box to your home-theater setup that can stream movies, music and photos across the network from PC to TV—and, for good measure, access Netflix, YouTube, Pandora and other cloud-based entertainment streaming services, too. Many of these devices include USB ports for hooking up a hard drive or thumb drive, so you can play less permanently stored video on an ad hoc basis.

We looked at three such offerings—including Apple’s latest—and found that, much to our chagrin, none of these were very compelling solutions for getting movies off your home network or for streaming media from the web. And yet, each is different in its own special, useless way.

Apple TV

The good news is that the Apple TV was the best product in this roundup. The bad news is we still wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Cupertinophile who can’t live without at least one of every gadget Apple makes.

There’s no complaining about the hardware. In true Apple fashion it’s a sleek and sexy hockey puck of a device, and setup is a breeze. Of course, in keeping with Apple’s other electronics, the Apple TV is useless without iTunes on your computer unless you simply want to access media directly from the iTunes Store. And Apple would really love it if you did: The Apple TV interface is overwhelmingly dedicated to selling you content, presented as a cacophony of clickable posters in no discernible order.

If you push past the come-ons to browse your PC library, the interface works well enough, although the ridiculous remote tries its best to thwart such efforts. Movies look good and audio is crisp and clear — provided, that is, that you’ve connected to your network via Ethernet. We had nothing but trouble when using the Apple TV’s wireless connection, to the point where it frequently dropped out in the middle of streaming a song and eventually lost track of our PC’s media library altogether. You’re best advised pretending Wi-Fi isn’t even an option (which it actually isn’t on the other two devices we reviewed) and simply plugging into your router.

With a maximum resolution of 720p, movies won’t look as good — in theory — on the Apple TV as they will on other streamers (both WD and Seagate support 1080p), but the reality is that heavy compression and stutter are far bigger problems than how many pixels you’re getting. We had generally good success with Netflix and YouTube streams, but searching for content with that gum-stick remote is a nightmare.

Bottom line: This is passable technology, but hardly Apple’s finest hour.

$100, Apple

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Authors: Christopher Null

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