5 Reasons Why Apple TV Sucks!

By Jim on October 24th, 2008

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At Apple’s recent earnings announcement, Steve Jobs was heard to say that Apple TV was still a hobby:

Asked about the “digital living room opportunity and how it relates to Apple TV,” Jobs replied, “well again I think the whole category is still a hobby right now. I don’t think anybody has succeeded at it. And actually the experimentation has slowed down. A lot of the early companies that were trying things have faded away.”
“So I have to say that given the economic conditions, given the venture capital outlook and stuff, I continue to believe that it will be a hobby in 2009.”

As an Apple TV owner I, unfortunately, have to agree with him. While Apple TV has made some progress, there’s still quite a bit missing from it in order for it to really hit a home run. So here are five reasons why Apple TV sucks. If Apple pays attention to this list it might still be possible to save Apple TV from oblivion. If not then oh well, Apple TV was somewhat fun while it lasted.

Before I get into this column please know that I am a bit of a hypocrite here as I more or less touted iTunes/Apple TV in my earlier column about getting rid of cable TV a while back. Well it has not lived up to what I had hoped so I ended up getting basic digital cable TV back as Comcast only charged me $10 more for that plus a faster internet connection. So I have cable TV back and I even dusted off my ancient Tivo.

At this point I’ve had enough of Apple TV. Here are the five reasons why I think Apple TV sucks and then I’ll tell you what I did to fix the problem in my own life.

#5 No Optical Drive
A while back I’d pretty much written off optical drives as I felt that we were moving quickly toward an all online solution for digital media. Unfortunately I have to admit that I jumped the gun a bit and I now realize that some sort of an optical drive should be included with Apple TV.
Many people have huge DVD collections that they might want to view via their Apple TV and right now that isn’t possible without another device that plays DVDs. Given the tiny storage that comes with Apple TV (more on that later) you can forget ripping your DVD collection and putting it onto your Apple TV. And some will scream that Apple should even add Blu-ray to Apple TV.

But does it really have to play Blu-ray discs? Probably not but it should at least play DVDs and CDs. Ideally Apple could add an optical drive that would handle Blu-ray, DVD, and CDs without raising the cost of the Apple TV. Yes, I know this is a pipe dream on my part right now but the fact of the matter is that the lack of some sort of an optical drive is a big problem with Apple TV.

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