I’ve owned every AppleTV that has been released. I believe generation one I purchased a year after release and it had a 40GB physical hard drive and you could sync content to it via iTunes over the network or you could stream content to it via the network. The sync functionality was a bit awkward. The AppleTV pretty much acted like a big iPod. It had a 40GB and 160GB version and was basically Apple’s Front Row software in a device that had Component / HDMI ports. AppleTV required an HDTV which really just meant a 16:9 aspect ratio 720P set. These weren’t hard to come by but they were certainly pricier than we have today. I can’t think of anyone that synced movies to their AppleTV and then unplugged the box to take it with them on a trip. The probability of the AppleTV wasn’t really a big draw. I mostly enjoyed the ability to watch content that I had in iTunes on my television set.
The second generation AppleTV was smaller due to the lack of a hard drive and it moved to a streaming from iTunes model over watching content stored on the AppleTV itself. it also gained the ability for customers to rent films or buy content from the AppleTV but it was limited to 720P content probably due to processing power.
I bought a 3rd Generation AppleTV to replace my 2nd generation which was a painful period because the main selling point of the 3rd generation wasn’t the change to the UI but instead the ability for it to play 1080P content. I had to re-rip all of my Blu-Ray disks to AppleTV 3 format in Handbrake which took months because I had about 500 movies in iTunes at the time. Now, my entire library is 1080P except for a few indie films that I bought that were never made available in 1080P and I’m not going to up convert from 720P to 1080P as that’s just a huge waste of time.
The 3rd Generation AppleTV is almost 4 years old at this point. I’ve actually bought 3 of them in total because I have given 2 of them as gifts. I think the ATV3 was really awesome. Apple slowly added new apps to the interface but they were opt-out meaning they’d just magically show up and all of them except YouTube and Radio were just hidden from my home screen. I saw no use for them because almost every app required I authenticate with a cable provider which i didn’t have.
One of the other big selling points for me was AirPlay. This technology allowed me to mirror content from any Mac / iOS device to AppleTV. Today, I have over 50 complete television series and almost 1,000 films stored on a Synology NAS in my basement. My biggest complaint with AppleTV is if you’re not streaming from the iTunes store, you absolutely need a Macintosh in your house running iTunes to watch locally stored content. I wanted to find a way around this and AppleTV 4 released in 2015 has become my savior.
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The 4th Gen AppleTV has a lot of new features. There’s an App Store so I can finally opt-in to the applications I want and not have things like Disney Channel Kids cluttering my TV screen. One of the biggest realizations for me was that Apple has given us the ability to put iTunes Movies / iTunes TV Shows / Photos / Search and Settings at the bottom of the app list. I can demote them completely out of the default view upon waking the AppleTV from sleep mode. This is great! My AppleTV has
- Plex
- Computers
- Music
- YouTube
- App Store
Having these as the first row on the AppleTV, I’m able to essentially hide Apple’s points of sale for content to the bottom of my list is really awesome.
I didn’t find a huge reason to upgrade to the ATV4 at first because most of the selling features are moot for me. The possibility of 4K support would have been nice but I agree that the content just isn’t at a mature place to warranty the high ATV price to have the hardware that would support playback of the 4X HD resolution of 4K. The biggest selling point was Plex support being brought to the AppleTV natively via an official app from Plex.
Synology NAS units have a sort of App Store and in that store is an application for Plex Server. It has been running on my Synology for over a year. It indexes my media folder, the same one that iTunes stores content and I keep things in Plex pretty organized. Up until the AppleTV arrived, the only thing not kept organized was the unwatched folder because I’d watch a TV show on AppleTV which would update the iTunes “unwatched” tab but of course didn’t synchronize back to Plex.
I’ve been using Plex for the past few days because it enables one key feature. I can finally put my iMac to sleep when I’m not actively using it. It’s the best thing ever and should equal a few bucks saved each month on my power bill along with a reduction of wear & tear on the iMac and hopefully extend its life by a few years. Plex really is an amazing platform but I don’t have to tell anyone that here.
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On to the AppleTV, it’s bigger. It looks more substantial in my TV stand compared to the previous generation. However, the improvements are vast. The I/O is unchanged. It still has HDMI, Ethernet and Power but the speed at which I can fast forward and rewind video is fantastic. I also notice that local media starts playing much faster. The setup of Synology hard-wired to the AppleTV via a Cisco ISR hasn’t changed. My iTunes library is also still on the iMac w/ Plex hosted locally on the Plex server. The AppleTV used to start videos pretty slowly and skipping ahead a few minutes was really difficult. Now it’s a breeze. It must have something to do with an A4 chip to an A8 chip along with additional RAM and more storage for buffering video.
Any complaint I have about the new AppleTV is fully improbable via software updates. The main complaint is Siri’s lack of support for Home Sharing (my iTunes Library) and Plex. “I’m looking for an unwatched Family Guy Episode” should yield results in Plex. It doesn’t. Siri pretty much only works for me if I bought / rented a movie in iTunes, if it exists in Netflix or exists to buy/rent in iTunes. I don’t subscribe to Netflix, Apple Music and rarely rent movies to Siri is something I’ve actually only used for the first 5 minutes of ownership and now, I’m good. No need to revisit until they support searching in-apps or my computers.
I did hold off on buying the AppleTV until they updated the Remote app on iOS because setup was a breeze with my iPhone’s keyboard. Again, it was an issue I had that they fixed.
With that, any other issues I have are fully with software.
On the subject of games, apps, etc. I’m not really using that. Once I installed Plex and YouTube, I was one with the App Store. When I was younger, I’d have time to browse hundreds of apps and play around and explore the games on the new cool remote but not anymore. I have an Xbox and iMac Core i7 running Windows 10 so I’m fully covered on games.
On to the remote? Well, about half of the time I have it clipped the wrong way and go to move my thumb on the touch pad and have to flip the remote around. I’m sure that issue will go away eventually. Also, every time I grab the remove, I end up accidentally fast forwarding the video. It’s because of that, I’ve just gone back to using my Logitech Harmony One that was already configured to work with all of my devices. When using the Logitech, I use the ability to scrub through videos slow or fast with my thumb. The fast forward / next button on the Logitech only fast forwards video. On the AppleTV Generation 3, this would fast-forward/rewind at 2x, 4x, etc depending on how many times I click. On the 4th Generation AppleTV, it fast forwards what appears to be 2x then 8x but it plays the sound at that speed as well which is slightly distracting so I find myself grabbing the AppleTV remote when I want to scrub and using my Logitech when I want to Volume Up/Down or navigate the AppleTV OS / Plex UI. The Logitech issues could be fixed by software but I don’t think Apple is going to go the extra mile to improve Logitech support.
What size AppleTV did I get? I did the 32GB version. For someone that only has 2 apps installed and uses it only to watch video, I didn’t need the larger version. If you plan on playing a lot of games, maybe 64GB will work for you. For me, it was $50 I put toward the AppleTV AppleCare Warranty which extends from 1 year to 2 years.
The biggest wins are Plex support and apps in general followed by the overall speed of the device. It’s pretty amazing. Worth the purchase for sure! If you have a 3rd Generation AppleTV, go play with one at an Apple Store and I’m sure you’ll buy it. I’m hoping Amazon adds Prime Video to the Apple TV and maybe Siri will be expanded to search my iMac via Home Sharing. Once that happens, it’ll be the perfect box and far-beyond the value of the purchase price.