Review: Apple TV just plain works

PC World - To say that Apple TV is the world's best media streaming device could be considered faint praise, the tech equivalent of calling someone the world's tallest midget. After all, most previous versions of these devices, which take music, video, and photos from your PC and play them on your TV and stereo, have been unreliable, hard to use and generally shunned by the buying public.

Apple has managed to rise above that kind of failure with its typical mantra: Keep it simple and make it pretty. Setting up our $299 Apple TV was a breeze, and anyone who's used an iPod will be instantly familiar with its extravagantly attractive interface.

With a 40GB hard drive for storing content, the sleek device appears to be able to avoid the picture break-ups and glitches that frequently come with streaming video over a wireless network. The basic rule of Apple TV content seems to be: If you can play something in iTunes, you can play it on Apple TV. That puts some limitations on users, but then, that's the price of simplicity.

A squished Mac Mini?

The device looks a bit like the Mac Mini after an elephant sat on it. It's about 7 inches square and a little over an inch tall. It comes with a power cord, a remote about the size of an iPod nano, and that's it. (Watch PC World's video on "Unboxing the Apple TV" to see all included components.

You're on your own to purchase other cables you'll need. For instance, if your TV is HDMI equipped, you'll have to purchase a HDMI cable (about $20 at the Apple store). The Apple TV has ports for HDMI connectors, component video, and analog video connections.

Once I connected the box to our PCW test HDTV (you must use a widescreen TV, by the way), the device started looking for a network connection. I was using Wi-Fi instead of an Ethernet connection, and the Apple TV couldn't initially find my network. Once I typed in the network's SSID on the on-screen keyboard, though, I was up and running. The box is very quiet but got significantly hot after about an hour.

You must link the Apple TV to a copy of iTunes on a PC or Mac (the screen provides you with a passcode you must type into iTunes to make the connection). Then Apple TV starts copying your content from your iTunes library onto its hard drive in a specific order: first movies, then TV shows, then music, etc. If there was a way to move something to the front of the line, it wasn't obvious to me. I wanted to shift some of my photos to the device, but kept getting a message saying it was too busy copying my music and I should try again later.