Apple ships Apple TV 2.0 – A review

I bought an Apple TV after Apple’s promised rental changes. Ok, so it is a toy, really I mean come on, $230 just to pay Apple more money to rent movies, but i love tech and wanted to check this out.

I’ve always wanted a 1080p Apple TV and while this is still 720p, my TV does a great upconverting job.

I rented “SuperBad” in SD via iTunes earlier in the month. Once the update installed, I tried to find the movie via streaming, but it could not be found.

I then realized you have to sync to watch movies rented on your computer. So I set up a custom sync and moved the movie over to the Apple TV.

This process, about 1.6gb of data, took 30 minutes. You can’t play a rented movie that is syncing, you have to wait.

The audio was prologic, and the colors a bit dull and dark, but the quality was very acceptable.

After that movie, I decided to rent The Simpsons movie in HD. After about 14 seconds, my movie was ready to go.

WOW, the colors are fantastic. The audio is 5.1 and sounds great.

This could get expensive. Even though we have Netflix for Blu Ray, renting HD movies via the Apple TV is fast and fairly affordable.

Oh yes, we’re watching Simpsons while iTunes is doing a new “automatic” sync, which will keep as much data on the Apple TV and let me stream everything else, in theory at least