The new AppleTV might turn into an iPad accessory | Hacker News Reader

The new AppleTV might turn into an iPad accessory

ipadwatcher.com

6 pointsmlongo4 comments

This article almost solely focuses on how the new price point of $99 makes the AppleTV more attractive to existing iPad owners. What's missing is some argument about why iPad owners might buy an AppleTV.

To be honest, I don't see how the AppleTV complements the iPad at all. The new AppleTV is only for streaming content from the iTunes Store and from the Internet. If you want to rent and watch the same content on your iPad, you can do so directly without an AppleTV. If you want to watch the content on your TV, you need an AppleTV but not the iPad.

That’s a pretty sloppy article. What Jobs demoed and what was somewhat impressive (and what this article might be referring to) was seamless switching from iPad to Apple TV in the middle of watching a movie. That will be possible with the next firmware update for the iPad. That will presumably work for other content, too, like photos and music. What this means is that the iPad allows you to immediately and seamlessly throw much of its content on the TV screen.

In my opinion that’s a nice gimmick – if you have $99 to spare why not? – but not much more.

You can also import your own videos into iTunes, and then sync them with the iPad. Then, later, when you want to watch them, you can stream them from the iPad to the Apple TV. It basically turns the iPad into a pretty, portable hard disk for the TV.

I assume iTunes will still retain AirTunes/AirPlay/whatever as well, so your computer will also still be able to stream your "custom, imported and re-encoded" (i.e. pirated) media to the new Apple TV—but you'll be more likely to have brought your iPad to a friend's house than your laptop, if you didn't pre-plan watching some videos together.

Translation from press release speak:

[The iPad is great for entertaining one person, but sometimes you want a TV because you want to entertain more than one person. Apple TV lets your TV be entertaining, as Steve Jobs demoed yesterday. It's $99, which is cheaper than an iPad. Also, you can bore people with slideshows of your last fishing trip if you have both. Compared to the old price of $299, it's priced like an accessory, like my fuschia Fendi iPad carrier fanny pack.]

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