I upgraded my AppleTV (160GB version) as soon as the update was published. I was an early adopter of the aTV. partly out of curiosity and because I was interested in hacking it to more useful things.

As it turns out, it's now the only thing I use on my television. I stopped watched broadcast TV years ago, I've never subscribed to a cable or satellite package and now that I've ripped my DVDs into iTunes, I don't need them anymore either. I gave away my remaining VHS tapes and player in 2006. The aTV is my video jukebox and to my surprise, completely amazes visitors who get hooked by the screen saver.

The original version was quirky but worked pretty well. Eventually. Key niggles were:

a. setup, particularly the static IP address was painfull slow with the remote. Given Apple's reputation for GUI design, it's appaling that I have to slowly enter "2" "5" "5", "2" "5" "5", "2" "5" "5", "0" "0" "0". It's a mask! I should be given a left-right slider. Most people will be on either 192.168.xx.xx or 10.xx.xx.xx subnets so an intelligent guess at the mask is straightforward with a default of /24. Getting the screen resolution right meant a trip to the manual.

b. syncing via wireless fails all the time. I initially had both the aTV and my host Mac on the 802.11b/g wireless network (a Linksys WRT54G v1.1), but it would sync for a while then drop out and fail to reconnect. The aTV is extremely sensitive to network glitches and just stops syncing. The solution for the initial sync was a Cat5 cable direct from the Mac to the aTV. I now have the aTV wired to the Linksys permanently.

c. YouTube never worked. I suspect the issue is my ISP (Starhub) who I am reasonably convinced do traffic shaping on YouTube. The aTV needs to buffer more.

I had high hopes for version 2.0 but these have slowly evaporated away with use:

a. I don't use the movie rental features (yet) so right there, most of the new functionality is just eye candy. The biggest problem is the menus. Why did they change them? I find the new ones (2 vertical columns that behave like the old NextStep cascade) less intuitive and I consider myself technically minded.

b. Worse, the menu items I want ("My Movies") is at the bottom of the list so I have to click down down down down past stuff I've never used just to play a movie.

c. Worse still, once in My Movies, scrolling the list is very slow. It hangs on each movie as it fetches the preview. This is so bad I end up trying to scroll quickly, then slowly, then quickly towards my target to avoid it landing on a selection then taking 2 .. 3 .. 4 seconds to preview. How did this ever get past QA?

d. Apple still has not enabled the USB port and with a permanently full HD and crappy syncing, this would be genuinely beneficial.

I can't complain about the upgrade price (free) but it confirms the downside of buying into Apple's fixed appliance model: if you like what you are offered, then enjoy, otherwise tough. Given that I don't currently use any of the movie rental features and syncing is still hit'n'miss, I would have been better off staying with version 1 (actually v1.1) software to keep the nicer menus and scrolling.

My early thoughts of hacking were immediately dashed as I didn't have access to an Intel Mac at the time, but it's looking increasingly attractive again. Wish list:

1. Bigger HD and/or external storage.
2. External DVD drive so I can eliminate the DVD player?
3. Keyboard/mouse for setup
4. 3rd-party package manager for additional functionality.

Networked digital media is clearly the future. I don't watch and hence don't need to record broadcast TV so one would imagine that my requirements are easily satisfied but the aTV is so frustratingly limited that I'm having dark thoughts about turning a Mac Mini into a Media Centre with MythTV.