TV came yesterday. Since I work all the time, I had to drive to FedEx to pick it up. The lady there mentioned that all day people were picking up their TVs. I thought this product would not do well at all.

The TV definitely did not like me.

(And after I spent an hour getting the HDTV out of the box it’s been in for the last two months.)

Unboxing experience

It smells just like my Airport Extreme. Must be all the rubber they use on the bottom. While they both only come with a power cable, they’re different. They both weigh much more than they have to—the power brick is built into both units which, if you’ve worked with embedded devices, adds a little bit to the cost and makes heat a problem. Also one is white while the other is silver with a milky translucent top.

I wonder how much time they spent deciding these things.

Hacks

If you want to mess with the innards, read AppleTV Hacks. Basically it’s a tutorial on how to open the TV, replace the hard drive, duplicate the innards, drop in QuickTime plugins, and activate SSH and AppleShare.

Fun stuff, but my spare notebook hard drive is 7200rpm so I think I’ll take a pass on it.

To get your videos on it, you can use VisualHub which is just a commercial front end to ffmpeg as far as I can tell.

Verdict

You’re going to buy it anyway so what do you care if I already hate mine?