Ah, the smell of an Apple rumour in the morning. Engadget is reporting that the famous Cupertino ‘hobby’ – the Apple TV – is to be reinvented using iPhone OS with full 1080p HD capablities. The new hardware is purportedly aimed and sucking content off the cloud – we’re hoping that includes stuff outside of the iTunes ecosystem – BBC iPayer, (Hulu in the US) etc and local streaming too. The device is said to have only 16GB of local flash storage rather than a Hard drive, but this is exactly the sort of hardware that most of us crave. Best of all the reportedly tiny size of the device is matched by a similarly diminutive price – $99! All sounds to good to be true? Let us know what you think in the comments.
“If you thought that Apple’s foray into the world of home entertainment died with the last iteration of the Apple TV, you’re quite wrong. A tip we’ve received — which has been confirmed by a source very close to Apple — details the outlook for the next version of the Apple TV, and it’s a doozy. According to our sources, this project has been in the works long before Google announced its TV solution, and it ties much more closely into Apple’s mobile offerings. The new architecture of the device will be based directly on the iPhone 4, meaning it will get the same internals, down to that A4 CPU and a limited amount of flash storage — 16GB to be exact — though it will be capable of full 1080p HD (!). The device is said to be quite small with a scarce amount of ports (only the power socket and video out), and has been described to some as “an iPhone without a screen.” Are you ready for the real shocker? According to our sources, the price-point for the device will be $99. One more time — a hundred bucks.”
I have 2tb of films on a Drobo that I use with AppleTV, I don’t think loading that lot into the cloud is going to be smart move, and the Time Machine drive isn’t big enough for local storage. Applw NEED to allow local storage on a device(s) that you decide… if not, I’ll be sticking with the old one.
Agreed – streaming from local storage is a must. Preferably supporting a variety of modern codecs rather than just h.264 – I don’t hold out much hope for that though.
As a device it may be less useful hacked than the current Apple TV too. If it’s running similar hardware to the iPad then presumably it will have hardware acceleration for h.264 but will be pretty wheezy with other codecs that try to use just the CPU?
Doesn’t do it for me – sorry.
Price is not bad, but being an apple product, it’ll still be tied to itunes and will only play a couple of file formats.
There are far more flexible offerings from Western Digital, Asus, etc.
The old Apple TV was nice but, like many other media boxes, very limited in features and expandability. I can deal without the built in storage if it will support directly attached storage (via USB3 or Firewire). I’m not sure about the use of flash storage though. Sure it can be faster and use less energy but all of the cloud data will have to be stored on the flash drive (at least temporarily) and it would probably be the first thing to wear out.
Also, they need to update the Time Capsule too so it will support streaming video.