No matter how much of a sideline business Apple TV is to Apple, the company certainly has designs on your living room.
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So does Roku, which makes simple boxes for streaming content to a television. Roku delivers Internet movies from Amazon and Netflix, music from Pandora, and baseball games from MLB.com, among other free or subscription-based channels.
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The latest $99 Apple TV box does a few things very well. You can rent high-definition movies and commercial-free TV shows and play them on your big-screen TV. You can watch YouTube and Netflix, hear Internet radio, view Flickr photos and stream videos, photos and music from your computer to the TV.
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In the past several days, I’ve been comparing Apple TV with the new $100 Roku XDS. (Roku also sells two less-expensive models, starting at $60.) Each has pluses and minuses. Apple TV has a slicker and more intuitive interface and is a bit easier to set up. Roku more than holds its own, with a broader channel lineup that will soon add the subscription Hulu Plus streaming service.
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A closer look at how the two stack up:
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*Apple TV. Apple TV is so compact you might mistake it for a coaster. It is one-fourth the size of the previous model. The price is smaller, too; it had been $229.
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The result is fewer connection options than on previous models. On the back is an HDMI port for hooking it up to an HDTV (you supply your own HDMI cable). There’s also an optical audio jack for plugging in a home theater system that doesn’t support HDMI. You can tap the Internet through ethernet or Wi-Fi.
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Apple also removed the hard drive from Apple TV, meaning you can no longer store movies and other content on it. Nor can you purchase stuff from the device as you could with…