Apple is a pioneer in many fields, but in the race to connect our TV sets to the Internet, it’s been lagging badly.
Three years ago, the company put out a small box called the Apple TV that brought iTunes movies to the TV set, but it was too cumbersome and expensive to be a success. Now, there’s a new, revamped and cheaper Apple TV, costing $99. It mainly represents Apple Inc. catching up to what competitors have been doing in the intervening years. However, with Apple being Apple, it also has some nifty features that set it apart.
So what is the Apple TV? Every time I write about it, I feel compelled to point out that despite the name, it’s not a TV set. It’s a black box that comes with a small remote. You connect it to your TV set either directly or through a receiver. It shows a computer-like interface on the TV screen, which you navigate using the remote’s buttons.
To connect the Apple TV to the Internet, you enter the password for your Wi-Fi hotspot, or connect the box to your router with an Ethernet cable. Once online, you can start renting TV shows and movies from Apple. You can also watch Internet movies from Netflix, if you have an account.
In setup and operation, the new Apple TV is simpler than the old, which was more like a small computer, with a hard drive of its own. It was designed to download shows from iTunes or your computer, then play them back. By contrast, the new one has no hard drive, which makes it smaller and cheaper, and it is designed to play video as it “streams” from the Internet rather than storing them. That means you don’t have to worry about the hard drive filling up,…