iTV? ISay no iThanks

Well Apple’s announcement’s yesterday were okay, but the one thing I’m really disappointed in is the iTV. All this is, is a set top box that can stream all of your iProducts to your TV. So it’ll have a nice media interface (natch) and can play your iTunes music as well as the TV shows and now Movies. That’s great and all, but it’s not innovative in the least. There are boxes that have been doing that type of media thing for years, those just can’t do the DRM tracks (because Apple won’t license the technology to anyone else.)

So I guess if you are one of the sheeple that blindly follow Apple, you’ll gobble this up like everything else. Now don’t get me wrong, I really love most Apple products (and desperately want a MacBook Pro) but all this product does is what your computer already does. It’s just a little box that allows you to do it from your TV. That’s a good thing, but it’s not worth $299, $199 maybe. For $299 I can buy an XBox 360 and get a DVD player and a game machine in addition to those other features.

On the Movies side of things, downloading at “near DVD” quality isn’t good enough for me. And if I buy a movie, I should be able to burn it to a DVD since it’s MINE. But no, this can only play on one of five activated (Apple only) devices.

Once again, people are going to settle for less quality than we have now with more restrictions. Because it’s Apple, it’ll sell a ton and become the de facto standard. Well, I’m not jumping aboard that train. Hope you don’t either.

Now all this being said, Apple NEVER preannounces anything. So I think they did this to gauge the feedback from the community. I hope there’s a lot of feedback like mine out there so Apple will make some decent changes.