the MARTINI SHAKER

Here’s a post that’s terribly late to the game, but just trust that I was cooking all this up in my head as I sat at the hospital with mom and baby reading the Macworld Expo news.

This year’s Macworld Expo keynote wasn’t filled with quite the fanfare as last year’s, but then again, there can’t be a product as rumored about and anticipated as the iPhone was every year, can there?

The Macbook Air is certainly a sexy little number, but it didn’t intrigue me that much. I have a Macbook Pro through work and I just upgraded from a G4 mac mini to a new aluminum iMac about three weeks ago.

What did excite me was the news about Apple TV. I bought one about 6 months ago with the intent of ripping my DVD collection so that all my media was relatively available to watch in the living room without having a huge clutter of music and videos lying around. I got about 10 movies in before I realized what a cumbersome task this was, not to mention that I was going to need to go out and get larger drives to fit all my music and photos along with the 150 or so DVDs that I own. Good thing I started with my top 10 favorite movies!

Since the DVD library idea sort of fell through, I’ve been using the device as a remote jukebox for the living room to listen to as we do housework, etc. That’s been great, but as a whole I began to feel like I wasted some money in terms of the possibilities Apple TV offered versus the reality of its capabilities.

That’s why Steve-o’s announcement of movie rentals via the Apple TV finally made the device useful in my mind. Not only rentals, but HD rentals for $1.00 more. Of course, I’ll need to rent an HD movie to see if it’s worth that extra dollar. Add to that the fact that the device will no longer require that it syncs with iTunes means that I can access all those movies I’ve ripped any time instead of having to go to the basement to sync up any movie that I might want to watch.

Of course, the Apple TV still has a lot of untapped possibility inside even after the announced updates it will receive. I’m also afraid that the next big leap in functionality won’t be offered via a free update since I’m imagining features that will most likely demand a hardware refresh.

Nevertheless, thanks to Apple for making the Apple TV into something I might use more than once a month.