Reviewing Apple TV One Week Later
By William Kristoph
It’s been about a week since I picked up an Apple TV. I spent a day or two researching the advantages and disadvantages of it vs. a Roku box. I also chatted up some of my Twitter followers to see what they thought about the differences between to two. After that consideration, I ended up with the Apple TV. There are hundreds of articles out there already, but I thought I’d share my experience too.
Purchasing
I decided to purchase my Apple TV from Best Buy. There wasn’t enough savings buying it from Amazon or directly from Apple to warrant waiting an extra 3-4 days for the Apple TV to arrive. I wanted to be able to use it over the weekend. So I placed an online order at BestBuy.com and chose to have it ready for pickup at the local store. The experience was very good from start to finish. I received proper confirmation from BB that the order was ready for pickup. I was in line less that 5 minutes to complete the pickup of the unit. Apple should be pleased with the experience Best Buy provided for their product in this case.
Unboxing
The box is tiny. In fact, it’s strikingly tiny. The unboxing experience is like any other Apple product. It’s pretty, clean, simple and sort of fun. Pull tabs help get each component out of the box without a tear or crumple. Initial set up is super easy. I plugged in the power cord and plugged in the HDMI cable and the Apple TV sprung to life on my screen.
Set Up
Set up was relatively easy. I had to temporarily turn off some security with my router to allow the Apple TV to complete its initial setup. After getting the hang of the super thin remote, I popped around to the settings so that I could properly set up the Apple TV with my router. I bounced back and forth between the PC and the Apple TV and was satisfied with the settings and locked my router down again. I chose to update the Apple TV to the latest version of the software. I was surprised by how long and sluggish the process seemed. So I moved the Apple TV around to see if my WiFi signal was the issue, but the Apple TV reported a strong signal of 4 bars out of 5.
