March 21, 2007
From PC to TV -- via Apple
BY WALTER S. MOSSBERG AND KATHERINE BOEHRET
The race to connect your TV to your computer and the Internet is about
to kick into high gear this week when Apple Inc., the company many
believe is best positioned to pull off this feat, introduces a
slender, wireless set-top box called Apple TV.
This silvery little $299 gadget is designed to play and display on a
widescreen family-room TV set all the music, video and photos stored
on up to six computers around the house -- even if they are far from
the TV, and even if they are all Windows PCs rather than Apple's own
Macintosh models. It can also pull a very limited amount of music and
video directly off the Internet onto the TV.
Apple TV is tiny, just about eight inches square and an inch high, far
smaller than a typical DVD player or cable or satellite box, even
though it packs in a 40-gigabyte hard disk, an Intel processor and a
modified version of the Mac operating system. And it has a carefully
limited set of functions. Yet, in our tests, it worked great, and we
can easily recommend it for people who are yearning for a simple way
to show on their big TVs all that stuff trapped on their computers. We
tried it with various combinations of Windows and Mac computers, with
movies, photos, TV shows, video clips and music. And we didn't even
use the fastest wireless network it can handle. It performed
flawlessly. However, it won't work with older TVs unless they can
display widescreen-formatted content and accept some newer types of
cables.
http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/solution-20070321.html
Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)