I've always thought Apple TV is a great idea, simply because I like listening to music and watching movies in the living room, rather than on my PC. But Apple TV had its flaws and everybody was waiting for the next update (or for its discontinuation). Well, finally it happened and Apple released a free update, which includes tons of new and improved functionality.
The big one is access to the iTunes store, including movie rentals, sometimes even in HD. That's certainly a smart move - however you need a really fast Internet connection for making HD downloads work: we tried it two times and eventually gave up waiting for the data trickling down the net.
But it's the smaller improvements I like the most:
- Apple TV acts now as a wireless speaker from iTunes. This very elegantly allows to "remote control" an Apple TV (one item on my first wish list). Also on our last party we could play the same music in both rooms, which is kind of cool.
- The distinction between synced and streamed content has finally been dropped. This was pretty annoying, because for accessing the full media library one needed to go through several menu items to switch between the local and the remote library. This happens now automatically and you can even turn the iTunes sync settings to "automatic", which copies supposedly the latest media to the Apple TV hard disk.
- Originally we bought Apple TV mostly for watching photos on the big screen. However this was only slightly less cumbersome than pulling a projector out of the cabinet and erecting a screen: if the photos were on a different machine than the one Apple TV synced with, you needed to copy them explicitly over, ideally reducing their size for saving disk space. The new Apple TV finally streams photos from Flickr, ,mac , iPhoto or Aperture from any computer which is connected to Apple TV.
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