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Two Weeks In, One Wish Granted
By Dave Peterson | January 17, 2008
I got one of my big wishes for 2008 in the Apple TV Take Two software upgrade. I wanted to be able to access the iTunes Store directly from the Apple TV without any involvement with a computer. According to the Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld, that’s now the way things can work. It sounds as if even podcasts will be available through this stand-alone autonomy. This is pretty fundamental to my wish. If a new episode of Geek Brief is released late in the evening, but my computer isn’t on, and I don’t want to boot it up, I’d still like to be able to retrieve it directly from the Apple TV. I really want the entire iTunes store to be accessible: Music, podcasts, everything. We’ll see for sure in a couple of weeks when the update is made available.
The other part of my Apple TV wish was for a DVD player to be incorporated in the device. That’s not happening, and given Jobs’ explanation for why it was not a big sacrifice to lose the optical drive in the MacBook Air, I’m not holding my breath for the future. It sounds like Apple’s philosophy on data delivered by removable disc is that it’s a dying concept and we should all start getting used to receiving such data as downloadable files. That’s probably true, but they’re trying to get us in that mindset a little earlier than most users might like.