You can get NETFLIX right in your TV, or your Blue Ray Player, or a Roku box for 1/2 the cost or some TV’s built in, or other devices. This product has nothing unique or distinctive, Its a silly Me Too that really other than Itunes integration brings nothing distinctive to the table.
I really view this as nothing more than a FanBoy product. I’m sure they make money off it, because parts inside it maybe add up to 20-30 bucks, but its a commodity item that offers nothing meaningful other than its got an apple logo on it.
5+ years after its introduction it really offers nothing that isn’t a commodity and available in dozens of other places other than the itunes integration.
Don't want it in a TV (and it's not in any of mine), not so easy to replace or repair the mechanism. PS3 will do it, and it's exactly that I replaced. I don't need a howling PS3 sucking up 100W of power to watch movies. Besides, the Netflix UI on the ATV is better. The PS3 also performed poorly when streaming from the computer, and the XBox didn't do much better. The ATV hasn't had a glitch yet, where the PS3 and XBox would pause and stutter at various times. As far as Roku goes, the 1080P products start lower than the ATV, but not half the price. Usual Apple-hating exaggeration.
I’m sure they make money off it, because parts inside it maybe add up to 20-30 bucks,
As far as the Roku is concerned, plug a $10 USB WiFi dongle into a $25 Raspberry Pi computer and you essentially have the hardware of an $80 Roku (same last-generation ARM chipset), plus Ethernet, but minus a bunch of other connectors of the Pi. And that's me adding up the retail prices, not how much it costs Roku to make them.
In contrast, the Apple TV is a much more powerful system, with a single-core version of the iPhone 4S chip: 800 MHz A5, dual-core GPU and modern ARM architecture (twice the performance per clock of the decade-old ARM11 system in the Roku). When the last generation Apple TV came out (A4 processor), it was estimated to cost Apple $64 to make. You know Roku's parts can't cost them more than $20 if we can get the same thing retail for $35. So who is making too much profit?
5+ years after its introduction it really offers nothing that isn’t a commodity and available in dozens of other places other than the itunes integration.
iTunes and iDevice integration were a selling point for me. Touch a button on the iPhone or iPad in almost any app that deals with audio or video, and it's on your ATV. Setup took all of a few seconds. I finally got to organize my movies and TV shows in iTunes to stream to the TV instead of just having them in folders. True, the ATV isn't groundbreaking, but it is a competitive product.