Apple is a funny company when it comes to updates. On one hand, they’ll keep supporting older hardware much longer than your typical consumer electronics manufacturer. The original iPhone was receiving updates up until the iPhone 4 dropped. Granted, a security/bug fix could still make it’s way back in time. But what end users really care about — New features!! — won’t be going backwards any longer. And then you have instances such as the Apple TV. The first couple of years for the Apple TV was rather uneventful. An added feature here, a slightly tweaked design there.
With the release of the new, drastically smaller Apple TV, two big changes will have far reaching consequences: (1) Older models will no longer receive updates of any kind, and (2) You cannot “buy” movies/tv shows anymore. It’s straight up rentals from here on out. Updates for older hardware isn’t something to be expected for any great length of time. But what about the most recent “older” Apple TV? Surely it’s not that old that it cannot partake of the new features, most notably Netflix, is it? The previous gen Apple TV doesn’t seem all that old. Kind of a pre-mature death, wouldn’t you say?
And then there’s the whole buying vs. renting arguement…
I prefer to buy things. That way, I can copy, share, import, export, resize, my content any way I see fit. When I rent it, I now have a time limit, potential limit on devices it can be played on, and absolutely no chance I can copy it between devices.
In Apple’s defense, the last point — Copying between devices — is partially negated by being able to stream content to and from your Apple TV. But it all boils down to the bigger issue — rental only.
It’s purely a monetary decision driven no doubt by the greed of the content owners (read: Fox, ABC, etc., etc). With rentals, you’ll have to re-rent that episode of Lost 50 times if you want to watch it on 50 separate days. That’s ridiculous. With older Apple TVs, I could simply click “buy” once and be done.
To those who counter with “then just buy it on DVD”, you’re missing the point. I hate physical media. It’s a pain, takes up exponentially more room than a digital copy transformed into 1′s and 0′s, and is an overall nuisance.
A much better decision would have been giving users the option to buy or rent. Say $0.49 rentals and $1.49 purchases. Yes, margins would be lower for everyone. But customers would be happier and buy more. God forbid one of the multi-billion dollar companies involved doesn’t make 60% profit on their digital goods.
In the end, I see the “new” Apple TV as a step backwards. Apple, whether by force or by choice, gave in to the demands of the ever greedy, always failing content owners and choose to support a business model that is completely anti-consumer. It’s scary that content owners are restricting the free flow of ideas and innovation and castrating it into these rental-only scenarios. In such scenarios, the only people who benefit are those same content owners — not the end user who has to continually buy rent the same show/movie/song over and over and over again.
With all of that said, the older Apple TV is almost a better buy because you can still own the things you want — not merely rent them. Besides, more and more TV’s are coming with web capabilities and bundled features. Bundled Netflix and friends would certainly negate the lack of said feature on your shiny new Apple TV — that is, if Netflix and other streaming services are a large deciding factor.
What are your thoughts? Are we getting driven into a market where we’re guaranteed to get screwed?
