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Dear Apple, I Still Love You

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m a die-hard Apple fan. (I asked for, and got, an iPhone for Valentine’s Day last year.) I think a love of all things Mac is bred into most designers. That’s why this particular post pains me so much to write.

I never thought I’d see the day, but I actually returned an apple product in exchange for essentially the same thing made by another company. Gasp!

Here’s what happened: On Sunday the hub and I decided to get a start on setting up the entertainment hub we’d been envisioning in our basement. Our first step was to run out and buy an Apple TV.

We also cut wall holes for future wire hiding, hooked up a surround sound system that has been unopened in our storage room for years and finally got our DVD player hooked up too. AND we signed up for Netflix so that we can stream movies to the big-screen via the new Apple TV. It was a mess for a while to say the least, but Vera was very amused from her vantage point on the couch where her dad propped her up with a rig of blankets and pillows.

We plan to add shelving and run the wires through the wall in the future, so hopefully we will eventually have more of a presentable system than how it looks right now. Luckily it is already looking better than it was a few days ago. It got pretty hairy for a while there. We were super excited to try it all out, but here’s the thing.. Netflix streaming kinda sucks. That is to say every movie or tv show we tried to search for wasn’t available. We could, however watch nearly anything from the 80s or that has been canceled recently. :/

So then we thought ‘bummer, but at least we can still do other cool stuff with our apple tv, right?’ Well, not really. Unless playing iTunes on your tv is your version of cool because that’s really all I could get it to do. You can also look at photos if they’re in iTunes or watch movies if you’ve purchased them from iTunes, but I don’t have any iTunes movies and all my photos are in iPhoto. So basically I could listen to music that I already own while watching a slideshow of generic flower images fade in and out. How anti-climactic. :(

So I was expressing my Netflix dissatisfaction to a coworker when he suggested that we look into Roku instead. And it’s amazing! Not only can you stream Netflix, but you can watch Hulu and other movie channels, Vimeo, YouTube, listen to Pandora and even play some games like Angry Birds. My favorite thing about the Apple TV was the ability to control it with my phone as a remote, but thanks to the Roku remote app, I can still do that too. Plus it’s less expensive! And you know we like a bargain around here.

So there you have it. We returned the Apple TV and bought the Roku. I’m still a huge fan of Apple products, but I guess I’m also proud of the fact that I’m not a name brand junkie and found a solution that works better for how we use it.

But don’t worry Apple. I still love you. (Always and forever.)

Anyone else have Apple TV or Roku? What do you think? Also is anyone else as disappointed as we were with the Netflix streaming selection??

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