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Apple TV 4th Generation - Initial Thoughts

10/31/2015

Well, it has been a long time since Apple released its 3rd Gen Apple TV (announced back in March 2012), so there has been a lot of pent up demand from a lot of us Apple TV fans. This box is better than the 3rd Gen in many ways, but there are still some issues that I hope Apple resolves in the coming months.

Features

The new Apple TV is a bit thicker than the last two Apple TVs. It also dropped the digital optical output that a lot of people still need. Of course, that issue can be remedied with a device like this one, but that will add to the overall cost of using the device.

List of the ports and interfaces:

HDMI 1.43
802.11ac Wi‑Fi with MIMO
10/100BASE-T Ethernet
Bluetooth 4.0 wireless technology
IR receiver
USB‑C for service and support
Built‑in power supply

Below are a couple pics comparing the front and back to an Apple TV2 (the fat one is the Apple TV4)

Apple Music

If you have a subscription to Apple Music, it may be enough to get you to shell out the $150-199. Its implementation is fantastic. If you have used the app on another platform, you should be very comfortable with the way it is setup on the AppleTV. It uses “For You”, “New”, Radio”, "My Music”, ”Playlists”, “Search” (Siri search in Apple Music is rumored to be coming in 2016) and “Now Playing” in a very similar way to the iOS app. I do not see a “Connect” tab, but there are some “Connect” video and audio choices on the “New” page. The “New” page also has a link to different genres, so I was happy to see that they were able to adopt that feature.

It appears that Apple has decided to keep the resampling to 48khz feature from the older Apple TVs. For audiophiles, this is a major problem since it won’t allow you to put out a standard 44.1kHz (Redbok CD) signal. That being said, I have listen to it for a few hours and it sounds great in my setup.

I also want to mention that I felt the desire to use the music video features a lot more on this platform. The iPad’s implementation of Apple Music videos is awful. There is no full screen mode, instead, it is presented in a small box in the middle of the screen. You can’t even Airplay it to a TV. However, having the feature built into the Apple TV means you get full screen videos right on your TV with great sound quality. In the past, the videos were a worthless feature, but now, I will be using them a whole lot more.
(click on the pics below for larger images)

Home Sharing

While you can access your own cloud music library (in 256k AAC) through Apple Music, if you have an account. The new Apple TV has also included Home Sharing through its “Computers” icon. I was very happy to see this because I have all of my music in Apple Lossless format and I would typically rather just stream from a Mac Mini to Apple TV rather than using my internet data when I want to listen to my own music.

Home Sharing has podcasts, home videos, and movies included, as well.

Search Functions

There are two ways to interact with the AppleTV. You can do that through Siri or through a remote. For movies, Siri is pretty darn awesome. You can say something like “Jason Statham on Netflix" and it will pull up his movies and you can click on any of them. It will give you a quick description of the movie, who it stars, the director, a preview, and the ability to play or open it in Netflix. It also includes a bunch of “related” movies below. I also tested it by saying “Michael Keaton on HBO" and it works as well, using the HBO GO app. Notice how quick the feature is in the short clip below:

Siri can also launch apps, give you sports info, and tell you the weather. See the short clip below for a couple of examples:

The downside to the AppleTV right now is that Siri doesn’t work with all apps. Your own video collection, for example, isn’t included in the search. This is where the real pain of using the remote comes into play. Apple, for some reason has decided to make the onscreen keyboard one row of letters. This is a real issue if you want to manually search in an app like HBO Go because the letters are so large that they trail completely off the screen. While I could live with this if the AppleTV worked with the Remote app (which has a keyboard for typing on the older AppleTVs), but it doesn’t.

This really becomes a headache when you have 16 character passwords that you have to type in when you install an app that requires a password…which is most of them. The Apple TV has Bluetooth which comes in handy for the initial setup, however, from my understanding, you still can’t pair a keyboard with it.

NOTE: I tried to pair a Targus Bluetooth Keyboard with it and it never showed up in the settings.

Podcasts

One of my favorite apps on my old Apple TV was the Podcast app. It was unique because you could go through many different categories and save specific shows as your favorites and they would automatically update. I have always preferred this approach over having tons of different apps that have one individual show you want to watch. Not to mention that you could start a program and then exit it and resume it on any iOS device or AppleTV.

On the other hand, the new Apple TV does not currently have the Apple Podcast app. I was very surprised and disappointed by that fact, to be honest. Instead of pulling up “MacBreak Weekly” in the Podcast app, the way to get it now would be to get the TWIT app. There are three different TWIT apps on the AppleTV (one of them is currently free). However, I don’t want to install another app on all my devices to get the resume play features.

In short, the lack of the Apple Podcast app is the biggest shortfall of this new Apple TV, in my opinion. I am going to try to get my iTunes library Podcasts up to date (I still have 2011 Hypercritical programs in it) and use Home Sharing for Podcasts instead.

Note: The TWIT app looks great, but I still prefer just having all apps I like show up in one place on all my devices.

Apps

The Apple TV 4th generation App store already has a lot of apps. It will even find your “Purchased” iOS compatible apps and make them available for download to the Apple TV. Many apps require a cable or satellite account to set them up, but I really like the ability to have NBC and ABC available on the Apple TV just for convenience. However, cord cutters will have some of the standard stuff like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO GO.

I also downloaded a couple games. I tested out Asphalt 8:Airborne and it was a lot of fun using the remote as a controller (more on the remote later).

I should mention that many “standard” apps are still not available. There is still no Plex, Amazon, Pandora, or Vudu available.

Remote

I have mentioned some of the features of the remote above. However, to be honest, I am not huge fan of the remote. While I really enjoyed playing Asphalt 8 with the Wii style functionality, the remote is so light and tiny that it makes it harder to control than a Wii remote because there is no heft to it.

Also, I am not sure why, but it seems to feel better in the hand upside down. There is a lot of empty space at the bottom and top, so it feels a bit confusing, when you pick it up, compared to every other controller I have used (I have caught myself aiming the bottom of the remote at the TV a few times). Also, the buttons could use a little more space between them, so it would have, IN MY OPINION, been nice to use that bottom space to make the controller more ergonomic. That being said, I think it was a design choice that makes it look more symetrical. I have to admit that I think it looks great, but I am more concerned with using it than looking at it.

Airplay

I tested Airplay and it still works great. However, it worked pretty great on the old AppleTVs, too. I was happy that Apple didn’t remove this feature, though.

The Apple TV will still let you send the audio from the Apple TV to Airplay receivers, as well. I was hoping that they would implement multi-zone Airplay from the Apple TV to more than one Airplay speaker, but right now, it is still one Airplay speaker at a time.

In addition to Airplay, you can also pair bluetooth headphones with the new Apple TV. I tested this feature with Parrot Zik 2.0 headphones and they paired up without a problem. However, with Bluetooth you do have to worry about a lag between the video and when the audio hits your ears. With these specific headphones, I did not notice any lag when watching Youtube.

Note: I get paid commissions for purchases made through any links to Amazon products in this post.

Interface

I like the interface, but I think it could be better. Right now it looks fantastic with its minimal design cues. However, it only allows 5 apps on each line. On my 65 inch TV, I can see 10 full icons and the top of 5 more icons (on a 32 inch display it shows only 5 full icons). I personally bought the 64GB version of the Apple TV in anticipation of having tons of apps. However, the Apple TV needs to be able to use folders. I would like to have 3 full lines of my 15 most used apps and then a line of folders for sports, games, videos, music, and others. This has been the best way to organize numerous iPhone apps, so I would think it would work here, as well.

I also want to mention the “Aerial Screensaver" features. I yawned when they spent so much time discussing this feature during the Apple Keynote. However, with Apple Music, I anticipate using the Apple TV quite a bit for music and that typically means that I want a screensaver to save my TV from burn in. In the past, I have always just used Flickr as my screensaver (it is another “coming soon” missing feature), but these beautiful aerial views are a nice change of pace.

Final Thoughts

I have mixed feelings about this Apple TV. It is priced higher than the Roku/FireTV and has less apps and doesn’t support 4k. At this point, I would only recommend it for people already in the Apple ecosystem or for those that want to be on board as new apps and features are introduced over the next year and beyond. In other words, I have no doubt that it will get a lot better in future months (Siri search in Apple Music alone will be a huge improvement). Right now, for the price of the $199 version, you could get an Nvidia Shield (I will post a comparison soon) which would give you a lot of features that the Apple TV doesn't have.

Note (12/15): Apple made provided a major updated to the AppleTV, read about it here.

Below is a quick look at the positives and negatives with the current version of the AppleTV (I am sure updates will be coming soon):

Upsides:
Apple Music (Siri integration would make it better)
Apple Music Videos
App store
Interesting games
AirPlay
Home sharing
Siri - great for movies with certain apps
Arial Screensaver looks awesome
Apple Photos and the Apple ecosystem in general

Downsides:
Remote iOS app does not connect to the new Apple TV
Music - 48 kHz resampling (prefer on-the-fly bit rate switching for bit perfect audio)
Podcast app missing
Onscreen keyboard is strange (would prefer more rows)
Lacks bluetooth keyboard pairing
Lacks common inputs/outputs - no SD slot, no digital optical out, no way to connect external drive
Lacks 4k - probably not a big deal for most, but it is a feature that most competitors are adding
Pricey considering the lack of 4k

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Google OnHub Router - A Review

10/27/2015

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The OnHub came in beautiful packaging that was nicer than any other router I have used. It is always instills a good feeling when you start off with a great experience. Once out of the box, I simply connected it to a Gigabit switch on my current system using the included cables. (NOTE: The unit comes with flat cables that fit nicely into the unit. However, if you use thicker cables, you may have a hard time fitting the good looking cylinder shell over the body of the router without it hitting the cables, which could cause issues with it fitting properly.) I have a decent router already with several controls, so I wanted to see what this router was all about before disconnecting my old router or before making my old router a bridge. At the end of the day, the main purpose of adding this router was to take advantage of the better wifi speeds and antennas.

The OnHub is pretty easy to get up and running using iOS or Android. My understanding is that it is easier to setup with Android, so I used an iPhone to set it up to see just how difficult it can be. I downloaded the app to my phone and then signed into a gmail account (which I believe is a requirement, but you can set an account up for free, so I don't see that as problem). Once I had it installed, it had me enter some numbers from a sticker at the bottom of the router and then assign a network. The OnHub has an unusual way of letting you know that it is finished by changing the colors of an LED ring at the top. Blue means that it is ready for setup, Amber means something is wrong, and Teal means you are up and running. After you set up the router, you can adjust the LED to be completely off or you can adjust the brightness with a handy slider in the app.

Once I was up and running, I gave it its own network name. The app noticed my older router and it indicated that everything might run smoother if I made the other router a bridge. I couldn't find a way to easily do that and I didn't want to remove the old router all together because I currently need the multiple ethernet inputs because the OnHub only has one ethernet input (I may buy another switch down the road, but I am still deciding if it is worthwhile). The old router also has USB inputs for attaching external drives to my network and the OnHub's USB input cannot currently be used for that purpose.

If you use the OnHub as the main router, you might also lose some of the controls that your old router might have. For example, you will lose parental controls and guest networking. Also, I like to rename the devices on my network, but I didn't see a way to rename an "Unnamed device" to make it easier to manage my network. As a result of some of these limitations, I decided to use the OnHub in bridge mode rather than facing the possibility of running into possible issues. It will pop up a warning that says that you will lose support for WAN configuration, UPnP, port forwarding, client static IPs, and DNS settings. I didn't find these limitations to be of great concern, so I set it up as a bridge.

As I mentioned above, I was mainly interested in faster wifi speeds on my network, so I ran some before and after tests. Before the OnHub was added to my network, I used an iOS app called "speedtest" to see how fast my up and down internet speeds were with my iPad Air 2. Before adding the OnHub, the speeds were 53.75 Mbps download and 11.78 Mbps up. After installing the OnHub, the speeds jumped to 88.62 Mbps down and 12.03 Mbps up, which is one of the main benefits of AC 1900 capabilities. I also was concerned with range. Unfortunately, I didn't have a place to put this in the center of the house, but the range is much better than my other router. I get a perfect signal in my backyard now where I didn't pick up a signal at all before I put in the OnHub, thanks to its 13 high powered antennas.

The OnHub also promises to add future capabilities. For example, it has a Bluetooth 4.0 and ZigBee Home automation circuitry that should eventually be enabled. It will definitely be interesting to see where Google takes this device in the future.

For my needs, it currently does everything I wanted it to do. It provides much better wifi internet speeds and greatly expands the range of my network. It may be missing some ports and useful features of other routers, but it makes up for it with ease of use, a handy bridge mode, and the promise of future updates.

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Chromecast Audio vs Airport Express (Top 10 differences)

10/17/2015

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With the new release of the Chromecast Audio (CA) device, I thought I would discuss how it compares to the Airport Express. They are both audio only devices, but there are differences that should be considered.

Note: I get paid commissions for purchases made through any links to Amazon products in this post.

TOP 10 DIFFERENCES

1. The CA costs $35 and has a mini port that supports analog and digital (via a mini to optical adapter or cable). It is capable of using Wi-Fi AC (which is superior to Wi-Fi N that the Airport Express uses).

The newer Airport Express typically sells for $90 or less (the older version is uglier but can typically be found for around $40). It supports digital and analog via a mini port as well. However, it can also expand your wireless network, has an ethernet input and output, and a USB port for connecting a printer. It supports Wireless N.

2. The Chromecast is small and plastic. It can be hidden out of the way, which makes it nice for hooking up to small radios that have an aux input. I tested it with a Tivoli Pal and it worked great.

The newest Airport Express is a small square (with rounded corners) white box that takes up more space. than the CA. However, in my opinion, it looks good enough to have on display.

Note: I get paid commissions for purchases made through any links to Amazon products in this post.

The photo below is the back of the newer Airport Express:

3. The Chromecast can (theoretically) play 24/96 audio. (Note: I tried this with BubbleUPnP and everything played at 48khz via the digital output, so I don’t personally know how to get 24/96 to play. Edit: I looked into this and from what I have seen, there should be a firmware update to fix this issue.)

The Airport Express is limited to 16/44.1. However, it is bit perfect rather than resampling to 48khz, which is what happens right now with any audio I send to the CA.

4. The CA uses “Casting” and is supported by several different apps on both Android and iOS.

The Airport Express uses Airplay and has little support on Android, but is supported by virtually every app on iOS. Since Airplay is built into the iOS operating system, it can be accessed even when an app doesn't have direct support.

5. Casting will get the audio signal directly from the audio service (Spotify/Radio/etc..). This means you can take phone calls after you start casting from a mobile device (with most audio applications). Essentially, the mobile devices typically works as a remote.

Airplay sends audio to the mobile device and then the mobile device sends audio to the Airport Express. This means that you will lose the audio stream when you take a phone call. It also means that if you have an outdated router, you could be more susceptible to drop outs.

6. Casting will eventually support multi-zone audio.

Airplay supports multi-zone audio now, but it has some limitations (see my article on this subject).

7. On Macs and PCs, you can currently cast to only one CA at a time from Chrome’s browser.

With an app called Airfoil, you can stream any audio signal from your computer to any or all Airplay devices. Also, iTunes has multi-zone Airplay built into its normal interface.

8. With Casting, you always have to use wifi because there is not an ethernet port.

With the Airport Express you can exclusively be on ethernet. You simply send the audio signal from the service to your connected computer and “Airplay" over a wired connection to an Airport Express that is also wired.

9. Video apps with Casting built in often don’t even see the CA, so it is mainly for audio services on mobile. In other words, if you pull up Youtube on an iPhone, you can cast to "Chromecast Video”, but you can’t just Cast the audio stream to the CA .

With Airplay, you can split the signal and watch the video on the iPhone and hear the audio on the Airport Express.

10. The Chromecast Audio can use USB power. This is beneficial if you don’t want to take up another power outlet and can power it with a device that has a powered USB port. (Note: I tried this with a Phillips SoundRing and it worked, but there was static. Something in the CA or Phillips device probably isn’t shielded, so I won’t be using it that way.)

The Airport Express cannot be powered by USB. Also, the audio tone that lets you know the CA is connected is unusually annoying. If you are just hooking up the CA, make sure you turn that off in the settings.

CONCLUSIONS

The Chromecast Audio is a great device for the price. It is almost a no-brainer to pick it up just to try out. Right now, they have several promotional offers involved that can make the Chromecast Audio practically free (if you are willing to temporarily switch to Google Music or Rhapsody). If you are on Android, Airplay is so limited, and Sonos is so expensive, that this becomes a very intriguing device. However, if you are "all in" on iOS, Airplay works with unsupported (by Casting) apps like Apple Music, Podcast app, Overcast app, and pretty much every other, unsupported by Casting, app that has audio. Airplay is just much more versatile on iOS at this point. Therefore, I would go with Airplay if you are on iOS and Casting if you are on Android. I personally won’t be using the Chromecast Audio very often unless it becomes compatible with Apple Music or Overcast, but I will keep it around, just in case. It might come in handy when Apple Music is added to Android later this year.

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El Capitan Install Issue

10/3/2015

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I have updated my 3 Macs to El Capitan. The MBP and iMac installs went on without a hitch, but I did have a problem installing it on my 2010 Mac Mini, so I thought I would put up a small post about how that problem got resolved in case others run into a similar issue.

My Mac Mini has two monitors and several USB devices plugged in. After the install, I got a black screen up on one of my monitors. As a result, I had to turn off the Mini with the power button on the back and it restarted with the Apple logo and then went to the black screen again. I decided to unplug all of the USB devices and keep only one monitor plugged in.

This time it restarted to a black screen, but down in the left corner, I saw a sliver of gray and I clicked on it. The multi-colored beachball came up on the screen, which was a great sign. A few minutes later, it was able to pull up my normal desktop. I didn't think that El Capitan installed because it did not change my desktop picture like it had on my other Macs. However, I went into the "About this Mac" settings and it was, in fact, updated.

Hopefully, you won't run into a similar issue, but if you do, hopefully this information will help.

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Apple TV 4th Generation - Initial Thoughts

Features

Apple Music

Home Sharing

Search Functions

Podcasts

Apps

Remote

Airplay

Interface

Final Thoughts

Google OnHub Router - A Review

Chromecast Audio vs Airport Express (Top 10 differences)

TOP 10 DIFFERENCES

El Capitan Install Issue

About me:

Archives

Categories

Apple TV 4th Generation - Initial Thoughts

Features

Apple Music

Home Sharing

Search Functions

Podcasts

Apps

Remote

Airplay

Interface

​Final Thoughts

Google OnHub Router - A Review

Chromecast Audio vs Airport Express (Top 10 differences)

TOP 10 DIFFERENCES

El Capitan Install Issue

About me:

Archives

Categories

Final Thoughts