Why I bought an Apple TV

I just bought and hooked up an Apple TV. In writing this, know that I am no great fan of Apple. Every other person in the company I work for uses an Apple but me. I use a PC. I started out just wanting to digitize my music and originally looked at a Yamaha CD recorder with on screen display and a built in 250 GB hard drive that would have cost me 560.00. While researching that, I talked to a guy in a local home theater store that thought I should check out Apple TV's even though he didn't sell them. When I looked into it, what appealed to me the most was that I would gain internet radio along with being able to digitize my music. I live in an apartment and get very poor radio reception so internet radio solves the problem. After that, mainly because I didn't want to be tied to Apple and I-tunes, I looked at the Neuros OSD and Logitech squeezebox. I still think the Neuros (OSD=open source definition) is cool because it is open source and is constantly being upgraded by people much smarter than me. As it stands today, there's no internet radio capability so I ruled it out. It can be hooked up to pretty much any source and can record anything and everything to a hard drive. You can then access the recorded material later through an on screen display. If you are a Linux programmer, I still think this would be a great choice. The Squeezebox Classic did everything I wanted (Roku Soundbridge is very similiar product with similiar features) but didn't have any on screen display. The only place I had to put it wouldn't have given me line of sight plus my eyesight ain't that great. The Squeezebox Duet has it's own cool remote with a color screen. It accesses music and radio from that screen so you solve the line of sight problem. It also plays music from various online music services rather than from music stored on your hard drive. So, I guess, that saves you storage space. You also don't have to worry about losing your library if your HD goes out. The Logitech's give you, by far, the most access to internet radio of any choice I found. The remote is a WiFi remote so the box wouldn't be compatible with a universal remote. Even if it did, you'd lose the color screen to select music from. For me, that was a real downer as I am trying to keep all my components on one remote with activity buttons. In fact, that's the main reason I didn't go with it. Apple TV's (160 GB HD) go for 329.00 and all the other choices outside of the Yamaha cost between 150.00 and 400.00. To me, that puts them all at about the same price range. I decided to go with the Apple TV because It allows me to digitize all of my CD's, gives me substantial internet radio capability (far less selection than Squeezebox), ability to buy and download TV shows, movies in 720P, on screen display (with cool Apple artwork), music and the ability to use my univeral remote and activity buttons. While some of the other choices did one thing or another better than the Apple, it just does so much so easily that it seemed like a better value for someone who likes tricked up things.

Not really sure how much space there is to type in these threads so I'm going to review the Apple TV in another post. Phew...it's going to get long and I'm a horrible typist. Hope I don't get carpel tunnel or something.

Rusty