AppleTV 1st Generation vs 2nd Generation - Should I upgrade?

I currently have an AppleTV and it's a 1st generation box with 160GB hard drive.  Since the second generation AppleTV was launched a few months back I've wondered if I should buy a new one.  At $99 bucks it's in my price range but clearly it has to provide a heck of a lot more capabilities than the current one for me to spend any money on a replacement.  For me, the big thing is AirPlay.  Lucky for me, we recently purchased the second generation box at work and I borrowed it to test it out on my home network.

I'll get straight to the bottom line...if you already have an old AppleTV keep it.  If not or if you use your box differently than I do then it might make a lot of sense.

Here's what I found.

1) The old interface is better then the new one.  Don't get me wrong it's still as simple and as easy to use as the old one with Apple's signature clean and beautiful user experience.  The difference is that most of the UI is taken up by the for purchase stuff and not your own collection.  At the top level are movies, TV, music but all of this takes you to the iTunes store.  If you buy or rent a lot of movies then this might be better for you.  The second generation AppleTV consolidates all of your personal content in a single location under Computers and to find your music, movies and photos you have to go there so it's at least a couple of clicks before you even get to your content.  The first generation box integrates everything at the top level so your movies, music and tv shows are in the same location as the rental stuff.  So it's just a single click to your content.

2) Lots of delays waiting for content to load from your library -  The first generation AppleTV box sync's with your iTunes library so content is downloaded to the box.  I personally have it set up to only download photos.   Music and videos are read directly from my NAS.  But even in this situation the list of music and videos are downloaded and maintained on the AppleTV so one doesn't have to wait for this information to be acquired when traversing menus on the AppleTV.  This is not the case with the Apple TV 2nd Gen.  Every time I go to a menu it says Loading Library.  Now I have a huge library wtih over 800 videos and 100+ GB of music so things load pretty slowly for me.  This is really annoying and is probably the biggest sticking point for me.  Now you can get around it if you have an iPad and use the remote control.  The AppleTV remote control on the iPad is great and doesn't have to wait for any type of loading.  It's a little weird because it feels like sometimes it caches it but other times it tries to load things again.  It's possible that my library is too large to cache which is why I'm getting such a bad experience so your mileage may differ.

3) AirPlay isn't as good as it could be - AirPlay is pretty cool.  You simply start a video or music from the iTunes app and it will play on the 2nd Gen AppleTV.  However, for now, this only works with Apple's apps such as video, YouTube, Photos and iTunes.  It doesn't really work with anything else.  These are the very things I could care less about because these are all natively supported on the AppleTV so I don't have to AirPlay them.  The things that would be cool would be if third party apps supported AirPlay such as Hulu, 60 Minutes, or any of the other video apps.  Only the audio works with most of these which makes it far less useful.  I read that this may change and that third party apps will get video support.  Once this happens then I think it may be worth an upgrade.

So is there anything better on the 2nd Gen AppleTV?  Well I think movies load faster.  I'm not sure why this is the case but they do load faster which is really nice.  My old school AppleTV takes at least a half a second before a video starts to play.  It's so slow that sometimes I have to wonder if it crashed or not.  The other thing is the new box appears to be more stable.  I have lots of issues with my old AppleTV.  The entire box locks up when syncing and nothing can be done.  It hangs every now and then so I have to unplug it to start again.  And overall, the new AppleTV feels a lot faster.

I think I'll buy one once AirPlay is working with lots of apps.  AirPlay is pretty cool.  The way you get AirPlay to work is that the typical video icon changes on the iPad to a triangle with a box around it when near an AppleTV or AirPlay device.  Click on this and you'll get a menu with the AirPlay devices.  In my case it says iPad Screen or AppleTV.  If you pick AppleTV it starts to play on the TV.  You have to be in the main UI.  It doesn't work if you're paused in a movie.

Before I end this post I should also point out I had some issues setting up the new AppleTV.  The easiest thing for me to do to get this set up quickly was to unplug my old AppleTV and then plug in the new one using the exact same cables.  When I did this and tried to turn on Home Sharing on the new AppleTV it said it couldn't log into the iTunes store and then I got the spinner which kept going round and round as if it was looking for something.

Well iTunes didn't like this.  When I looked on my Mac the old AppleTV still looked like it was plugged in and I think this confused the new box.  I rebooted iTunes and my Mac and then tried home sharing again on the AppleTV.  This fixed everything and stuff just started working.  However, when using Home Sharing the new AppleTV doesn't appear in iTunes at all.  I wasn't really sure things were set up right until my stuff started showing up on the AppleTV.

Anyway, in conclusion the AppleTV is still a pretty cool little box but if you have the old AppleTV I don't think there is any reason to buy the new one at least until AirPlay video is supported by third party applications.

UPDATE: It appears that a number of third party apps are releasing AirPlay video support even though this won't work until 4.3.  Here's link to the MacRumors article.

UPDATE2: I purchased the new Apple TV and have been pretty happy with it.  Loading the library doesn't take a long time like it originally did in my earlier tests so that's not really an issue.  Also it appears to play a wider variety of video encoding.  I accidentally Handbraked a few movies using the default template and they wouldn't play on the old AppleTV but they play find on the new one.  I have also used the AirPlay feature mostly a bit for fun like playing music videos using Vevo but the apps I really want haven't added AirPlay support like Hulu, 60 minutes and HBOGo...at least as of the last time I tried.  Finally it's a lot more stable than the old AppleTV.  it doesn't lock-up or crash or need rebooting a lot like the old one did.  I've been using it quite a bit for Netflix and it works great.  I could watch netflix using my XBOX, Wii or PlayStation but the Apple TV is always on and it's quick to get too.  Anyway, I'm pretty happy I purchased this new version.

Apple iPad Remote and the 1st Gen Apple TV

I saw my brother in law over the Christmas break and he asked me about the Apple Remote iPad application and Apple TV and whether I used it or not.  He was seriously considering buying the AppleTV now because of this capability.   Wow, what a great question.  I have had the Remote app on my iPad since I purchased it because I downloaded it for my iPhone many eons ago.  I never really used it on my iPhone because it didn't seem that much better than just going through the TV menus.  But my brother in law was right that the idea of the iPad controlling the AppleTV was kind of a game changer because of it's large screen.  I had tried the Apple Remote iPad app to control iTunes on my computer and it was nice but I rarely want to control my iTunes remotely.  When I tried it I was mostly disappointed that it didn't replace the Air Video app for iPad (The Air Video app is also very cool but it's not from Apple and I think Apple's implementation would be better).  Basically, I wanted to watch and listen to my iTunes content on the iPad itself without having to store it on the iPad.  The Remote app doesn't do that.

Anyway, I was curious so last night I gave it a try.  I found the Apple Remote on the iPad and turned it on. I then switched to the AppleTV and went to settings.  I selected the General / Remotes screen and nothing happened.  Bummer.  I then did a Bing search and read something about enabling Home Sharing and using that technology.  Well my 1st Gen AppleTV doesn't support Home Sharing.  Double bummer.

Right about now I was starting to get AppleTV 2nd Gen envy when I decided to give it one more try and did a search on the Apple site and found this article.  The way to set this up on the 1st Gen AppleTV is to:
1) Add an iTunes Library to the iPad Remote App by clicking on the Gear icon and then selecting the Add Library button.  You will see a 4 digit code appear.  Leave this on.
2) Then go to the AppleTV and under Settings navigate to the General / Remotes screen.  Your iPad's name should appear.  Click on it and then type in the same 4 digit code that the iPad Remote app displayed.
3) Click Done.  You should see the 4 digit code disappear on the iPad and the AppleTV contents will then be displayed.

After this the Remote App is paired with the AppleTV and all of the music and videos appear on the iPad. You can do a search on the iPad and then start the song or video from there.  It's very cool.  There is also a mode where it acts like a regular remote.  Click on the 4 arrow icon in the bottom right corner of the remote app to get to this mode.  Swiping right or left will go right or left in the AppleTV menus.  Swiping up or down will go up or down the AppleTV menus.  This is the way to control and get to non-music and video content such as pictures.

This is definitely a game changer and might possibly be a reason to buy an Apple TV over a Roku box.   Think of a supped up Sonos system (I don't have one of those but I imagine it's kind of like that).  I think it's a definitely slam dunk if Apple starts allowing iOS apps on the new AppleTV.  I would love to have Pandora, Sirius XM, HuluPlus and other apps some of which are already supported on Roku.  I would upgrade my AppleTV for those new capabilities.