I got mine this weekend. It’s worth getting just to see how a really well-designed product works. Apple TV IS really well designed, in part because it explicitly doesn’t do certain relatively complicated things.

1) The first iPod model that came out did NOT have iTunes Music Store (hard to remember), so you only played MP3 files on it. It was also locked to a single computer, so if you changed computers, you lost whatever was on your iPod. This was the predecessor to the Fairplay DRM — a really simple way to guarantee to the music labels that Apple wouldn’t enourage piracy.

Apple TV, likewise, will only synchronize with one computer. If you switch which computer you sync with, the stuff on the hard disk inside Apple TV gets overwritten. At first, I thought this was stupid, in part because my computer leaves the house when I do. But then I realized it was brilliant because syncing with multiple computers is much harder to make work for both Apple and the consumer.

2) All that said, synchronizing that much data (movies are about 1.5GB each; TV shows are 200-500MB; and so forth) takes a LOT of time on a wireless network. If you’re used to using Firewire or USB 2.0 with an iPod, be prepared for a whole different dimension. I started syncing my iTunes data yesterday around 10am. By the time I unplugged to go to the office, the Apple TV had both movies and about half the TV shows. And syncing is really pretty dumb; it goes one media type at a time, so still no photos on the Apple TV.

3) That said, there’s nothing wrong with this product! The screen resolution (HD only) is spectacular so that movies and TV shows I buy on iTunes look better than anything else on my television, possibly even including the Blu-ray DVDs I’ve watched on my Samsung DVD machine. Photos are brilliant (once they all get there). And music is as good as the sound system on the television.

In fact, you begin to think that maybe Apple will end up being the delivery mechanism for real HD video. The company has no legacy to protect from being a cable or satellite or broadcast network. The selection of movies they have on iTunes is already pretty good. And you don’t have the issues of protecting consumers from their own media that the Fairplay system creates for music listeners. (I’ve stopped buying music on iTunes since I can’t use it anywhere else.) Video is different than music: Watch it once or maybe twice and you’re finished with 99% of the video that exists. For the other 1%, go buy the DVD.

4) The industrial design of Apple TV is beyond brilliant. It’s small enough that it will go anywhere and pretty enough that it fits just fine sitting by itself in front of the television (not in the stack of stuff underneath). My television has an HDMI plug, so it was the easiest thing in the world to install: Plug in power, connect to the TV, turn it on.

This is the most satisfying experience I’ve had since the first time I got my TiVo to work — and the installation time was about 2% of what it took to get that TiVo to record its first show!

Update April 1, 2007: 1) Michael Chang (comment below) was correct. Apple TV can show HD resolution, but iTunes doesn’t deliver movies and video in that resolution. 2) I solved the only-one–HDMI-slot by buying an HDMI switch, but this stuff is expensive! The switch ($141 including tax) and a 4-foot HDMI cable ($108) cost almost as much as the Apple TV ($299). I didn’t shop around, so I’m sure the BestBuy guy just gave me the most expensive stuff. But that’s the business model for Monster, isn’t it?

Any day now, our landlord will finally deliver a working swipe mechanism to open our office door. Meanwhile, since we moved in, we’ve had to use a physical key to get in, even though we already have the cards that let us into our parking garage. What leads to this rumination, though, is my recent car purchase.

I bought a 2006 Toyota Prius, which came with a smart key. I don’t need to pull the key out to open the car or operate it. As long as I have the key on my person, the car talks to it to establish my authenticity and allow me to open the door and push the start button. It’s kind of eery, actually, for an older guy like me: I walk up to the car and when my hand reaches the door handle, the car senses my proximity, talks to the key and unlocks.

My life now: I physically lock the door to my house, walk up to my car and drive away. I swipe me and my car into the parking garage, swipe myself into the gym, and then take a key out to open our office door. Any day now, of course, our landlord will finally deliver a working swipe mechanism; then I can use one card for both parking garage and office door.

Why do I have a key? Isn’t it feasible and affordable now to install electronic locks everywhere, including my house? Indeed, if it is feasible, why the heck do you need different electronic fobs or cards for each entry point? Why can’t I use my ATM card or cell phone or something else I already carry around? (See this post on my personal blog for another smart-card experience, but I don’t want my identity stored on that one!)
You can feel it: The future isn’t too far around the corner.

Synchronization is the worst technology problem that still needs to be solved today. That’s a bold statement. It’s bold because most people think of sync as an easy problem to solve; you just need to make a copy of data and then keep the copies the same. So what’s hard about that? What’s hard is that everybody has a different opinion about what makes a good copy and what element of data needs to be copied and how many times it needs to be copied and…. On and on and on.

My most recent horror story: I have about 6,500 contacts in my database. I care a lot about my contacts. I might even be called OCD about my contacts. But my career has been based in part on keeping track of all the people I know and staying in touch with them. So I started this database when I started my newsletter, PC Letter, in 1985 and I’ve been keeping it current ever since — 22 years. Suffice it to say: It’s important to me.

Right now, I maintain the contact database in Apple’s Address Book, the program that comes with the Macintosh. I also need to keep it on Microsoft Exchange, since that’s how my contacts show up on my phone, in Goodlink on my Treo 700p. I have been using Plaxo to synchronize my contacts from the Macintosh to Outlook. Then Outlook synchronizes to Exchange and then Goodlink synchronizes to my Treo. Apple Address Book supposedly synchronizes directly with Exchange, but I could never make it work and could never find anyone at Apple to tell me what was wrong. So I jury-rigged the system with Plaxo.

Well, you can imagine the next part of the story: I need to get my contacts in order to send out invitations to a party. In the process of doing that, Apple Address Book started to crash. I had it backed up, but when it crashes, it comes back with an empty data file. That made me worried that Plaxo would sync the empty records to Outlook and then the system would destroy my contacts database all the way through Exchange to my Treo! Significant anxiety, you might imagine.

So I did everything I was supposed to: Reset permissions on the Macintosh (don’t even ask why the world’s most modern operating systems requires resetting permissions regularly to keep track of its files correctly); reset iSync on the Macintosh to make sure there wasn’t any stray notion of wiping out Contacts during a sync; re-installed Plaxo to make sure it didn’t have the wrong memory of what to sync; and created a brand new data file for Apple Address book. And then re-synced to Plaxo. Got all my contacts back, although the process took several hours.

And then, just when I thought it was safe to start sending out my invitations: All but 30 of the contacts disappeared from my Treo, from Exchange, from Outlook and from Plaxo. But not the Macintosh Address Book. So I quit Plaxo and uninstalled it to break the connection and make sure I still had a valid copy of my contacts on the Macintosh. Phew!

Geeks among you; hold on to your seats! What happened next is that iSync on the Macintosh started synchronizing out of Apple Address Book directly to Exchange! Over the next two hours it restored all of my contacts to Exchange and therefore to both Goodlink on the Treo and Outlook on the PC. Now my contacts are being reliably synchronized. It turned out that Plaxo had written a nasty piece of software that prevented Apple’s iSync from doing what I had told it I wanted, but there was no way for me to find that out until I uninstalled Plaxo.

So what was simple about that? Solving this problem requires maintaining trust with the user (ie never losing any data and keeping the data in precisely the form the user wants) while managing data across multiple platforms with multiple vendors (in my case, Apple, Lenovo, Microsoft, PalmOne, and Good). That means that the software needs to adhere religiously to standards (and there aren’t any universally accepted) and demonstrating incredible intelligence.