Polish the AppleTV

The whole concept of someone "selling" you a system but them retaining the rights to what you can do with it is bogus. What if the car dealership said "We'll sell you a new car at a special reduced price, but you can only drive it within 100 miles of the dealership. At 100 miles away the engine shuts off."?

We need better consumer's rights. I remember encountering this issue with TV's. Some years back I bought TV's with built in VHS for my kids. They could use them in the car or in their playroom to watch their tapes. I bought a video game console thinking they could watch DVDs on their old TV as well as play video games. The VHS "copy protection" essentially makes it impossible to play DVDs on these crippled machines.

Apple and Sony are big offenders in this arena. What's next, electronics that actively self-destructs after 2 years of use?

Once I buy a product, I should be able to do anything I want with it.

Sadly that's not how it looks like it's going to happen.

But it's a simple matter os Math (since we're PoPSci fans):

Apple has what, 500 engineers working on this? (Make it a thousand)

The web has a million kids with spare time and curiosity.

It's just a matter of time until those kids find out how to disable these locks.

What Apple (and Sony) should do is: spend less time finding ways to lock your devices and spend more time fixing bugs, including features (copy and paste on iPhone anyone?).

They make an ad of "the PC" putting all his money into advertising and no money in fixing Vista.

How about this ad:

Mac: Hi I'm a Mac!
PC: Hi I'm a PC!
Mac: Hey PC, I've learned from you.
PC: Oh really?
Mac: Yes, I saw you sending all your money for marketing and no money for fixing (BEEEP)
PC: Ah well that's how it goes...it's working. Heard of Windows 7?
Mac: Yeah we noticed, here's the Mac take on the subject: We spend less money on marketing, but we spend more money on locking our customers in our products so we can have their money for a longer period of time.
PC: Uhh, that's cool. Then I'd have more money for ads! And Marketing! Thanks Mac.
PC grabs his phone and you can hear: Transfer 50% of our engineers to locking our products. Yes take some of the task force to fix Vi(BEEP).

This ad would be by us, customers.

@Spacerat: I do believe that lot's of the content protection comes from the fact that apple get's pushed by media providers (Sony Entertainment, Warner, Music labels etc.. etc..) to distribute only DRM sort of media and doesn't allow copying. And Apple only get's the contract when the provide methods that dis-allows copying of protected media.

I don't agree what happens at the apple store though...

Ries

All the money companies put toward locking their products is wasted. This type of thing happens in Games Software and opperating systems. The companies should focus on making a better product than encoumbering it with restrictions that will be Hacked, Cracked and Disabled the day after the product is realeased. Their money could be better spent.

$50 is pathetic, then $30 for 'unlimited'? A true DIY article would have pointed towards the Free, Opensource project atvusb-creator.

http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

The appleTV should play all common codecs or at least the open ones out of the box vs being locked into itunes as it is.
By my definition that is a broken product and if not for the hacks it would be a useless product.
Personally I'd rather use a mini-itx board and Linux for a set top box.

Speedy8 is absolutely correct.

Maxson
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