AppleTV Take 2: New Software, Same Hardware

I very carefully and duly noted when Steve Jobs, during an interview, said that Apple had 3 businesses (Macs, iPods/iTunes, and iPhones) and a hobby (AppleTV).

If that wasn’t a tacit, explicit admission that a product hadn’t done as well as they’d hoped, I don’t know what is. To launch a product and then call it a hobby, you might as well say “Dude - it tewdally tanked.”

And with good reason - more expensive than a DVD player, with less content available, AppleTV didn’t add up to the sum of its parts in consumers eyes.

For high end users, it made for a nice way to have a good interface to their iTunes library that was constantly available, and also display pictures in high def on an HDTV. As bonus round, it could play movies in a pricey, low quality format, and Oh Cool! - it also could play back purchased TV episodes if you missed them. This was how I perceived it when I bought mine, and quickly realized I wanted a MUCH bigger hard drive than the 40GB unit it came with. * I was enamored and excited about it enough I even started a blog about it called AppleTV Hacker (which I haven’t updated since last August).

So I was pleasantly surprised to Steve Jobs spend some time talking about AppleTV again at this year’s MacWorld, as he described it as AppleTV Take 2.

MacBook Air: Why it isn’t for Us

Apple’s much hyped MacBook Air that Steve Jobs rolled out to much fanfare has started shipping in the last few days.

The specs are surprisingly decent for an ultralight laptop - 13.3” wide aspect 1280x800 screen, full size LED backlit keyboard, a Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM stock, a slick solid state drive, Bluetooth and WiFi, and Apple’s first implementation of a multi-touch interface on a device other than an iPhone.

Buckets o’ sexy, and countin’.

At only 3 pounds, it sounds at first like the perfect machine to do some offline editing in the field with, or capture some footage with and start editing back at the hotel, etc. It has a Core 2 Duo processor, already has 2GB of RAM out of the box, so why not? At $1800, it isn’t cheap, but it costs less than a MacBook Pro, so even moreso why not?

Well….not so fast.

Let’s Play “20 Questions” About Red Drives…

Let’s play “20 Questions” about Red Drives…

Jarred Land announced on Reduser the other week that Red Drives were shipping.

For those not keeping score, the Red Drives is the hard drive recording solution for the Red One camera. Up until Red Drives shipped, your only recording option was the special high speed CF cards (compact flash) recording officially 4 1/2 minutes of 4K at 24p apiece *. Since only one Red CF card can be loaded at a time, this was roughly the equivalent of a 400 foot film load. Survivable for steadicam work, a nonstarter for sitdown interviews.

That changes with the release of the Red Drives - you can record over TWO HOURS of 4K footage to the Red Drives, and many more hours of 2K footage (details below).

The Red Drives are comprised of two 160GB 2.5” mechanism hard drives set up in a RAID 0 (striped) configuration. This doubles the capacity and speed versus a regular drive….and also doubles the chances of failure - if one drive fails, you’d lose ALL the data on the pair due to how information is split between the two.

I emailed Ted Schilowitz, Red’s Leader of the Rebellion, a bunch of questions about the Red Drives, here’s what he had to say:

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