The New Apple TV and Apple's Home Entertainment Ambivalence

Everyone's talking about the , and that means Apple's announcement about has been mostly forgotten. That's okay, because it seems that Apple has mostly forgotten Apple TV, too.

While the new Apple TV has a new interface and supports 1080p, it's an incremental step in home entertainment while every other major electronics company is trying to leap forward. Apple seems to treat the Apple TV as little more than an extension of its content services, and has no ambition in expanding its presence in the home entertainment market through significant advances. When Steve Jobs first introduced Apple TV, he called it Apple's hobby, and that lack of committment has carried through into the third generation of the device.

Apple views the Apple TV and its presence in the home entertainment sector primarily as two things: a way to sell iTunes content, and a way to connect iOS and Mac devices to larger screens. Everything else, from playing media from multiple premium streaming services to browsing the Web, is tertiary at best, and unnecessary at worst. This underlying philosophy hurts Apple's progress in home entertainment, even while it advances its remarkable progress in mobile entertainment.

Other electronics companies, like Sony, Samsung, and LG, focus on putting more and more content and features on their HDTVs. If you get a midrange or higher set from any of those companies (or Panasonic, Sharp, Vizio, and many others), you can already access a variety of services and networking features. For inexpensive models, that might be just Netflix, Hulu, and Pandora via a wired Ethernet connection. For higher-end models, that can mean a full-fledged Web browser, extensive local media, network, and online playback features, and enhanced interfaces with QWERTY-equipped or pointer remotes. These companies are focusing on putting as much connectivity as possible into HDTVs, justifying higher price tags and giving you a single home entertainment device that can fulfill most of your needs (except for physical media playback like Blu-ray discs and video games). They don't support AirPlay or iTunes, but they can access many more streaming media libraries like Amazon Instant Video, Hulu, and Vudu.

Compare this with Apple, which with Apple TV is focusing not on giving you a single device for your home entertainment needs, but letting you network all of your devices together into an entertainment system across your house. Let me be more specific; networking all of your Apple devices together. The emphasis isn't on connecting your HDTV to everything online, but on connecting your HDTV to everything Apple. Netflix is great, YouTube is great, but the main incentive is iTunes and AirPlay. Everything else is either a begrudging necessity or an afterthought.

This philosophy works well for now, because Apple has done a lot in the last decade to make itself one of the biggest brands in the world. ITunes is a massive media service, and iOS has become a juggernaut of a mobile device platform. Even iMacs are wildly popular computers. However, market saturation isn't overwhelming, and when you look at the advantages of an Apple TV versus another connected home entertainment device when you don't have a Mac or an iOS device or an iTunes account, it seems a lot less compelling.

Instead of offering new features or a significantly different interface and control scheme (like ), the Apple TV isn't much different from the one that came before it. Apple isn't bothering to evolve the product because that's not the focus of entertainment. It's not about making the home theater a center of all of your entertainment services, but another extension of all of your Apple media services. It's not strictly home entertainment, but Apple entertainment, based on the idea that you can take your media anywhere with an Apple device and get anything you need on iTunes.

In other words, while the new iPad is a new iPad, the new Apple TV is little more than an accessory to the iPad, iPhone, and iTunes-equipped computers. It just isn't seen as its own device, but as an extension of your iTunes account and, since it doesn't compete with iTunes, Netflix, and YouTube, Apple has no reason to change it much outside of incremental updates.

Of course, that was the case for the various iPods, and look at how those super-popular portable media devices have been forgotten in the face of the iPhone and iPad. Even if it does the job Apple wants, if something else does the job better, consumers will go for it. For phones and tablets, that meant a massive embracing of Apple. For home entertainment, that could mean a massive wave of people looking at their new HDTVs and asking why they'd need an Apple device connected to it at all.

Stay tuned for PCMag's hands on with the new Apple TV. Until then, see our and .