Letters from the Equator

Apple TV top and front
Originally uploaded by niallkennedy.

I’ve been toying around with an appleTV, which was acquired at my company recently for showcase demo purposes. It’s pretty slick, if you don’t think too hard - because you start to realize quickly that you can quickly reproduce a lot of functionality like that on a normal PC.

Hence my interest in getting an mac mini and converting it into a HTPC. That stuff’s all the rage, nowadays. I don’t have one. Simply because I don’t have a large plasma screen.

In fact, I don’t own a TV.

Most people are simply astounded by the fact that I don’t own a TV in my own apartment, and I don’t really want to have a TV. In fact, I’ll admit that I don’t even like watching TV, and that’s TV with cable and all the paid premium content.

I’m still convinced that in all its glory, there’s not enough TV programming to satisfy an entire nation, because simply put, the Internet just does it better.

I don’t particularly enjoy being fed information. I like it the other way round. I don’t like TV companies, advertisers, actors, producers, and other people who appear on programs in order to catch my attention, especially when I didn’t really ask for it.

Of course, there is occasional stuff that’s very novel and worth watching. But most stuff on TV is boring.

The great appeal of a HTPC is in choosing which content you really want to watch, when you want to watch it, in whatever way you want.

In fact, the other appeal of a HTPC is that it’s just there. Waiting. For you. All the time.

It doesn’t pretend to have content that it claims will ease your mind or satisfy your curiosity or tickle your consumer senses.

That’s also the reason why I don’t really want robots. I want plain dumb things that do their job really well. Like play a movie. Or make coffee. Or make wonderful sounds out of a tailpipe when I cruise down a freeway at 100mph.

A HTPC may just be the next best thing to a computer. Because it is a computer, and more. And that may just be the reason why I WOULD want to be a plasma TV.

Even though I said I wouldn’t want one.

Categorized as discoveries/i want