tatiyants.com Battle for the Living Room: Apple vs. Microsoft

Ever since saying goodbye to paid tv, we’ve been relying on something other than the cable box to see stuff on the big screen. Two appliances emerged as replacements: Apple TV and Microsoft Xbox 360.

Below are some thoughts on how the two compare. It’s worth noting that the comparison is for vanilla (i.e. un-hacked) systems, even though there are ways to extend both Apple TV and XBox by installing XBMC on them.

User Experience

I honestly can’t find much of a difference between the two systems when it comes to general usability or user experience. Though there are UI differences, I can’t say that one is better than the other.

There are only two tangible differences I can think of. First is Apple’s free Remote app. You can install it on your iOS device of choice and control your Apple TV with it. The app is very handy for quickly typing stuff (like titles to search for) with an iPhone/iPad keyboard.

Second is Apple TV’s physical remote control. I find it easier to use than the Xbox controller (or the Kinect). That said, we use Harmony 700 remote to control both units (highly recommended by the way). Harmony allows you to configure an almost identical set of buttons to control both devices, which makes an out-of-the-box remote (or a lack thereof) largely a non-issue.

Your content

Both systems allow you to stream your content (music, movies, pics) to your TV. Apple TV will talk to any machine with iTunes on it, while Xbox expects Windows Media Center to be running on your PC.

Interestingly, this makes Apple TV more flexible because it should work whether you have a Mac or PC. I may be wrong on this, but I’m not aware of any way to stream stuff to Xbox off a Mac.

Another thing to note here is that Apple TV lets you stream content from an iOS device (iPhone, iPad). This feature works reasonably well and lets you do things like allow your friends to show videos from their phone on your tv (nice if you’re into that sort of thing).
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Their Content

Both Apple and Microsoft let you buy or rent media from their respective stores (iTunes and Zune). I can’t speak for Zune since I haven’t tried it, but the iTunes rentals experience is almost laughably bad.

The problem with renting from iTunes is that it requires you to download the ENTIRE movie before you can start watching. This operation can take hours for an HD movie, which means that if you’re in the mood to watch something, you have 2 choices: you can either wait a day or send a message to your past self to begin the download yesterday.

I really don’t know how Apple considers this to be an acceptable user experience, especially in light of instant streaming available on Netflix and YouTube.

3rd Party Content

Both systems can stream Netflix. In addition, Apple TV can stream YouTube and Vimeo, while the Xbox has Hulu, ESPNLive, and NBC News. The fact that each system is missing pretty major content options is a disappointing and somewhat odd business decision (had it not been for Hulu not available on Apple TV, I probably wouldn’t have bought the Xbox at all).

There is another important gotcha to mention.You have to pay an additional charge (Xbox Live membership of about $60/year) to watch 3rd party content on the Xbox. This may or may not be a big deal depending on whether you already play online games. I don’t, so I found the Xbox Live membership requirement to be really annoying.

Anything Else?

Well, there are rumors that both companies are planning for upgrades. Apple may be considering a streaming video option and Microsoft is likely adding YouTube support. Nothing terribly exiting, but there you go.

Actually, the rumor I’m most intrigued by is apparent plans by Microsoft to add support for Skype via Kinect. After all, Kinect already has a video camera and a microphone built in, so it’s technically feasible. If done well, this could bring full screen video calling into the living room en masse. Pretty exciting!

User Experience

Your content

Their Content

3rd Party Content

Anything Else?

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