Apple's Hobby Now a Smaller, Quieter Hobby

Let's take a look at the last piece of today's Apple event first: Apple TV. Before today, the Apple TV box was a smallish device to play videos and music from your local network (after syncing), or  to purchase shows and movies online.

Now, the box is one-fourth of the size, and allows you to rent, rather than buy movies and television shows. There are two ways to look at this product: It is an incremental upgrade for those who are seeking the same functionality the last version of Apple TV provided. If you live in a home without a Wii, Xbox, or PS3, then the Netflix streaming makes the box attractive. If you already have one of those devices though, or you're fine with hooking you laptop up to the TV to watch hulu/Netflix, the value of the box becomes cloudy.

Apple would do best to focus on creating a box that can be THE box that gets attached to your TV. Apple TV doesn't even have an HDMI pass through (unlike the future Google TV offerings) so you will need to flip sources between this box and your cable box. Not a huge deal, in a perfect Apple world, one would expect just one box to be connected to the TV. 

Again, as an upgrade to the existing hardware, the new Apple TV looks like a winner. Is it the death knell for the cable companies some had hoped/predicted? No, not by a long shot. Not yet, at least.