The wife surprised me with an Apple TV for my birthday. It was an item I had suggested earlier in the year that we check out because we picked up an HD TV for the bedroom on black Friday of last year. This is the first television she’s let into our bedroom since we were newlyweds.

The Apple TV is probably something I never would have bought myself, but now that I have one, I’m really enjoying it. We’ve hooked up our ipod to the TV in the den before and despite the fact that an ipod connection lacks any kind of real interface, watching media off of it was okay. I know friends who have hooked up laptops or mac minis to their sets and used the built in front-row system. I never bothered trying any of that. I’m sure most people won’t.

The Apple TV is really simple to set up. It plugs into your set via component or HDMI cable. I didn’t see anyway to hook this up via RCA cables (even apple’s proprietary set I bought for the ipod). To be honest with you, I don’t know a thing about any of that stuff. I went to Walmart, bought an HDMI cable and bam. Done. It did not come with any cables to hook it up to your set. You need to buy that yourself.

One you hook it up, you have two ways to view your iTunes content on your TV: You can copy files to the Apple TV’s hard drive, or you can stream any music, show or movie via your wi-fi network straight to the set. I was very skeptical that the later would work, I expected streaming an episode of The Office over the network would be spotty at best. Not the case. I watched an entire episode of ENTERPRISE via streaming, while the girls were playing WOW on the same wi-fi signal and it never stopped once to buffer.

I paired up the Apple TV with my laptop’s iTunes library. I let it copy over everything over to the Apple TV hard drive overnight. Movies, TV, music, podcasts, audiobooks…everything. The first sync takes a while but updating new stuff happens seamlessly in the background.

So what don’t I like? Very little, but a couple things nag me: for one, I hate the interface. I saw video of the first Apple TV interface and I liked it better. I’m not sure why. I guess I wanted it to work more like frontrow. It’s a small nit-pick. The other thing I don’t like is how I can’t watch stuff from the hard drive while downloading content from iTunes. If I want to download an episode of House from iTunes, I can’t watch anything while it downloads in the background. Why not? I can do that with my Macbook pro. Why not with Apple TV?

I have not rented a movie yet via iTunes. I think paying $4.99 for a movie I have to watch in 24 hours is pretty dumb. I would rather buy a DVD and own it. If I want, I can use Handbrake to rip the DVD to iTunes and sync it to my Apple TV.