I didn't check out Apple TV. Because others had gone before me Bentway, I'm afraid that even such a big Apple fan as I must agree. The only two things the Roku box doesn't do that the Apple TV does, are to 1) allow you to purchase or rent content through the iTunes Store, and 2) use Airplay to display video (or play music) from iPhones, iPads, and soon, with OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Macs.
But the Roku does do a lot of things the Apple TV doesn't do, and offers a far greater breadth of available content. I'm thinking about getting one of them myself.
The Airplay feature is quite compelling for me, since I can get a lot of the content the Roku box offers on my Mac, anyway. It adds one more layer of complexity to have to use the Mac to play the content, but on the other hand, it's probably easier to cruise around and find the content from a real computer.
Still, the Roku seems like a better bet overall, especially if you don't have a Mac. |
