Status-Q

One of the things Steve Jobs announced in his latest keynote was a drop in the price of the AppleTV, from $299 to $229 for the base model.

This should be good news for us at CamVine, because we buy quite a few of these – we take them apart and do nefarious things with them.

But there’s no price drop in the UK market – in fact, they’re still selling at £199. Now that’s not a bad price overall, and you have to remember that UK prices include 17.5% tax, but it’s still nearly $400 – substantially more even than the old price.

The price drop in the US, of course, coincided with the availability of movie rentals from the iTunes Music Store – something not available in other parts of the world yet. I wonder if the US hardware is being subsidised at all by the rental business?

They’re very nice devices, but I don’t have one at home because, some time ago, I bought a Mac Mini to go beside my TV, and an Elgato EyeTV box to capture digital broadcasts. It does everything the AppleTV does and a lot more – playing DVDs, for one thing. At the time, it seemed like quite an extravagance. But I’ve never regretted it for a moment. The vast majority of our TV watching is done this way now, and the recent release of a new version of the EyeTV software just makes it better.