I decided to do my part to support the US economy and splurged on an Apple TV.  The Apple TV is essentially an iPod without a screen – instead it provides HD video outputs including HDMI so you can use your TV as the screen to navigate and play music, photos, and videos.  Like an iPod you sync it from your PC using iTunes – however, unlike an iPod you sync it over your home wireless network, so it can be a bit slow.  Since it has internet connectivity, it also provides you the ability to access YouTube, Flickr, and the movie trailer library.

I purchased the Apple TV to view my photo library on the big screen TV at high resolution while playing my music library on the stereo speakers.  For this purpose it works well.  I probably won’t use the movie download feature – although viewing movie trailers is nice.

I was missing an HDMI cable to set up the Apple TV, so I went to the BestBuy store near my house – the cheapest HDMI cable they had was $60 (???).  So I decided to try the new Apple Store also near my house and they had an HDMI cable for $19 -much better.