All of it can be achieved with a set-top-box and a TV as long as you ignore half of its electronics and use it as a dumb monitor.

Yeah, and I think for most of here, there will be a "what's the big deal" factor when it comes out.

Those of us who have no problem containing our video setup inside our head, who have a Harmony remote, who have a mental picture of what goes where -- we're not really going to care that much. I think we'll appreciate a fully integrated TV experience, but I don't think we're the people who will get excited about it.

But let's put it this way, if you're staying at someone's house (i.e. babysitting or housesitting), the one thing you must hold a debriefing session on is how the TV, boxes and remote(s) work. That's kind of messed up. That's where the big advantage is for an Apple TV set.

That's the point - a TV remote should have 2 buttons at most - input select and on/off. And that's if selecting an input doesn't turn it on and selecting "off" from the input list doesn't turn it off. Or none, if it turns on or off according to the presence or absence of signals in its selected input.

The set-top-box remote, OTOH, could be no more complex than an Apple remote - menu/back, play/select/pause, directions.

One day I'll try tearing out every button off my TV remote and leave just the power and input buttons. Should be an interesting experiment.

It's only smarter to put the electronics in an add-on box that you can upgrade more frequently if people actually upgrade add-on boxes more frequently.

But do they?

Tivos, VCRs, DVD players -- very few get replaced with an 'upgrade' by regular people. [1]

And gaming consoles, the case to study for set-top boxes that people do upgrade, get replaced only every 5+ years. And they have massively lower market penetration.

[1] Notwithstanding early adopters replacing limited early-run devices with later ones, as with early dvd players getting replaced by those that did dual-layer without a pause.

With a gaming console you have a commitment in the form of the titles you own and people upgrade them to get access to improved content. A game console has to offset its cost with the increased attractiveness of its improved content.

A TV set-top-box is much cheaper to build than a gaming console (or, at least, should be) and the commitment will probably be with the subscribed content - and people won't upgrade them unless the new version offsets its price with enticing features. TV makers already noticed that and the push to digital is a form of making standards flexible enough to accommodate things like 2160p and 3D, shortening product life to levels analog TV sets and long-lived standards wouldn't be able to achieve.

Isn't that exactly what introduces the biggest usability problem that televisions have today: knowing how to set the monitor source channel to correspond to the set-top box one wants to use?

- facetime - receive/switch call to tv

So true. I can't wait until they add fax support so I can get fired by my boss in Japan.

Here's one: Visual mute. Broadcasters have taking to making commercials "flash" with bright, momentary images, in order to distract/attract attention. When viewing live, I find that the (audio) mute button is no longer sufficient. I'd like the screen to e.g. go 50% gray, where I can still see what's happening when I look at it, but it's no longer distracting me by "flashing" in my peripheral vision.

Given that TV's all have some degree of computerization, these days, I want mine to be open source, for reasons precisely like this.