Initially we were hoping to get Apple TV in for a review this week, clearly this is now unlikely as News.com is reporting it will not now be shipping until mid-March.
This is annoying but not a surprise — Apple has a habit of pushing product launches back. On the plus side, at least it takes the time to get them working properly before it ships them.
An Apple representative is quoted as saying, “Wrapping up Apple TV is taking a few weeks longer than we projected.” To which my reply is, “Don’t worry about wrapping it up all nice, just pop it in a plain cardboard box. I’m not at all fussy.”
One of the reasons I want to see Apple TV as quickly as possible is that I want Microsoft to get its act together and allow the Xbox 360 to stream more kinds of video over the network. At the moment it’s crippled, and can only stream WMV. My hope is that they will improve this in time by adding support for MPEG-4 and DivX.