Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Why do I have so many boxes underneath my TV?

These are all the boxes that live underneath my TV. Nothing too exciting: DVR, receiver, Blu-Ray, Wii... The most exotic toy is the AppleTV.

So why am I bothering to post this? Because this article got me thinking: that's a lot of shelf space for hardware.

Seriously! It's a a couple optical readers and a couple hard-drives. You can fit those in a backpack now. Why do I need two whole shelves when I connect them to my TV?

Granted, I can't fit everything onto PC hardware, we're actually rather close. With a Windows Media Center (gasp!) we can consolidate the AppleTV, the Blu-Ray, and the DVR into a single box. My question is: why is it so hard to find a box that does this? and why is it so unusual to try?