As you can tell by most of my other posts, I am a huge proponent for Apple Products.  I own almost one of everything they have released in the last 3 years.  I have a MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, and an iMac.  While I don’t need to go into detail as to why I have switched to the Mac-side, I do feel that I need to sway people away from the Apple TV.

The Apple TV is great, don’t get me wrong, but my number one question when people ask me if they should buy an Apple TV is “Why do you want the Apple TV, what are you going to use it for?”

The standard response involves Netflix, Streaming Photos, Playing Music through the TV.  While these are all valid reason for wanting an Apple TV, If you can justify paying $100 to have your pictures and music show up on your TV, by all means, buy it.  But if you are the least bit resourceful, there are much cheaper alternatives to doing the both of these.  If you would like me to go into details on how-to, please ask me, and I will do a comprehensive write up on the issue.

This leads me to why I bought an Apple TV.  I was very much interested in jail-breaking the Apple TV to get XBMC/Kodi (soon to be Kodi) installed on it.  For those of you that don’t know, XBMC/Kodi turns the Apple TV into a powerhouse.  I donated one of my Apple TV’s to my pals house, and they have coined it ‘the magic box’.  XBMC/Kodi allows you to stream EVERYTHING you could imagine straight to your TV.  I’m talking TV shows, Movies, Live PPV UFC, Boxing, XXX, and even network TV streams.

Jailbreaking the Apple TV only works up until the Apple TV 2nd Generationwhich you can see by clicking, it’s going for 3 times the cost of when Apple released it.  This is where being a smart consumer comes into play.

Q: Why do you jailbreak the Apple TV?
A: For the XBMC/Kodi capabilities.

So you want XBMC/Kodi? You don’t need to spend $300 to make it happen.

This is why I recommend the G-Box Midnight MX2 Android 4.2 Jelly Bean Dual Core XBMC Streaming Mini HTPC TV Box Player For a little over $100 you can have your XBMC /Kodi on your TV streaming whatever you want in a matter of 10 minutes from power on.