All Apple All Day

There's been quite a bit of chatter about the HR34's growing pains. Sluggish menus, old SD interface, missed recordings. Many of those issues have been addressed and fixed throughout 2012. I was still a bit nervous as our tech left after yesterday's install. Well, consider me impressed. This is, without a doubt, the best set-top box I have ever used. It's a leap forward, in the way that the TiVo Series 3 was a leap forward in its day. It can record 5 HD channels while playing a sixth - with no limitations. Whole home DVR. Beautiful on-screen GUI, with snappy scrolling. Massive (expandable?) storage. It has YouTube, Pandora, and a slew of DirecTV-centric presentation goodies (All MLB games + a scoreboard? Sure. Weather? Twitter? No problem.) For $99, this is money very well spent. For DirecTV, this is an all-too-rare move by a market leader to not only stay ahead of the competition, but to exponentially outpace them. (UPDATE: And now, the HR34 "Ge

After two and a half months of WOW UltraTV, we finally gave up. The internet service has been rock-solid, but the phone service won't connect to our ADT system, and the TV service just isn't ready for prime time. (Literally. We are constantly losing all high-def channels at the worst possible times, including yesterday during Breaking Bad.) When you factor in that our WOW bundle cost in excess of $160/month, making the decision to unbundle was pretty easy. We're going with DirecTV, AT&T for their barebones landline, and - for the moment - keeping WOW for internet. More on that later. With DirecTV, we'll be going with the Choice Xtra bundle. At the outset, we're going to be saving an absolute ton of money - TV is going to be about $50/month to start - meaning our "unbundle" will be about $40 cheaper than our bundle.