AirPlay: The Most Under-appreciated Apple Product(s)

Every Thanksgiving my family hosts a turkey fry.  For the uninformed masses: frying is the most delicious of all the many preparation methods for the bird. Briefly, you dunk a well-seasoned 15 lb. turkey into a big pot of 360º peanut oil for 45 minutes. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. Anyway, our annual turkey fry is a 20-year tradition involving close friends and neighbors coming to our back yard Thanksgiving morning and consuming mass quantities of Bloody Marys while I dunk their birds.  This year was typical.  15 turkeys were fried while about 40 of our closest friends got drunk way too early in the morning. After 20 years, the spectacle of two bubbling cauldrons with bobbing birds has become rather commonplace to our visitors, but me controlling my outdoor music system with my iPhone widened some eyes.

Even though I've had an Airport Express connected to my music system for three or four years now, this Thanksgiving it garnered attention when I got a request to "turn it up" when one of our local favorites' tune began playing from my well-crafted playlist. Instead of grabbing some infrared remote or twisting a knob, I retrieved my iPhone from my pocket and thumbed the slider on Apple's Remote app. One of my less technical neighbor's eyes widened and he asked, "How did you do that with your phone?!!" As I explained the basics of AirPlay to him, I noticed several of my guests had stopped what they were doing and began paying attention. Before long, I was giving an impromptu demonstration of Apple magic.

That event reminded me of how much I take my Apple infrastructure for granted. My home network includes an AppleTV (2nd gen) and two Airport Expresses connected to two separate music systems. I have the Remote app installed on all my iDevices, giving me the ability to send all types of media from any of my three Macs and all my iDevices to any mix of three different music/video systems. All this capability cost me less than $300. ($69 for each Airport and $85 for the AppleTV, all from Apple's refurbished stock) That may sound a bit expensive until you price other solutions from Sonos and the like.

My neighbors' fascination with all this capability reminded me of just how wonderful AirPlay is. It is absolutely simple to set up, requires no cryptic instructions to operate and like most everything Apple makes, it just works! Believe me, I've tried the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance standard employed by Microsoft) hardware and found I had to continually fiddle with it to keep it working. There always seemed to be a permission issue or network problem that needed resolving (or re-resolving) before I could get music or video from my Windows PC to my home theatre. Someone less determined or less tech-savvy would probably give up.  Given DLNA's slow uptake, it appears many people have.

This makes me wonder why more people don't know about AirPlay. It's built into iTunes for free. Is it just something nobody wants? Based on my limited data, (admittedly gathered in a mild vodka fog this Thanksgiving) I don't think so. Maybe it's something Apple simply doesn't push. I seem to recall something about AirPlay capability in some Apple commercial, but the details escape me.  Seems to me, it would be an easy sell. I know I've helped them sell two AirPorts since Thanksgiving, one of which I had to help set up.

Sometimes I hate being the computer guy.

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