Our household god is Steve Jobs, by which I mean that we are devoted to Apple products. I’m typing this on a MacBook Air, which is a dream machine. I gave my wife a MacBook Air for Christmas. We have three iPads in the house, two iPhones, and an iMac. We’re not evangelists for Apple or anything; we just really like their products. Which is why we bought a $99  AppleTV device.

That was a mistake, I regret to say. The good thing about it is it gives you easy access to all the movies available on iTunes. The selection is more limited than Netflix, but of higher quality. The problem we’ve had with AppleTV is that it’s really unreliable regarding downloads. You can’t count on it to work properly. Most of the time, no problem. But most some of the time, yes, it’s a big problem. It takes forever to download a movie, if you can download it at all. Last year, I had a long back-and-forth with a support tech after we had rented a couple of movies that wouldn’t play. Apple was really helpful and apologetic, and refunded our money without objection. We found out in the end that the thing to do when the device gets hung up like that is to log out and log back in.

This works most of the time, but not always, and not smoothly. I rented the film Before Midnight a couple of weeks ago, when it was 99 cents on iTunes. You have something like a month to watch it. Well, tonight Julie and I decided to give it a shot. It wouldn’t play. Finally I restarted the system, and it said it would play in 45 minutes. Turns out it actually played in 25 minutes, but what a pain in the butt, having to wait 25 minutes for the thing to load. We didn’t finish it tonight, because by the time I got finished fiddling with it to make it start loading in the first place, and then by the time we got finished waiting for it to load, we were too tired to get through the whole movie.

There are worse problems in this world, I know. My point is one of consumer advice. Don’t buy Apple TV. It’s great when it works, but in our experience, it’s poky and unreliable. I wish we had bought a Roku instead. Learn from our mistake. And believe me, we are major fans of Apple, who have expressed our support for the company and its products with our investments and our loyalty. We have been Apple champions for years. But Apple TV sucks.

UPDATE: That said, I haven’t liked the Linklater series with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, because I have found them both annoying characters. The only reasons I saw the other two is because a) I really like Richard Linklater, b) I love the premise of the series, and c) Julie Delpy is crazy sexy.

I am surprised by how much I’m liking Ethan Hawke in this third film, though. He is aging very, very well. Life seems to have soaked the cockiness out of him — not entirely but enough. I’ve only watched about half the movie, but Julie Delpy (well, her character) is as annoying as ever, but I’m startled by how much I’m enjoying Hawke’s performance. He comes across as a man who has been chastened by life in a way that makes him less abrasive, and much less sure of himself. This is to his good. This is a strength. He used to come across as callow.