This past weekend we set on our second stage of our update to our bedroom (the 1st stage was installing a swing arm TV mount), painting all the walls a pure white, applying a National Geographic supergraphic, and running Wiremold surface runners to hide our visible cables. The cherry ontop was upgrading from our old Apple TV to the latest wee-sized model.

You can see how ridiculously smaller the new Apple TV is compared side-by-side by its previous iteration. We previously had an eyesore ontop of our bedroom dresser comprised of our cable box, the Playstation 3 and the older Apple TV. I made the decision this wasn't going to cut it anymore for the minimalist tendencies, so the first step was upgrading the Apple TV to the smaller form factor. The PS3 and cable box will likely be hidden either underneath the dresser or inside a nearby closet (if and when I can make some extra room and install a simple IR Repeater system to work with the universal remote), with the signal being split over to an wireless HDMI system we use with our living room projector for movies and sporting events.

The other plan is to wall mount the Apple TV behind the HDTV, just placed so it isn't visible unless one peeks underneath, but still accessible via the remote when needed. A Seattle company, H-Squared, offers a newly updated design for the version 2.0 Apple TV called, tvTray that allows for this exact purpose.

Because in our opinion, the best technology in the home is the ones you can't see, but yet are always there when you need to use them. The problem of course is to have access to everything remotely, so this bedroom project is going to keep us busy though the holidays.