When I purchased the new Apple TV 3, I never imagined it to become the backbone of my home digital ecosystem. In fact, I never set out to purchase one altogether.

When I bought my iPad, originally I had planned on buying the 64GB LTE version. With documents and other files increasingly being stored in the cloud, however, I instead opted for the 32GB LTE version and used the remaining $99 to buy my first Apple TV.

And, boy, I’m glad I did.

I was visiting Felix in San Diego at the time. Despite him telling me I made a big mistake (a valid point – I never considered the larger files sizes for apps, possibly up to five times larger, to accommodate hi-res images for the retina display), I went ahead with it anyways.

First off, I want to acknowledge that the Apple TV is severely under-marketed. This could possibly be due to the fact some other TV-related product is in the pipeline. I have no news here, and TIm Cook has always maintained that the Apple TV is a side project, but it’s no secret that Steve Jobs wanted to enter the television space as documented by Walter Isaacson before Jobs died.

The real key to the Apple TV, and what makes it so valuable, is AirPlay. Specifically it’s mirroring feature which works well with iOS devices, and soon, with Macs on OS X Mountain Lion.

AirPlay is truly revolutionary. So much so, that I would consider ditching cable completely, like many Americans, in favor of Netflix and other on-demand content. Even my local news posts YouTube clips to their Facebook page immediately after airing the newscast. I’m not the only one to think this. Dan Frommer also thinks that “we’ve barely cracked the potential for AirPlay.”

It’s an exciting time for new Apple products, all of which will be grounded in iCloud and the Apple TV.

Better hurry to buy some $AAPL if you believe the $1000 target. With their crazy-disciplined product focus, however, it might not be out of the question.

I mentioned the ordeal I had the other day about rescuing an SD card from the SuperDrive on my mother’s iMac.

After receiving a phone call from my mom in near-tears about what she did, I went over to see what the problem was.

Having no clue how to fix this, I googled “Idiot puts SD card in iMac SuperDrive” and, sure enough, was greeted with a few other frantic forum posts. Luckily other people have been stupid enough (mostly drunk) to do the same thing. 

But then I started thinking. Perhaps this is one of Jony Ive’s design flaws. The holes are awfully close (insert [ha] dirty jokes here), and most people aren’t looking at them when they stick it in.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the upcoming Ivy Bridge iMacs.

Anyways, I digress. Apparently the tried-and-true method is to…

1. Unplug the iMac
2. Bear hug it (27 inchers would be harder. Luckily I was dealing with a 24 inch model), carefully not to slam it to the floor.
3. Jump up and down until you hear the SD drop into the foam entrance of the SuperDrive.
4. Take a paper clip, make it into an “L” shape, and reach into the SuperDrive and hook out the SD from behind, carefully not to scratch the optical eye.

Try this at your own risk, but it seemed to work for the first guy, and it worked fine for me.

So now you know…