New Apple TV = No Hard Drive = Bumming!

Question

I am really thrilled by the lower price, and size profile. It looks awesome. I also love the fact that it will stream from Netflix without needing a Wii or Play Station or other peripheral. However, there are a few things I question.
I am bumming that there is no built in storage of any kind. One of best features of our existing Apple TV's (we have them in 3 rooms) is the ability to put various photo files we've created directly onto the hard drive. We love having the pictures scrolling to music when when we have company and parties. I don't want to have to fire up the computer and iTunes each and every time I want to do that. It was also nice to have certain music and few of the kids movies on there that we could listen to or watch without having to have the computer running.
My thought around this is that it would be nice if the USB port allowed use of a thumb drive. You can get 16GB+ fairly cheap (I have a 64GB) that would be cool to load up and do what I mentioned above. Maybe they are working on something like this?
Although I realize everything is evolving, I hope there is some kind of update allowing streaming Netflixs, etc. to existing Apple TV's. They are perfectly good and it would be a shame for them to become outdated simply over a few hardware revisions. I know that had I bought one of the "old" models here in the last 6 months I'd be none to happy.
Best to all.

Answer 1

i don't think it's a matter of Apple not caring.. i think they do care and wanted to simplify the product for a majority of users (you can't please everyone). it's just that syncing is buggie, slow and confusing for many, many users.. i'd guess that over half of the posts on this appleTV forum are by people who are having trouble with syncing in some way or form.. i agree that the streaming model is not that great if all you have is a laptop, but if you have a desktop it makes WAY more sense to stream. streaming means you basically have no limits whatsoever on storage size.. if you put a hard drive in appleTV, no matter what size it is.. there will be lots of people it will be too small for (i have ~2TB of media to store).. then even if you want to enable to USB port to add storage you have to consider a backup strategy so people don't lose all their data in case of a HDD failure.. it's a big complicated mess, that's just not worth it in the end.. so they moved to a pure streaming model.. their customer surveys apparently show that most people don't want or need syncing.. so in an effort to simplify the product in use and in the minds of users appleTV is now streaming only.
i think for people with a laptop the best thing would be to just get a cheap-free computer.. can likely get one for free that someone is throwing away.. it can be really junky.. it just needs to run iTunes.. add drives to it an use that to stream to appleTV.