So the news comes this week that approximately one million of the new generation Apple TVs have been sold, raising hopes that this perennial hobby product that might, some day, shed that status. But do these initial sales signal a trend, or will the rate fall off sharply after the holiday season?

Now at $99 per copy, the Apple TV is a fairly casual purchase as holiday merchandise goes. Compare that to the original Apple TV, the hard-drive based products that resembled an AirPort Extreme. The final price of admission was $229, making you think twice before buying one.

Today’s Apple TV consists of a tiny black case, a quarter the size of the original, and it owes more to the iPhone than to a Mac, using Apple’s A4 processor and the iOS. The previous version used subset of Mac OS X for its operating system, and a low-power Intel processor.

In contrast, it appears Google TV isn’t doing so well, with so-so reviews of the expensive gear that uses the new system, and reports of tepid sales. Rather than blaze new ground, Google appears to have attempted to resurrect the original failed WebTV concept, with a keyboard that will turn your TV into an Internet access device and, of course, help you see the targeted ads that keep Google in business.

This isn’t to say Apple has conquered the living room. I believe Steve Jobs when he said that the current state of affairs with cable and satellite companies makes that near impossible. A big impediment is that they usually give away their hardware, or lease it to you at a very low price. Either way, there may be no way for Apple to compete big time, unless they, too, give the Apple TV away with the hope that they’ll make a profit from iTunes movie rentals. Fat chance!

But the Apple TV opens up a lot of possibilities, even though the feature set today is rather limited. In addition to iTunes, where you can rent content or stream from your Mac, PC or iOS device, you can also view content from Netflix, YouTube and Flickr. However, being iOS based, there’s nothing to prevent Apple from crafting pacts with other content providers and offering them simply as additional apps. Since the key is to sell hardware rather than content, Apple shouldn’t put any locks on the door. Since Amazon has e-book apps on both Apple’s desktop and mobile platforms, what’s to prevent them from offering video content from Amazon on an Apple TV?

Now I got an Apple TV from Apple for review very shortly after the original release. I do use it, though not often. It offers a better Netflix interface than the clunky menus on my Samsung Blu-ray player, and I have rented TV shows that I forget to record. The problem, however, is that those 99 cent TV rentals are limited to two networks, ABC, Fox, Disney and BBC, with no indication when or if the rest will come aboard. So even if you hope to replace your cable or satellite service, and don’t mind a potentially far higher price of admission if you’re a TV junkie, you’ll end up disappointed. Buying lots of TV fare and streaming it via iTunes is even more costly. How about a subscription service, Apple?

There were other shortcomings as well. Apple’s remote appears to operate at a far more limited angle than most others I’ve used, so you have to point it straight on to make sure the unit receives the command. I have considered taking my Logitech Harmony Universal remote and adapting it to Apple TV use, but that’s won’t help of the set top box’s own reception window is the limiting factor.

The other problem is rather more serious, although I hope the most recent software update, not yet installed, with address it. Sometimes a movie will, after staying to play, halt to buffer content all over again. My wireless connection is powerful, broadband speeds are quite fast, but the problem happens nonetheless. I’ve seen others complain about the same symptoms, except for most reviewers of the Apple TV, who either never observed this symptom, or didn’t do their research to see what problems actual users might have confronted. But I expect, if it hasn’t been solved, it will be before long.

The real issue, once again, is the age-old question of whether large numbers of people want another box to compete with their attention on their TV. More and more of the newer sets are incorporating their own Internet features, including Netflix and other services, some of which Apple doesn’t yet offer. The interfaces won’t be as simple as elegant as what Apple is offering, but the convenience factor of not having to buy yet anther set top box is going to present problems for Apple TV’s long-term success as something other than a hobby.

So moving day came for the Steinberg family, but it wasn’t a major change. Our new home is about a six-minute drive from the old one, and moving our Internet and cable services should have been a pretty straightforward affair. After all, it was the same company, Cox Communications, and our service bundle was identical. Indeed, our new dwelling is prewired for cable, so what could possibly go wrong?

Well, my friends, the problem here is that cable, satellite and telecom providers don’t have to offer a guaranteed minimum level of service, nor do field technicians have to demonstrate basic skills of competence, apparently. There is no written test for cable TV service people administered by the state governments. If few customers complain, and profits are good, the corporate masters are happy.

The only fly in the ointment, evidently, was my request to keep the service at the old home active for a day after the new service was opened. I merely wanted to be able to stay online in both locales. Silly me.

On Sunday, the day I was supposed to meet the installer at our new place, I lost Internet although, peculiarly, TV service wasn’t impacted. Fortunately, customer support realized the problem and reprovisioned my cable modem within a few minutes. But it went downhill from there.

Just as my wife and I were en route to the new location, I got a call from the Cox installer. This particular individual, and this is true for many of Cox’s field technicians, was a contractor, working for one of several firms Cox selected, rather than hire extra employees. Not that it should make a difference, but maybe it did.

The tech arrived minutes after we did, and it was clear there would be problems. His task should have been simple — set up telephone service (I retain one landline with minimal options for faxing), and make sure that all the connection jacks were active with proper signal levels. But what seems simple on paper is sometimes fraught with trouble.

The installer insisted he was tasked to install all new hardware, even though I planned to bring the old equipment the very next day. I had to explain this several times before it sunk in. Worse, it appeared, at least according to the technician, that he didn’t have to install any new hardware to activate Cox’s “digital phone” service, even though Cox said otherwise when they wrote up my order.

Over the next 15 minutes, I witnessed the embarrassing display of incompetence as the tech searched every nook and cranny of our apartment in search of a connection panel that contained all the cable wiring, so he could make sure everything was activated. He telephoned his dispatcher, and there were lengthy back and forth convesations trying to make sense of this dilemma.

In the end, he said everything was operational, and all I had to do was a “self install” the next day, meaning I call Cox, give them the serial and network numbers of the hardware (they are clearly affixed to the bottom or rear of the enclosures), and I’d be good to go. Of course, whenever I hear “good to go,” I know I’m in for trouble.

Segue to Monday. Once the moving men had departed, I set up my Mac, attached the TV to the DVR set top box, and dutifully telephoned Cox from my iPhone to complete the self installation. Guess what? They had me scheduled for this “self install” the following day, meaning I wouldn’t have TV reception or Internet until then.

It took several minutes of complaints, transfers to other departments, and finally an “executive escalation” from the regional General Manager’s office before they gave in. Only they still had to visit my home to install a hardware interface for their phone service to operate. This was entirely different from their former installation strategy, which used an outside tap to a home’s internal telephone wiring.

Regardless, the installer arrived a couple of hours later. This time they sent a “lead technician” from the same independent contractor. Once being apprised of the problem, it took roughly 30 minutes for him to actually make my services function. And, yes, he found the patch panel, opposite the water heater in a tiny storage room. His predecessor went there and saw nothing.

In the end, Cox did promise some service credits to compensate me for my inconvenience. But it was all so unnecessary. If the original order taker had actually done the proper job and recorded the simple instructions I gave accurately, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time struggling with their support people.

Worse, I wonder about customers who aren’t tech journalists or otherwise aware of some of the fine details of the cable installation process. I have heard horror stories about most of the providers in this country, about support that fails to get the job done, incompetent field technicians, and sometimes days of lost service for problems that ought to be solved in minutes.

It’s not as if you can call the competitor down the street and get a better deal. Quite often, there is no competitor for broadband Internet. And the choice between cable and satellite for TV is often no choice at all. I ditched Dish Network when they couldn’t even figure out why I was unable to get their On Demand programming operate on my TV, a very conventional Panasonic, and please don’t get me started on DirecTV’s failed installation attempt.

Sometimes you get so busy figuring out what a company has done, you may miss telltale signs of where they are going. Of course, with many of the tech companies, management is often more concerned about how many boxes they’ll sell in the next quarter, rather than a long-term product strategy.

One area where Apple seems quite different from the competition is that there is a master plan. You may not know what the plan is, and sometimes there are forks in the road, such as the iPhone, which Steve Jobs claims was an outgrowth of the iPad project. Only the iPhone arrived nearly three years earlier.

What that goes to show is that Apple’s game plan isn’t written in stone. There will be changes, dictated by new ideas that arise perhaps from an existing project, or perhaps customer responses and requests.

I realize some of you believe that Apple doesn’t care about customers, but it is those customers who made a once-dying company the number one tech firm on the planet. If they don’t buy, Apple listens, yet Apple in the twilight of 2010 is a powerful juggernaut that is fully capable of transforming an industry with unexpected product initiatives, or unique features.

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Hardly a week goes by without yet another story about some sort of patent fight involving Apple. Sometimes it’s a company that bought up a bunch of intellectual property portfolios and is hoping for lucrative pay days to make the investments worthwhile. They don’t actually produce products or services; they just collect royalties. But other actions involve claims from “real” companies that believe (or claim) that someone else is stealing what’s rightfully their’s.

I have not begun to consider the actions from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Does he really need the money?

In the mobile phone industry, there are loads of interlocking patents covering various and sundry technologies that are owned by companies that include handset makers, chip makers, and even the carriers themselves, though they’re best at leveraging the inventions of others, and getting you to sign a service contract.

Apple is currently embroiled in a whole mess of confusing actions that include Nokia, Motorola and HTC. In each case, one accuses the other of stealing their property, mostly without granting the appropriate royalties.

Unfortunately, patent law, particularly in the U.S., is a mess. It appears to be all-too-easy to get approval, and some inventions are so general and wide in scope they can cover most anything, which makes it near impossible to avoid infringing on something.

These days, companies will often file patents as a defensive measure. If they don’t get there first, someone else might beat them to the punch, and thus they might end up paying big wads of cash to someone else should they decide to go ahead and produce the product or service that’s covered by that patent.

That explains why Apple will often file patents that don’t seem to apply to any known product. Indeed, the Apple watchers out there will watch those filings hoping for clues about some forthcoming iconic gadget that’ll soon be available in a store near you. However, it may well be that nothing will ever come of that invention, or it’ll manifest itself somewhere down the line in a totally unpredictable fashion. It doesn’t matter. Apple has to protect themselves from the wolves circling the corporate campus.

In an ideal world, I suppose patents would only be granted for truly original inventions that differ considerably from what came before. But it’s hard for overworked bureaucrats to know what a few pages of charts, design instructions and technicalities might actually represent. Sometimes it’s easier to just grant the patent than take the time, with a severe backlog of submissions, to figure out what it all means.

I won’t even attempt to decide whether Apple should win or lose against all those competitors with whom they’re embroiled in those mobile intellectual property disputes. It may well be that some actions are strategically taken to ward off others, or to delay shipment of someone’s competing product. It’s not always a clear-cut case of right versus wrong. Often, the gray areas are so muddy that jurors may have to toss coins to make sense of any of it.

In the end, most of these patent disputes end up with out-of-court settlements — they say, “let’s make a deal,” as some of the characters in legal dramas often do. Sometimes there’s no guilt admitted. One company agrees to pay the other a lump sum or royalties to resolve the dispute. There are no responsible parties, just payer and payee.

Sometimes one company will play a game of “chicken,” where they keep the case going by filing mountains of countersuits and paperwork, in the hope that the other party will eventually give up and go away. Even if one party loses, there are those inevitable appeals that can take a case through a number of courts at different levels in the justice system, not to mention consuming years of filings and loads of cash to the attorneys involved.

A telling example is TiVo Inc. versus EchoStar and Dish Network. In 1998, TiVo was granted a patent for its “multimedia time warping system.” This is the technology that set the standard for time shifting, allowing you to record one show, while viewing another. These days, most set top boxes actually can record two shows, while you watch a third.

TiVo won the original lawsuit in 2004, and EchoStar ended up paying them several hundred million dollars, but is still appealing the case. Unless there’s a final settlement somewhere along the line, there’s no telling how long it’s going to last, but the outcome could have severe repercussions on Dish Network, particularly for those who use their set top boxes to time shift TV shows and movies. That capability might have to be disabled. At the same time, the original action covered gear that’s long out of production, and newer models supposedly have a workaround that is designed to avoid possible infringement.

As you see, patent cases are confusing, confounding, but ultimately lucrative for both winning and losing counsel. Of course, those of you who live in countries where such protracted legal nastiness isn’t allowed are probably just shaking your heads about all of it.