In case you missed it, the Apple TV is more extensible than Apple’s specs would make you believe: the hard drive is just a standard PATA (not SATA, somewhat surprisingly – cleaning out old inventory?) 2.5-inch drive, so any not-too-recent laptop hard drive will work. And as I had been hoping and predicting, the decoding is indeed done through QuickTime. The OS is so similar to Mac OS X, even, that placing Perian (a codec pack in form of a QuickTime component) into /Library/QuickTime – just like you would on a regular Mac – does indeed have an effect on movie playback in the Apple TV’s UI. Just like in iTunes on a Mac, the content has to be in a QuickTime container, but a referenced movie will work. You can even install an SSH server (or try and get the built-in one to run).
This makes me wonder: if everything else is so similar to Mac OS X, maybe the kernel extensions are, as well? Maybe, by supplying kernel extensions from Mac OS X (or even just from Darwin), you can extend the USB port to support keyboards, mice, even external hard drives? It seems to me more a matter of ‘why the heck not?’, rather than ‘why in the world would that even be possible?’.
With a little bit of hacking, what we have here is more than just a living room hub for your photos, music and videos; we have, perhaps, the cheapest almost-fully-featured Mac Apple ever sold. There’s no FireWire, no Bluetooth and no built-in iSight, but aside from that, is there anything truly lacking?
Intriguing.
Update: Adam kindly pointed me to a MacRumors.com forum post listing some (sadly, not all) System Profiler information. Not too many surprises in there; this is clearly a stripped-down but otherwise quite ‘normal’ – there’s even a machine model ID, AppleTV1,1. No Quartz Extreme (perhaps no composition at all?); a listed second memory bank (pointless, since there is no slot for it); multiple partitions. Somewhat unusually, the OS version is 10.4.7, the OS build is 8N5107 (which is actually between 10.4.8 and 10.4.9) and, finally, the Darwin version is 8.8.2. Presumably, they started off with 10.4.7, added in some newer Darwin extras, and then rebuilt, thus ending up with a build number closer to 10.4.9 than to 10.4.7.
Also via Adam comes some additional info of what’s on the drive. Even technology such as Automator and Image Capture that, for now at least, appears to have no direct use on this device, is included.
Others' Thoughts
Comment on March 25th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Another test.
Does it work now?
Comment on March 25th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
Argh!!!!!!11
Now I forgot the period. What I really learned to hate in the last 20 minutes is that if you click the back button in the browser the formular is blank. My former posting? Nada. Zilch. Gone. In your former version (the math test) this was not the case.
Comment on March 25th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
I’ve passed it on as a bug report to Peter.
Comment on March 25th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Anyway, the low price of the Apple TV comes with a price: Only 1Ghz CPU, 256 MB RAM, a more or less stripped down system and no Support for Hacks to run OS X. If it was a normal all-purpose computer it would be the flop of the year. But as a solution it seems to be mildly successfull. In fact I’m surprised at the positive reception in reviews and blogs.
I’m curious in what further directions Apple can go with the box: An internet surf station? A game console?
Comment on March 25th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
iTunes 7.1 has some strings that suggest games will indeed be supported eventually. Someone apparently also got Firefox to launch.
Aside from an empty Applications folder, no Finder and similar omissions, it is technically quite a similar OS to Mac OS X. Whether Apple will allow people to make it as extensible, I don’t know.
Your Own Thoughts
I'd love to hear your input. Just try to stick to a few rules:
Before you comment for the first time (or, after you have deleted cookies), you will have to answer a little challenge to prove that you are not a spammer.
Comments are written in Markdown.