With Apple’s new set-top device filtering into the hands of the faithful, its buzz has been appropriately high. Over the weekend, however, many enterprising hackers took the time to probe the internals of the AppleTV a bit more thoroughly. What did they find?As it turns out, Apple’s claim that its new devices (e.g. AppleTV, iPhone) run OS X “for real” in a stripped-down fashion is absolutely true. AppleTV’s OS is a modfied version of 10.4.7! Once this was discovered and preliminarily tested, everyone went totally crazy with the knowledge, hacking the thing like a den of industrious hacker-beavers hopped up on a case of Cocaine Energyand armed with something to prove. So far, we’ve seen:
- Larger hard drives swapped in (for extended media-synchronization capacity)
- SSH and VNC (via Apple Remote Desktop) for remote management
- Alternate video codecs via Perian—this one is a Holy Grail for users [like this author] that have gigs upon gigs of XviD content already sitting on a NAS
- Network shares mounted via AFP and NFS . . . possibly obviating the need for larger hard drives if network performance supports streaming
- The list will only continue to grow . . .
When the AppleTV first came out, most press paid polite attention to Apple’s achievement but sharply derided its thin featureset, consistently noting its lack of TV-recording ability and host-computer-running-iTunes dependency. This author thinks most of the AppleTV’s critics have missed the point: This device is about playback only. It’s about delivering the best playback experience on the market. (It’s also about leveraging its presence in the living room to sell more computers—and new 802.11n wireless base stations—in the process.) Apple has acheived this respectable goal by writing an excellent software interface, putting it in some cool hardware, and at least paying lip service to a decent price point.
Now that hackers have opened the door to customizing the device and expanding its capabilities, consumers can look at the AppleTV as a product that is truly insanely great—especially considering that it was pretty great out of the box.
