Apple TV Already Being Hacked

TunesBoy writes "Only a couple of days after being shipped, the Apple TV is already being modified in a variety of ways. A thread at Something Awful discusses installing VLC, and a dedicated site, AppleTVHacks.net, has appeared and is cataloging hacks including a hard-drive upgrade tutorial. Did Apple intend for the Apple TV to be so easy to upgrade and hack?"

Comments

Intentionally, or just not-unintentionaly?

[White Shade]

I don't think it really matters whether apple "intended" it to be easy to hack, I think it's more of the fact that every single piece of "cool" hardware with the potential for added functionality has been hacked or broken within an extremely short amount of time. Maybe rather than intending it to be easy to hack, Apple instead decided to not spend as much money on implementing all kinds of crazy protection schemes, thus allowing a higher profit margin. Which, in my mind, makes a hell of a lot of sense! :

It does seem like the norm these days is for companies to build equipment with huge amounts of power, but then they lock it down in an effort to.. protect. .. something... PSP for example; I don't know exactly what the point of locking it down was, but obviously it didn't help much. Kinda like anti-features, or un-products; you have all this potential and you lock it down. Lucky for us, apple isn't quite so far up their own butts as Sony and whatnot are, so we have a sweet new product that we can do sweet stuff on without having to go through hoops to crack it! :)

Double whammy in Apple's favor

[localroger]

One thing people might be missing is that one of the reasons the Apple TV is so cheap is that they aren't paying any of the licensing fees that manufacturers have to in order to support other formats. Much of the cost of your DVD player, for example, goes not into the hardware but to the folks who license the formats it supports -- JPG, MP3, CD audio, and of course DVD (and some of those license also include stupid requirements like Macrovision on the output, which is ANOTHER license).

Here, Apple is only supporting formats THEY own, so they can spend the money on the hardware. Hacking it only drives up their market share, and to the complaint that people are watching all these unlicensed formats on it Apple can say "Hey, we didn't do it." But you still bought a box from them.

Re:Will it stay open?

[ScrewMaster]

Kinda like Linksys did with their WRT54-series WAPs. Fortunately, they had to good sense to realize they were costing themselves money, and put out a hacker-friendly version. I understand that the PSP/X-Box business model of selling the hardware at a loss with the intent to recoup losses in software sales really motivates manufacturers to keep their products from being purchased for other purposes. I mean, if you buy an X-Box and put Linux on it and never buy a game, you just got yourself a cheap computer at Microsoft's expense (not that I have any particular problem with that ... it's your property, and they chose to sell it to you at a loss.) But there's no real reason for a vendor whose profit comes from hardware sales to attempt to predetermine what software runs on that hardware. Well, not in the $50 consumer-grade market anyway.

Unless, of course, you're an Apple Computer with the obvious intent of becoming the 21st century king of content distribution. You probably wouldn't want people hacking into your real-time swarming video distribution system getting movies and TV shows for free. This apparent friendliness to the hacker underground may just be a ploy to get as many of the things out there as possible, by eliminating complaints that were common to late-generation Tivos and Dish Network products. They can always lock it up later.

Time will tell.