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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?"
That way they'll save a lot on support (you hacked it, then we don't support you). And later it'll be a lot easier to "open it up" to comply with EU ruling ;)
It's not very hard to forsee hacking of a small silent computer in a settopbox housing. There are countless sites that try to DIY such a thing. Now what happens if a popular brand introduces such a thing at an affordable price?
They will not sell that much more hardware directly, but the PR image they create with it is worth a lot, and all they had to do is produce something decent.
Linksys is a very good past example of this: their wrtg routers were nice to modify and already ran linux. I bought one for myself to play with and later advised my brother to get that brand. Marketing is easy if your customers start doing the selling themselves.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
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! :
.. 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! :)
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.
ìì!
MS had to be careful with their XBox, because they were adopting the Sony approach: sell the hardware at a loss, and make money on the software (games) afterwards.
Historically, Apple don't sell at a loss. I'm pretty sure that (even at the low price of $300 for a 1GHz/256/40G PC in that form factor) Apple will be making money off this - they don't care if you hack it.
In fact, the more hackable it is, the better - jo(e) public buys it so (s)he can watch their iTMS movies on the big screen, the geeks buy it to hack it. Box numbers go up either way, which helps Apple PR, and helps them persuade people they have *the* viable platform for the home.
I wonder how long it'll be before the USB-2 port is made available (it is running OSX, after all), at which point you get an external 1T drive on it as well, in one of the mac-mini style enclosures...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
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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.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
According to the specs, the Apple TV supports AAC, MP3, AIFF, Apple Lossless, WAV, MPEG-4, H.264, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG.
The only format Apple owns is Apple Lossless audio. The others are industry standards. AAC, Advanced Audio Coding, is part of the MPEG-4 specfication although I belive it doesn't need to be licensed (unlike MP3 which requires a per-machine license). MPEG-4 (aka MPEG-4 part 2) and H.264 (aka AVC: Advanced Video Coding aka MPEG-4 part 10) also require licenses.
I'm not sure if JPEG requires a license, probably depends on the lawsuit of the day.
This is a slight exaggeration. It's actually more like a small truck in neutral.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM