Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Hacker Turns $300 Apple TV into Cheapest Mac Ever

Posted by Zonk on from the another-bite-at-the-buck dept.

An anonymous reader wrote with a link to a Wired story about a fun play-along-at-home project: Turning Apple TV into a very tiny workable computer. "Apple TV is dead, long live the Mac Nano. Sort of. Just two weeks after Apple released its streaming media box to the public, hackers successfully installed OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, on the $300 device, making it the cheapest PC Cupertino has ever sold. 'The breakthrough is done, OS X runs on Apple TV!' wrote Semthex, the anonymous hacker responsible for the mod, at his website. 'Now we got (the) low-budget Mac we ever wanted.'"

3 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What is the world coming to... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    You wouldn't know a joke if it stuck a carnation in its arse and painted its bottom with bright blue letters saying "I'm a joke" would you?

  2. Re:This is a cool hack by Megane · · Score: 2, Funny

    But if I did buy a copy then in the UK at least it would be quite legal for me to run it anywhere I wanted.

    Yes... on a PPC CPU. Apple does not include the x86 version of OS X Tiger in retail copies. You would not be running what you bought. ("I bought a copy of the Boston Pops doing Beethoven's Fifth symphony, so it should be quite legal for me to download any version of Beethoven's Fifth ever recorded.")

    --
    #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
  3. Forget stolen (ok-unlicensed) OSX; Where's MythTV? by karlandtanya · · Score: 3, Funny

    I didn't know this thing existed, but it looks like it's out-to-TV only.
    It's not difficult to cheez together a MythBox for ~$500.00, but it'd sure be nice to have some of that slick apple hardware running Myth.

    It's got a USB port, and a 40G HDD, so you'd still be at about $500.00 if you added an external USB video encoder (There are has some supported by Myth--Plextor makes 'em IIRC) and boxed up a spare HDD from another computer.

    Still, I'd buy one instead of the MicroATX setup I'm eyeballing today.

    Which is just an overly verbose way of saying...

    Nice...but will it run linux?

    (Sorry, had to do it).

    --
    "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick