Hacker Turns $300 Apple TV into Cheapest Mac Ever

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.'"

Comments

Of course..

[michaelhood]

This pricepoint is pretty much based on pirating a copy of OS X.

Re:Of course..

[keytohwy]

I disagree. I own an AppleTV and have yet to buy any content. It's awesome for showing family photos on my HDTV. In addition, its a great, visual music browser for listening. And lastly, Apple makes availabe a shitload of podcasts on the ITMS. I have a lot of those. Some video (even HD), some audio, but all free. I think that the AppleTV will transcend people's initial reaction, which is like yours. There's plenty of content you already own that make this a worthwhile venture for many.

This could get interesting

[oddeirik]

"Without video acceleration, games can't floor the graphic chip's throttle. There's no audio or ethernet support either[...]"

Which means it's of fairly limited use, atleast for now. I'm guessing that'll improve over the next couple of months though.

And if it's possible to clock the CPU up to 1 GHz (it's underclocked to 350 MHz?), maybe put in some more RAM and upgrade the HD, $300 ain't so bad for a HTPC with a design that your wife can accept in the living room. It having HDMI, DVI and WLAN isn't a bad thing either if they can get that working.

Re:This could get interesting

[peragrin]

you clicked on the wrong box.

Also a mac Mini is One tenth the physical size and a heck of a lot quieter than any desktop PC I have come across.

I can use my Mac mini in my living room and not hear it. Yet I can hear the steady hum from my pc's in the next room over.

Compare Apple's to Apple's. At least price out a shuttle, or a custom mini-itx setup before you compare the tiny mac mini to a dud.

Yes I said Dud. Both dell's I have bought were cheap pieces of crap. even the machine I custom built was better and cost a lot less. It wasn't always so. There is a dell at work that keeps on going. Of course it is now 13 years old.

PowerMac G4 Tower

[OrangeTide]

Was a whole $80 off eBay. With a $200 upgrade it's dual 1Ghz G4 now, but honestly it ran OSX fine without the upgrade so I could have skipped the big upgrade and saved some cash.

I won't be impressed until someone shows me a programmable/extendable device for under $40 (for new, not used). The $300 price point is not really an exciting price point when you consider PCs have been under this for a while.

I recently spent like $65 on an Athlon 64 X2 3600+ Brisbane cpu. a few other parts and it's a whole computer. Granted an Apple TV is a really tiny computer, and it hooks up to a TV in a very convenient way (but doesn't hook up to a CRT/LCD without some effort). For a tiny computer it's not a bad deal, but if smallness is not a priority then there are better bargains out there to be sure.

Re:This is a cool hack

[Richard W.M. Jones]

AFAIR running OSX on non-Apple hardware is illegal.

If I didn't buy a copy it would be illegal. 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. Under the Unfair Contract Terms Act and the Software Directive / Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, any license terms which tried to prevent me from running OS X virtualised or on non-Apple hardware are sure to be tossed out in court.

Rich.

Not necessarily

[brokeninside]

With three Macs in the house, the most economical way for me to legally upgrade is Apple's household bundles that come with five licenses. Meaning that at any given time, I've usually got one or two licenses that I'm not using. I doubt that I'm the only person in this situation.