AppleTV Hacked! Who Cares!?
Apple | Mac, Geek'd, Hacks, Rants April 3rd, 2007Even with the AppleTV hack, I still don’t get it. I’m not going to by a home entertainment center device that doesn’t do everything. This thing has no optical drive, and has a very small hard drive with little room for upgrading since it’s a 2.5″ laptop drive. So I’m forced to do everything over my network, including buying movies. It all seems very limiting to me.
My plan would be to spend an extra couple hundred on a used Mac Mini, and hack it instead. This way I have my optical drive for DVDs, so I can watch/rip at the same time, I have room for a larger hard drive for local access, so I don’t always have to send stuff over the network or add an external drive, and when it gets outdated, I can use it as a computer! The AppleTV is so limiting because it does one thing, and one thing only.
I don’t get the craze over it except for all the psycho Apple fanboys (hey, I’m a fanboy, just not psycho) wanting something Apple in their living room.
Read the article that started this rant: Apple TV Hacked from Paul Stamatiou
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Example: 3 very cheap roommates that don’t like spending money, eg barely willing to purchase Apple TV. They have a massive repository of movies on a local server in-house. what better way to view those movies than a hacked apple tv? If you can convince college kids to spend upwards of $600 to get a Mac Mini, you must have some special powers.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
All I’m saying is that for what it actually is, the AppleTV is not a good value. Hacking a Mac Mini would be much more functional and easier to expand and upgrade. I just don’t get all the hype about the AppleTV when it still relies on file transfer over your network. I’d rather have a multi-function machine in the living room so I can play disks too.
If three cheap roommates don’t like spending money, why would they buy an AppleTV? It’s just not a good value!
April 27th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Just to follow up - now that the Apple TV can be hacked and runs OS X out of the box, I’m a little more impressed at it’s price point.