Apple TV - Part 1: Unboxed and Dissected
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 22, 2007 6:12 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Getting Inside - It's that Easy?
The bottom of the unit is made of the familiar rubber that we've seen on so many Apple products, including the Mac mini. There are no exposed screws but if you peel up one of the corners of the rubber base you'll see why:
Beneath the rubber bottom are four T10 screws and four T8 screws; armed with our torx driver we went to town:
The rubber base is held to the metal underneath with an adhesive, unfortunately it doesn't exactly come off too easily leaving us with the mess above. It's a small sacrifice to make to satisfy our curiosities.
The outer four screws actually hold the vented plate in place, the four inner T8 screws keep the internal 40GB hard drive in place. You'll want to remove all of them though.
Amazingly enough, that's all you have to do to get inside the Apple TV. Apple seems to vary how difficult it makes opening hardware, and the Apple TV definitely ranks as one of the easiest devices to get inside. Lifting the bottom plate reveals an IDE cable attached to the internal hard drive. With the four HDD screws removed that we mentioned earlier, the only thing keeping the drive in place is a sticky green pad. Just tug on the drive and it will come off without any trouble:
The drive in our sample was a 40GB Fujitsu MHW2040AT:
The drive is a 2.5" single-platter 4200 RPM PATA solution with a 2MB buffer.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
37 Comments
View All Comments
noxipoo - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
turn up the DoF on those pictures. I noticed it first on CPU review and continued to this, why make everything so blurred except the center. no artistic touch needed on a tech review, make everything come in focus please.dm - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
can't wait to see how it performsAppleIIe - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
http://www.miglia.com/products/video/tvmaxplus/ind...">Miglia TV Max+Being that the Apple TV won't support DVR qualities, i'm wondering how long it will be before Miglia and others makes add-ons for the Apple TV.
Miglia TVMax+ with an Apple TV and a Miglia MiniBank would be a very clean setup.
blckgrffn - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
Is that this is more powerful than the Wii! I bet before long this has a U2500 (I think that is number, the ulv core duo 1.2 ghz) and that would be a sure bet as more code moves to multithreaded goodness.Seriously, why couldn't Nintendo provide even this level of hardware? I mean it has to last for four to five years! What is ridiculous is that if Apple had been willing to make it an inch thicker they probably could have put a full mobile 7600 in it for much more serious 3D performance... imagine if the wii had that... a core duo and a 256 meg 7600...
*hugs wii to ease hurt feelings*
randomlinh - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
and then the wii would be more expensive? They stuck w/ IBM to keep easy backwards compatibility. And their money went to the remote development I'm sure.Sure, I wish the Wii had some more umph to it.. HD Wii would be great. But for now, it works for me. And who's to say it's a 5-6 year cycle? Nintendo profits on hardware still. So I wouldn't put a 3yr cycle out of it's range... an upgraded HD Wii with more power in the future when HDTV's are far more widespread.
blckgrffn - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
I wasn't trying to say that it would have been necessary, but I think it would have been a better platform overall with a little more grunt - I mean, navigating the menu can be painful enough at times. Even a dual core IBM would have been great, and probably wouldn't have raised costs very much. I would have easily paid $20-30 more for a wii with twice the ram and CPU, and I doubt I would have been the only one.Still, it's the only console outside of the Gamecube that I own, so that says something...
Nat
anandtech02148 - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
basically appletv is a 2yr old ultra mobile laptop.what's the next greatest innovation for Apple? I_console video game system? surely they got the knowledge to dumb down a pc product and sell it to the mass with horrendous price.
Falloutboy - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
if someone hacks this I might have a replacement for my ageing hacked xbox and XBMC, shouldn't be to hard I imagin it runs a striped down version of OSxplinden - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
There's an ongoing discussion here - http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=...">http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=...bobsmith1492 - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
How is this a TV? I don't see any screen...It looks like a super-small, weak computer.
I don't get it. :(