Apple TV - Part 1: Unboxed and Dissected
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 22, 2007 6:12 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Motherboard: Spotted
With the drive disconnected we're left with the following sight:
Click to Enlarge - The bottom plate of the Apple TV unit
We can't get the motherboard out quite yet though, first we have to tackle the power supply which is the white bar to the left in the picture above:
With the power supply out of the way, we've got to move inwards and unscrew the wireless card:
To the left of the first antenna terminal on the card is a T8 torx screw, removing it lets you pull out the wireless card:
There's ample yellow tape used inside the Apple TV to keep cables in place, we had to peel some of it off to push the wireless card to the side.
We've got two more screws to remove before we can lift the motherboard out of the case, both of which are located around the metal bar that the fan is taped to (see above):
This first one is a bit of a pain to get to; if you've got a thin and long enough torx bit (T8) you can get to it pretty easily, but if you don't you'll have to go at an angle like we did as you can see from the picture above.
The final screw is actually an even larger torx mount that one of the T10 screws screwed into:
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Lonyo - Thursday, March 22, 2007 - link
Anandtech readers aren't most people :Pshabby - Thursday, March 22, 2007 - link
Eug - Thursday, March 22, 2007 - link
Perhaps Apple is using the GeForce Go 7300 to assist with H.264 decoding.saratoga - Thursday, March 22, 2007 - link
That seems likely. 1GHz would be fairly iffy for 720p H.264. My guess is they included it for use as a DSP. Theres a lot of FMACs on even a low end GPU, which is really important for this sort of work.Still, the whole package looks a bit thrown together. Theres real embedded parts you can use, rather then expensive laptop gear. You don't need an x86 CPU if you don't have a PC, a MIPS or ARM part with a fast DSP chip will do the same thing for 1/10 the price . . . if you've got time to rewrite your x86 codecs for a highly specialized DSP system. I guess Apple didn't.
Sort of reminds me of the Xbox 1. Lots of off the shelf PC parts, way more expensive to make then it should have been, but it did get MS's foot in floor and Sony isn't laughing so hard these days. Maybe Apple will pull if off.
Renoir - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
1GHz does indeed seem to being cutting it a bit close for high def H.264 although given how efficient coreAVC is perhaps they've just really optimised the decoder. If they have it'd be nice to see it in quicktime as that one seems very inefficient IMHO.michael2k - Thursday, March 22, 2007 - link
I wonder if you could make a TOTALLY sweet MythTV box out of this.Or... somehow hack a wireless keyboard with something like Synergy and get full OS X on this thing.
Cygni - Friday, March 23, 2007 - link
Man no kidding. This would be a great MythTV + Emulation station computer if we can get Linux running on it, and i cant see why it wouldnt. The whole thing is made of standard PC components. The 40 gig HD might be a little skimpy for a MythTV box, however.