Apple TV - Part 1: Unboxed and Dissected
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 22, 2007 6:12 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Although the less exciting of Apple's major announcements this year, Apple TV is finally upon us. As the world waits for the iPhone, it's time to look at Apple's latest entry into the convergence market. While we work on our review we thought you all might like to see the innards of the Apple TV.
The Apple TV box is stylish in Apple's usual fashion:
The inner box is like a giant iPod box, you open it like a book:
On the left you've got the Apple TV unit, on the right its remote. Beneath the Apple TV you'll find the only cable supplied with the unit and documentation:
The power cable that ships with the Apple TV is quite possibly the most unkempt cable we've seen ship in a recent Apple product. The cable itself is fine, but it's not wrapped in some ridiculously elegant way - given that the Apple TV is about a month late to market could it be that things were a little rushed on the assembly line?
Click to Enlarge - This is exactly how the box arrived, you also get two Apple stickers with your purchase, each one good for 10HP
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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.