Latest hacks turns Apple TV into £199 Mac computer!

[Bob Crabtree]

The hacks being done to the Apple TV network media player just get better and better. Among the latest is the creation of a replacement for the Mac OS X kernel.

This lets you run the full version of the Mac OS X operating system on an Apple TV - turning it into an ultra-low-cost Mac computer.

More.

[Thorburn]

Its interesting to see the community getting these things working, but I think its real usage is limited beyond a hackers toy.

256MB is simply not enough these days, even Windows XP is sluggish with this amount and OS X really needs 1GB or more to hit its stride.
If it was a case of swapping an SO-DIMM then there would be more potential, but when its soldered onto the board you are stuck with what you've got.

[Bob Crabtree]

Its interesting to see the community getting these things working, but I think its real usage is limited beyond a hackers toy.

256MB is simply not enough these days, even Windows XP is sluggish with this amount and OS X really needs 1GB or more to hit its stride.
If it was a case of swapping an SO-DIMM then there would be more potential, but when its soldered onto the board you are stuck with what you've got.

I'd tended to have taken the same line but some of the people who've tried out this hack seem to be of the opinion that some native OS X apps run surprisingly well on Apple TV.

Without having had the chance to try this, I tend to think that Apple TV running OS X is going to be next to useless for power apps, such as for editing stills, audio or video, but may actually be okay for others, such as web-browsing, email and the playback of stills, audio and maybe video, whether networked or from an attached (internal or USB) hard disk.

As for XP - well, I've actually seen some well-put-together (and quite venerable) Dell machines running XP in an okay-ish fashion with 128MB of RAM, so 256MB might just be enough for XP to run basic apps on Apple TV if and when someone gets Boot Camp to run on it.

[Thorburn]

Absolutely, not saying it doesn't have its uses, merely that they are rather limited.

Especially once you add on the £100+ for a licensed copy of OS X, you could have bought a cheapo laptop from PC World and get a higher spec (same HDD and memory, faster CPU, optical drive, screen) for £299, and saved yourself a lot of hastle.

[Bob Crabtree]

Absolutely, not saying it doesn't have its uses, merely that they are rather limited.

Especially once you add on the £100+ for a licensed copy of OS X, you could have bought a cheapo laptop from PC World and get a higher spec (same HDD and memory, faster CPU, optical drive, screen) for £299, and saved yourself a lot of hastle.

Points well made, me thinks!

However, the £299 Medion laptop from Woolies looks like the product to beat (and I'm not so sure that it's not now - or wasn't until recently - £249!).

[DR]

I'm waiting for someone to install Vista on it and use Readyboost

Sorry Joking - I have to say Apple are being clever with this one by not clamping down on it - talk about the worlds best market research - deliver a product, let people hack and enable it with features then copy the features people want and put them in Gen2!

Also this forces other people to release updates for there Media devices - take Microsoft and the release of H.264 and MPEG Playback on the 360 - which is coming in their next update