Now that jailbreaking is totally on the up and up, thanks to a recent ruling by the U.S. Copyright Office, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that users are able to unlock new hardware within a matter of hours.
Take the new Apple TV. The thing just started shipping–in fact, it’s not even shipping widely yet, but it’s already been jailbroken, thanks to pod2g’s SHAtter tool.
So, why jailbreak an Apple TV? Well, aside from the obvious reason (i.e. it’s fun to jailbreak stuff), the latest version of Apple’s settop box is running a neutered version of iOS that won’t let the user run any apps on the thing, and let’s be honest, as smooth as iOS is, the operating system is nothing without its apps.
Granted, as Daily Tech points out, the new Apple TV isn’t a device designed for storage. There’s a mere 8GB of flash space on the thing, all of which is designed for caching all of those movies you rent with the thing. That doesn’t leave a ton of space for apps.
Chalk this up to doing something because you can–at least until some clever hacking figures out a more useful application for the device.
Lest you weren’t glued to your television sets last night, our own Josh Topolsky raised quite a bit of mayhem on Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night show. After doing the professional thing and showing off the minuscule Apple TV and Roku XDS media streamers, Josh proceeded to power up an AR.Drone quadricopter and fly it around the studio in a decidedly menacing fashion. For video of Jimmy’s courageous reaction and the fallout from this robot invasion, jump past the break.
Well, there you have it, kids. Your new favorite hobby has gone from having a confirmed exploit to a legitimate jailbreak in the space of a mere couple of days. MuscleNerd reports that the Shatter jailbreaking endeavor has claimed its latest iOS victim today, though as you can see for yourself, it’s “not quite ready for prime time yet.” App installations still have to be figured out, but at least the door’s been opened for making some good, if not magical, things happen. You’ll find video evidence of root access after the break.
Well, this isn’t going to be surprising to many, but certain executives of certain big studios and networks aren’t wasting anytime letting everybody know what they think of Apple’s new 99-cent rental model for the Apple TV. If you’ve read our review of the tiny new iOS device, you’re already aware that one of Apple’s biggest challenges with the product is getting the content providers on board for such a reduced price — so far, the company’s managed to pull in ABC, Disney, Fox, and the BBC — but Jobs has said that studios will quickly “see the light” and join up. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes seems to disagree, however. “How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents an episode and thereby jeopardize the sale of the same shows as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free?” Bewkes recently asked, joining the now growing chorus of executives to decry the new scheme. Jeff Zucker recently said he thought Apple’s 99-cent rentals “devalue” the content, while Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said the rental model was “not good.”
We thought about calling this podcast “Unchained Melody” or “The Engadget Podcast: RAW” but our COO got a little concerned about violating some sort of intellectual property laws, so you just get the plain vanilla name. Regardless, it is quite a monster, complete with a radio play set in an AT&T store and 3-D versions of Jerry Seinfeld and Jar-Jar Binks. Dunno how else we can sell you on this one. Hosts: Joshua Topolsky, Paul Miller, Nilay Patel Producer:Trent Wolbe Music: The Addams Family AT&T Store music: El Remolon – Riki Ticki
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The header says it all folks. We just ran some tests on the AppleTV’s playback limits by streaming 1080p movie trailers in iTunes and managed to verify murmurs saying the device can accept 1080p content. Unfortunately, output is a different story, since it downscales the image back to 720p on your display. Yes it’s a little frustrating — especially since it’s predecessor was up to the challenge — but it should at least comfort those with a massive library of 1080p videos who were worried about reconverting for their new black box. Considering the hardware gems discovered in the AppleTV teardown however, we’re still holding out for the jailbreak community to let us play our 1080p files, and display them too. Oh, and if they could get to work on Super-Hi Vision support at some point, well, that’d be just dandy.
Two tiny black 720p boxes, two interesting choices. The $59 Roku HD will put Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand and Roku’s 75 other content channels on your TV quickly and easily, while the $99 Apple TV offers up iTunes rentals, Netflix, and eventually AirPlay streaming from your iPad or iPhone. (You could step up to the Roku XDS with 1080p support for $99, but we don’t think the extra money will be really worth it until the USB playback channel is released and / or there’s more useful 1080p content available.) It’s a tough decision, so check out our Apple TV review, our Roku XDS review, and our in-depth comparison chart to just try to make up your mind. Then again, you could grab ’em both and still not break the bank.
Well, here’s a surprise. During its customary new product teardown, iFixit discovered a full 8GB of on-board storage inside the second generation Apple TV, in the form of a Samsung K9LCG08U1M 8GB NAND flash chip.
That’s not a ton, granted (especially in light of the fact that its predecessor had either 40- or 160GB), but a bit more than expected, given the fact that the device isn’t designed to serve as a hard drive for media, in the way the first Apple TV was.
iFixit notes that the chip is the same as the one discovered during a teardown of Apple’s iPad. “This is a pretty remarkable amount of storage for a $99 device,” the site wrote.
The storage is most likely used to cache media streamed to the device, so you don’t have to deal with buffering, should there be a lag in your connection. Still, iFixit puts it best, “we wonder what else you could do with 8 GB of exploitable storage.”
It sure didn’t take long for the dev community to hack into Apple TV’s iOS build. One of the first payouts is a port of Apple TV’s “lowtide” 10-foot user interface to an iPod touch as briefly demonstrated in the first video after the break. While not very useful on such a small display, that could change when ported to the iPad’s bigger 10-inch display. In fact, that might be Apple’s plan according to our friend Erica Sadun who’s been busily spelunking the Apple TV’s disk image. She posits that the iPad could launch the lowtide UI when responding to AirPlay requests in a future iOS build.
Another minor victory was achieved by TUAW reader Arix who spliced the Apple TV’s AirPlay daemon onto a jailbroken iPhone 3GS thus allowing it to receive AirPlay streams (second video). But the best news of all, perhaps, is the ability to restore the Apple TV in iTunes by connecting its micro-USB port to your computer. That means that existing PC- and Mac-based jailbreak tools can be updated to work over the connection. In fact, TinyUmbrella has already been updated to backup the Apple TV’s SHSH blobs in order to preserve your ability to downgrade in the future. With 8GB of storage and 256MB of RAM to play with, we suspect this little media puck will become quite the developer playground, with or without Apple’s consent.
The new Apple TV could be Steve Jobs’ best sleight-of-hand trick yet.
During his modest introduction of the device, Jobs called the Apple TV “one more hobby.” But a closer look at the code and the hardware powering the Apple TV reveals that there’s a lot more going on under the hood than the CEO shared.
Interestingly, Jobs didn’t mention that Apple TV runs iOS, the same operating system running on its flagship product, the iPhone, and some other big hits — the iPod Touch and iPad. And there’s more, too: The Apple TV’s software may already be jailbroken, and some hidden software should eventually allow you to share the Apple TV’s media with other iOS devices.
These secret ingredients could be the recipe Apple needs to shake up the television industry. For years, Apple executives have labeled the set-top box a “hobby” product because of its mild success compared to blockbuster sellers like the iPhone and iPod. Now that Apple TV has been revamped into a streaming rental service with an arsenal of stealth features, maybe Apple has a chance to change the TV business — if not today, perhaps later.
“The most important hint of Apple’s real ambitions in the living room come from AirPlay, which puts iPhones and iPads in the driver’s seat and makes the TV just an output device for the Apple ecosystem,” said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst, in a recent e-mail statement. “Expect Apple to gradually push more and more in that direction, but as of this moment in 2010, Apple has not yet made a significant play for control of the TV.”
Here, we round up the juicy tidbits we’ve heard about Apple’s mysterious new set-top box.
iOS and third-party app support
There’s more than enough evidence proving that the Apple TV runs iOS. Dispelling any doubts, Apple recently posted a build of iOS 4.1 specifically for the Apple TV.
This piece of information about iOS is important because of a new feature called AirPlay, which streams media from your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch to the Apple TV. When Jobs demonstrated AirPlay, he only showed the feature working with an iPad’s built-in video player, photo app and music library. Now that we know Apple TV runs iOS, it’s likely that third-party apps such as MLB at Bat or ABC Player will be able stream media to the set-top box, too.
DaringFireball blogger John Gruber confirmed that an AirPlay button is showing up in the MLB at Bat app, and he adds that apps using the built-in media controller will be able to integrate AirPlay.
Long story short, you’ll be able to wirelessly stream media from some third-party apps straight to your Apple TV with an AirPlay button. AirPlay is shaping up to be Apple’s secret weapon to reshape home entertainment.
In addition to AirPlay, the fact that Apple TV is running iOS means that — in principle, at least — it may someday be able to run applications from the iTunes App Store. For now, that capability is not included in Apple TV, but the underlying operating system certainly supports it, so Apple might open a TV App Store in a future software update.
Jailbreaking hacks
Third-party app support will probably be limited for the Apple TV, but that’s where the jailbreakers come in. In the same way that we’re able to override restrictions on the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch with a jailbreak, we should be able to run unauthorized apps on the Apple TV — something Jobs would never advertise, of course.
In fact, hackers already have a head start, because a tool called Shatter, which was used to jailbreak the newest iPod Touch, already works with the Apple TV, according to the iPhone Dev Team. That means we should be expecting hackers to code some unauthorized apps soon to unlock additional capabilities such as video conferencing via your Apple TV.
On top of that, existing hacks for the old Apple TV should work, too. Dev Team member Will Strafach explained that “the new AppleTV OS seems to be a mashup of the old AppleTV OS and iOS,” meaning “frappliances,” plug-ins that add functionality to the old Apple TV, should work as well.
‘Lowtide’ app
The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s Erica Sadun, a popular iOS programmer, took a close look at the Apple TV’s software and discovered that it runs an application called Lowtide — the software containing the set-top box’s media interface.
Sadun dug deeper and found lines of code that suggest that Lowtide might eventually be extended to other iOS devices. In other words, you should be able to share media from the Apple TV to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, whereas originally we thought we’d only be able to do the converse with AirPlay. This functionality would be comparable to a Slingbox or an EyeTV.
Lowtide isn’t readily available for Apple’s iOS mobile devices yet, but iOS developer Dustin Howett has already managed to load Lowtide on an iPod touch running iOS 4.1, demonstrated in the video above. He recommended against doing it yourself, though, unless you’re ready to reformat your iPhone on a regular basis just to turn it back into a phone.
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