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.
Apple’s cheap, puny Apple TV set-top box shares many of the same internals as the iPad, according to a teardown of the device.
The nimble engineers at iFixit cracked open the Apple TV earlier this afternoon and found the same type of Samsung flash chip that’s also inside the iPad, holding 8 GB of capacity. iFixit speculates this storage will be used for caching while streaming TV shows and movies.
The teardown also revealed that the Apple TV features the same A4 processor and amount of RAM (256MB) as the iPad.
Of course, the Apple TV has connectivity features that the iPad doesn’t: Ethernet, HDMI output, an AC adapter and an optical audio-out port. But it’s pretty interesting how similar the two devices are otherwise. Perhaps this is a clue that the Apple TV and iPad will be very tightly integrated in the near future (going beyond the AirPlay streaming feature we’re already familiar with).
An 8-GB drive doesn’t sound like much, but it’s pretty good considering the Apple TV’s $100 price tag. And because the Apple TV’s focus is streaming media, 8GB should leave more than enough room for extra third-party apps, if Apple later decides to open an Apple TV app store, which some have speculated to be a possibility.
“Of course the new Apple TV gets a teardown, silly,” is what we would tell you should you have the audacity to question its inevitability. But alas, we’re too busy analyzing every photo of iFixit’s gallery to even dignify your raised eyebrow with an unprovoked response. The site gives it 8 out of 10 in its metric of repairability, opining it might be “the most eco-friendly set-top box of all time.” With that said, here are the big takeaways we’re seeing so far: 8GB of storage provided care of a Samsung K9LCG08U1M NAND Flash chip, and the same one found in the iPad. Speaking of which, there’s also the exact same markings on its Apple A4 processor as the iPad and new iPod touch, K4X2G643GE (not the same as the iPhone 4, as it turns out), the exact same Broadcom BCM4329XKUBG 802.11n WiFi / Bluetooth / FM chip as the iPad, and at 256MB, the same amount of RAM. Also interesting and of note are the solder pads near the side of the logic board, which look to be a perfect fit for an Apple dock connector. At any rate, with all that’s under the hood, we expect the jailbreak community to have an absolute field day.
Roku’s streaming media players can shake off the “Netflix box” tag once and for all. TiVo, too, keeps its spot high in the set-top food chain. Both Roku players and TiVo’s Premiere and Premiere XL boxes will be able to stream network shows with Hulu Plus this fall.
Hulu Plus, a $9.99/month subscription service that offers additional premium content in addition to the network TV shows and backlist films offered through the free Hulu web site, is already available for streaming with net-connected Samsung TVs and Blu-ray players, Boxee’s set-top boxes, and Sony’s Playstation 3, with announced support for XBox 360, other Sony devices, and some Vizio TVs and Blu-ray players coming either this fall or in early 2011.
The announcements from TiVo and Roku did not specify dates on which the service would be available on either device. Roku currently offers access to Netflix Watch Instantly, Amazon Streaming Video, Pandora, and other streaming media channels. TiVo offers DVR capability in addition to most of the same services. Apple’s much-anticipated new version of Apple TV offers Netflix access and rentals through iTunes, but not Hulu at this time.
The emerging model for set-top boxes appears to be devices that offer a wide range of streaming services, whether free, for purchase, for rental, or through subscriptions. Either the boxes are inexpensive and dedicated for this purpose, like Roku and the new Apple TV, or relatively expensive but offer additional services like gaming, web browsing, or video recording, like TiVo, PS3, or XBox 360.
The devices have differentiated themselves according to three features: 1) price; 2) some exclusive features, as in the case of game consoles; and 3) the strength and ease-of-use of their interfaces — both the on-screen software and remote control capability.
All can be used in conjunction with traditional cable and satellite TV service, but some users are beginning to find the offerings of internet video rich enough that they can forego cable or satellite altogether. Hulu Plus on TiVo and Roku may be what pushes many of them over the edge.
You’ve been waiting, and it’s finally here: the Apple TV review. Months before Steve Jobs announced the new set top box at Apple’s annual fall event, we had been reporting on news that the company would strike out again into the TV market, offering a small, low-cost box that had more in common with the iPhone than the iMac. When those rumors came to fruition, we were presented with the completely revamped Apple TV — a tiny black puck of a device priced at a staggering $99, and centered around a handful of completely new ideas (for the folks in Cupertino at least) about getting content onto your TV screen. The first is a new rental system which allows you to nab brand new TV shows at $0.99 a rental, and HD movies for $4.99 a go (or $3.99 for older titles). And that includes new releases the same day DVDs hit shelves (or Netflix distribution centers). Speaking of Netflix, the new Apple TV also features the rental service’s “Watch Instantly” as a wholly integrated component of its offerings, alongside a new function the company calls AirPlay which will allow you to “push” video and audio content from your iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch with the tap of a button. On top of that, the new ATV streamlines sharing from your home computers or laptops, making getting content you own onto your TV dead simple. So, has Apple finally solved the “second box” problem, or are they still struggling to turn this hobby into a real business? Follow along after the break for those answers (and more) in our full review of the Apple TV!
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