Enterprise Mac | Tom Yager » Is Apple TV a Mac?

April 22, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Is Apple TV a Mac?

TAGS: Consumer and lifestyle, Design and engineering, New Products, Software

Apple TV is certainly no iPod, and it's nothing like a stripped-down embedded Linux box. I've concluded that Apple TV as close to a Mac as you can get for $299.

At a minimum, Apple TV runs Darwin (Apple's open source UNIX core), and there is enough Mac-grade kick in the presentation layer to support OpenGL, OpenEXR, xpdf, khtml and real-time decoding of video and music, including iTunes DRM-protected content. It has a 48 watt power supply and a measured draw of 20-21 watts, enough for an embedded PC. It is supposedly targeted at consumer HDTVs, yet Apple TV drives a 30-inch Cinema Display at its full native resolution. On the Cinema Display, the graphics and text generated by Apple TV are not scaled up from HD resolution, but are rendered and anti-aliased at the display's native scale. That calls for more graphics RAM (shared RAM, given that Apple TV almost certainly uses Intel's chipset integrated display controller) than a consumer electronics vendor would factor into its parts cost for a $300 component.

Apple TV's USB port, presently unused, has everybody talking. I believe that it's there for a keyboard and/or a game controller to be put to use for custom software and for streaming interactive TV. It could also accommodate a tuner or other means of bringing video into the box, but I consider that unlikely.

Did I say "custom software?" Yup, that was I, but don't get excited. I expect the development model to be like that of iPod, where only Apple and Apple-blessed third parties can code for it. During my briefing on Apple TV, I posed the question about an open Apple TV SDK and got a response that I took as "are you kidding?" Too bad. The idea of embedded OS X is awfully enticing and accounts for much of my interest in iPhone.

That's not to say that some enterprising hacker with a spare $300 can't get inside Apple TV purely for the sake of blogging about it.

If you're still unconvinced that Apple TV is a near-Mac, Apple's list of Apple TV open source and license acknowledgments, which I scraped from the screen, closes the case. Compare this list with OS X's list of acknowledgments and note the differences.

(How did efax get in there?)

3Dlabs, OpenGL2 Shader Language compiler
Various, BSD kernel
Apache, Apache and apache_mod_perl
AT&T, C library
Casas, efax
Clapper, poll
Corcoran, Smartcard Services
Creative Labs, OpenAL
Demetriou and Ustimenko, ntfs
Digital Equipment, bind and BSD kernel
Eaton, man
Elber, Raymond and Kuratomi, giflib
FSF, bash, gcc, gnutar, grep, libiconv, ncurses
Gailly and Adler, zlib
Gifford, SHA2
Giraud, smart card reader drivers
Gladman, AES, SHA2 message digest
Glyph & Cog, Xpdf JBIG2 decoder
Hinds, PC Card driver
Hipp, SQLite
IBM, Unicode
Indulstrial Light & Magic, OpenEXR
Johansen, Levenshein, Distance C++ code
Juniper Networks, PAM
Knoll, et al., khtml
Lane, JPEG library
Leffler and Silicon Graphics, TIFF library
Lucent, awk
MIT, Kerberos, WebDAV, install-sh
Matsumoto, Ruby
Miller, sudo
Mills, NTP
Moolenaar, gpt
Morgan, PAM
Mosier, cephes math library
Muffett, CrackLib
Netscape, arena files, parser
Netscape, network security services
Network Associates, et al., NET-SNMP
Nudelman, Less
OpenBSD, OpenSSH
OpenLDAP Foundation, OpenLDAP
OpenSSL Project, OpenSSL
OpenVision Technologies, Kerberos Administration System
Open Software Foundation, Mach
Percival, bspatch, bsdiff
Pixar, et al., tif_pixarfilm.c
Porten, et al., kjs
Randers-Pehrson, et al., png
RSS Data Security, MD4.H
Schlumberger, PKCS-11
Seward, bzip2
Solfrank, et al., msdosfs
Spencer, regular expressions
Steinberg, curl
Tsirigotis, xinetd
Ts'o, libuuid
Unicode, ConvertUTF
UC, Sun, Scriptics, Tcl
University of Cambridge, PCRE
UCAR, Unidata, wordexp(), wordfree()
van den Berg, procmail
Vaillard, libxml2, libxslt
Venema, TCP Wrappers
Vixie, cron
Wall, Perl Kit
Winning Strategies, asa
WWW Consortium, tidylib
Zimmerman, et al., kcanvas, kdom, ksvg2

Posted by Tom Yager on April 22, 2007 02:44 PM

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