Under the Hood: Apple for the living room

Having conquered the market for portable media players, Apple marches on toward the living room. Apple's computers remain a distant second in market share to the Windows-powered PC (though they've shown some recent strength), but the iPod has won its product category hands down. Now Apple, having stripped "Computer" out of its name, is targeting wireless distribution to the home via the Apple TV (A-TV). The goal is to move digital media from the "lean forward" world of the computer to the "lean back" environment of the home television. The irony is that the Apple uses a pared-down computer to get there.

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Characteristically, Apple's setup instructions for the A-TV are dead simple: "Download, synch, watch." I haven't yet tried the A-TV, but other experience with the company's goods would suggest that the startup process is as relatively pain-free as promised.

The box itself measures a modest 197 mm x 197 mm x 28 mm, so no major real estate will get consumed in anyone's home theater setup. An I/O panel on the back of the unit sprouts connectors for Ethernet, a hobbled USB interface, a High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), component video, RCA-jack audio and optical audio, while the front panel has only a small window for the infrared remote control. The A-TV adheres to the industrial design aesthetic evident in such other Apple products as Airport Extreme and the Mac Mini.

The platform uses 802.11g or 802.11n wireless to handle the transfer of movie files from the iTunes environment. Of course, it requires that the host computer with iTunes have the same wireless support, though 10/100-Mbit/second Ethernet is available as a wired alternative for connectivity. It's worth noting that the iTunes requirement here does not necessarily mean an Apple computer must be used, since iTunes works with both the Mac and Windows OS.

Unlike some other Apple products, the A-TV was easy enough to open, with corner Torx-head screws tucked underneath the adhesively attached rubber anti-skid bottom surface.

A 40-Gbyte 2.5-inch hard drive is bolted to the floor panel of the A-TV, serving as the mass storage for holding local copies of iTunes content. A Fujitsu MHW2040AT was used in the unit analyzed here, but multisourcing would leave other vendor options available to Apple given the seemingly generic nature of the drive. Indeed, outside of Apple, clever entrepreneurial types have already started offering disk swaps to increase storage capacity, further supporting the notion of a standard hard drive interface.

The electronics in the A-TV consist of a single "motherboard," an 802.11a/ b/ g/n plug-in daughtercard and a power supply brick assembly to convert the 120-Vac input to a 5-Vdc (7.2-amp) supply rail. The use of the term motherboard is fitting here because, in many respects, the A-TV is really a connected PC. Despite the A-TV's focus on a media adapter function, the component set is really a scaled-down computer, with a CPU, graphics adapter, I/O controller, memory hub and ports for Ethernet, Wi-Fi and USB.

Intel inside
As for the suppliers of those key "hidden PC" functions, the CPU comes from Intel, in a move consistent with Apple's recent migration to that company's processor elsewhere in its computer lineup. Given the A-TV's use of an OSX operating system derivative, the CPU selection here is of little surprise. While the part number etched on the Intel die (7645A966) does not provide a lead to a specific Intel part number, others have concluded that the component is Intel's Crofton variant of the Pentium-M family, running at 1 GHz. Dedicated hackers (you folks are amazing!) have already devised ways to boot a full-blown OSX and run the A-TV as an ordinary Apple computer, albeit with modest horsepower.

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