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Apple TV

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Anthony Fiti
Kurtis
Apple
Apr. 2, 2007

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First Looks

The Apple TV device comes in a somewhat big black box. Given Apple's recent talk about reducing packaging to save the environment, this seems like its going back in the opposite direction.

Once you slide the box out of the sleeve, you get the "Designed by Apple in California" tagline and you can open it and see your Apple TV and the remote. The Apple TV is a lot heavier than I expected, though it really shouldn't be surprising since there is a full fledged computer in there - from the CPU, memory, graphics chip, hard drive, its all there.

You get the Apple TV, a remote and a power cord. You'll notice it's a normal two-pronged power cable, and that means that the power supply to convert the AC power from the wall to DC power for the PC to use is located inside the unit, which also accounts for some of the heft.

There is also an instruction manual and some other disclaimers and legal stuff included with the documentation.

The rear of the unit has the power input plug, the USB port for "diagnostic purposes only", Ethernet, HDMI, component, audio (RCA) and TOSlink (optical). The front of the unit has a small IR receiver and an LED that is white when it is operational and flickers when you push buttons on the remote.

The bottom of the Apple TV is rubber, and you can peel it off to reveal the panel to start unscrewing things if you're planning on tinkering with it.

Inside the unit, it is essentially a computer running OSX. There is a Pentium-M based CPU running 1Ghz, a GeForce 7300 chip (possibly used for H.264 decoding assistance), 256MB of RAM and 64MB of video memory. The hard drive is a 40GB 2.5" 4200RPM. All of the components are soldered to the motherboard, so no dice on trying to replace the CPU with a faster one.

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Page 2 of 7

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Setup
Page 4: Initial Experience and Struggling with Streaming
Page 5: Testing
Page 6: What's Lacking
Page 7: Conclusion

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by Kurtis on April 1, 2007 - 11:46 pm

Digg please:
http://digg.com/apple/Apple_TV_Full_Review_at_TheT...

2 - Posted by on December 31, 1969 - 6:00 pm

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