Is Apple TV a Mac?

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