The AppleTV has only been out for a few days, and already it’s been hacked backwards and forwards. Is this a bad thing? Not at all! Apple so far has been quiet on the modifications that enterprising geeks have made to the equipment, making it everything from a desktop wifi enabled computer to upgrading the hard drive that’s built in, and people who were taking them apart started finding interesting things under the hood, like hardware that could support full HD video in the future should Apple release a firmware update for it, a pretty fast processor, and more.

The major gripe people have had with the AppleTV up to this point is “limited functionality,” meaning Apple traded ease of use for features that some people would have wanted. Well, since Apple didn’t do much to stop the hardware from being able to perform at its best, people have already started engineering hacks and add-ons to the AppleTV that extends the functionality to levels that even Apple may not have intended when the product was released. The OS is easy to upgrade (it’s actually a version of OS 10.4.7), the hard drive is easy to upgrade and clone, and the AppleTV is surprisingly easy to open.

With the ease that tinkerers can get into their AppleTV and upgrade it to be a beefier machine than they may have initally paid for, and the ease of use Apple provides out of the box with the AppleTV with no modifications whatsoever, Apple may seriously have a winner on its hands with another device that’s a lot like iTunes and the iPod – easy to use and very functional at the basic level, and the more you want to dive into it and do with it, the more you can do with just a little extra knowhow. Clearly the AppleTV is everything but limited, and has a pretty long and bright future ahead of it as a device.

[ MacWorld :: Hacking AppleTV ]