Full Mac OS X on the Apple TV

Last week we saw a number of Apple TV hacks come to be, and the little box was made to do a lot more than it could out of the box. Despite the various successes, hackers did not rest on their laurels and kept working over the weekend, to bring the big one.

Sunday, semthex from Hackint0sh.org, in collaboration with AppleTVHacks.net posted the ultimate Apple TV hack, the fully functional OS X. More than just the specific hacks we’ve seen so far, and relatively easy, this effectively turns the Apple TV into the cheapest Mac ever.

Getting a fully functional version of OS X into your Apple TV is relatively easy. After removing the hard drive from the Apple TV, connect it (or a larger compatible hard drive) to a regular Mac and install the Inter version of OS X onto it. Customize the new install pruning anything unnecessary and update it to at least version 10.4.8. The next step is replacing the mach_kernel with a customized version in order to sidestep the hardware restrictions that previously disallowed Mac OS X from running on the Apple TV. Then copy the EFI boot file from the original Apple TV and bless it. Last but not least, remove any and all Nvidia kernel extensions as they cause conflicts.

With a full version of OS X inside, the Apple TV becomes the cheapest Mac ever. With a 1GHz processor and 256 MB of RAM, it is not exactly fast and won’t really be up to any resource intensive tasks, but it will get most everyday jobs done.
While the Apple TV is much cheaper than the Mac mini, it is doubtful that it will ever really be seen as a low-end Mac outside modding circles. Once its novelty wears off, you’ll realize that while it costs less than a mini, you also get less than you would with a mini in many ways.

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