How-to: Upgrade the drive in your Apple TV
While millions thousands of people were enjoying their Apple TVs last night, we decided to take ours apart for some pictures and to upgrade the drive. Seriously, 40 GB is smaller than our iPod and we don't like to have to pick and choose what to sync.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple released Apple TV on March 22, and had already added QuickTime export support for 720p Apple TV video. Engadget’s teardown-and-upgrade guide immediately tests whether the product’s 40GB capacity fits a library-based video workflow.
The upgrade’s pickup by MAKE Magazine and Gizmodo shows that storage was a visible early limitation, not merely a niche repair concern. Apple TV’s launch also arrived while attention was divided by the iPhone and Mac OS X Leopard. Earlier scrutiny of Apple’s product appearances provides the closest corpus context for why a hands-on teardown drew interest.
First-order effects
- Apple TV owners willing to void their warranties can expand local storage beyond the bundled 40GB drive, reducing how often they must choose which media to sync.
- Apple faces an immediate mismatch between Apple TV’s video-export capability and the capacity available for keeping larger high-definition libraries on the device.
Second-order effects
- Third-party storage and how-to publishers gain a practical role in extending Apple TV’s usefulness, while Apple retains no control over the warranty risk assumed by upgraders.
- The workaround makes drive capacity a more conspicuous purchase criterion for Apple TV buyers, pressuring Apple to address the gap through future hardware configurations or software that reduces local-storage demands.
Third-order effects
- If owners routinely modify a newly launched media appliance to make its core library model workable, consumer electronics value shifts toward configurable hardware and the communities that document those changes.
- Apple’s connected-device strategy will face a recurring design trade-off between tightly managed appliances and enough local capacity for users’ growing media collections.
The trend: The Apple TV launch illustrates the early convergence of living-room hardware and personal media libraries, with storage capacity determining how frictionless that convergence feels.