Watching hbo with hulu on mac mac os#

As I said, when the iPhone came out a few months later, I forgot about hacking the Apple TV altogether. Maybe my risk tolerance is too low, but they seemed too much of a hassle, too likely to have something go wrong, and of too little practical benefit to be worth the bother. I eventually passed on trying any of them. They figured out a way to boot the Apple TV from an external USB drive, eliminating the need to crack open the box in order to hack the device.Īt the time, I took a look at this and other hacks.

Probably the most widely-reported hacks came from AwkwardTV. Indeed, within days of Apple TV's March 2007 release, Web sites were already reporting successful use of the device's USB port. Similarly, the odds that everyone will listen to Apple's admonition, and leave the USB port untouched, are approximately zero. Chances are very good that the cookie will be gone when you return.

Apple tech support may get to play with it, but it's off-limits for you.Ĭome on! This is like putting a favorite cookie in front of a toddler, saying not to touch it and then leaving the room. Apple's official position is that you should ignore the port. What is perhaps the most tantalizing and yet frustrating feature of Apple TV is its USB port. Essentially, many users would prefer their Apple TV to be a scaled-down Mac mini with special media features, rather than what it is.

Watching hbo with hulu on mac mac os#

What I'd almost forgotten is that the Apple TV, from its very beginning, has been subject to the same sorts of complaints: You can't do a standard boot from an Apple TV (even though it's running Mac OS X), you can't copy files to or from an Apple TV (except via iTunes), and you can't access the Internet from an Apple TV (except for the Apple-approved locations) - again unless you do some sort of hack. More specifically, one of my chronic complaints about the iPhone is how Apple keeps it so closed that you can't access its operating system files or even mount the iPhone as an external drive on your Mac - without jailbreaking the iPhone. With all of the attention I've given to the iPhone in recent months, I'd almost forgotten about Apple TV.