AppleTV upgrade

I was an early Apple user. I learned the basics of programming on and Apple ][ and bought a Machintosh 128 the day it came out in 1984.  Hell, I even had a Lisa. Over the years, Apple has had some ups and downs but always seemed to get back on track, better than ever. When Jobs left they certainly made some interesting decisions. The Clone Wars were a mess, OS 7 and 9 were stable but they didn't really do anything special. When Steve came back into the fold, he adopted an ever forward attitude, focused on innovation and even removed the "museum" of previous Macintosh models from the Cupertino campus. He took back control of the hardware manufacturing and the new operating system promised to bring more power to the user. Apple has since introduced many very successful new computers the ubiquitous iPod, tons of great software and many other wonderful innovations. Since the emergence of the new Apple, I have purchased several computers, phones, ipods, an AppleTV, gone to WWDC twice and even spoken at Apple events on podcasting and workflow. Life has been good.

Over the past few weeks though, Apple has hit a some rough spots. The Mobile Me debacle, the iPhone 3g activation issues, curious activity on the iTunes App store... and a few other bumps in the road have brought the naysayers and critics out in droves.  It's been very un-Apple like. My very first clue that something was amiss at Apple this time was when the first AppleTV was introduced. It seemed very cool and the idea of having iTunes as a source of video content was damn near thrilling. On the music front, iTunes had revolutionized an even revitalized the music world. Surely a revolution in home video was on the horizon. Not so much. I have had a 40GB Apple TV for a little over a year now and I was annoyed almost out of the gate over the interface and drive size. I felt like it had been rushed to market. The iTunes video library was barren, the interface was difficult to navigate and it just seemed silly to produce a device designed for video with such anemic storage capacity. Over time the iTunes store added more movies and TV shows, the new OS (Take 2) has YouTube, local streaming, Flickr and .mac gallery capability and the interface is much MUCH better. The drive size still bugged the crap out of me. Today, I finally did something about it. There have been some AppleTV drive upgrade hacks out there for a while and they all sorta work. My buddy, superbiff and I decided to try it with a shiny new 250 GB drive. We started with the most common approach found at endgadget but that was a wash. We also went down the path shown at appletvhacks, but that too failed. It seems these were older hacks that didn't fly with AppleTV 2.0 or later. We looked around and found this step by step guide for Take 2. It worked like a champ.

Before superbiff got here, I had started the process of opening up the unit and pulling the drive out. That was pretty uneventful apart from the small tear I made in the rubber base.  
Next came the creation of a drive image. That was easy enough using the dd unix command. Finally, creation of the partitions on the new drive and copying the image over to it. We installed it and my drive capacity is now a wonderful 228 GB.

So, I'm sure Apple will get over this current hump and restore credibility thier once proud, unofficial slogan of "It just works". Even in this little exercise I could not help but notice how beautifully designed the interior components of the AppleTV were. It was so easy to open it up, work on and reassemble without doing any damage to the case or the internal components. The only tools I needed were a #8 and a #10 torx drive. As we worked on the upgrade, I was googling with with my MacBook to find tips to assist with the upgrade, texting my wife on my iPhone as she visited her grandmother in the hospital. When all was said and done, we hooked up the Apple TV and watched a bunch of LEGO Mindstorm videos on YouTube while it started syncing up to my iTunes Library. At the end of the day, these recent bumps in the road have been pretty insignificant in the big picture. As for my newly expanded AppleTV, it just works.