Tearing apart an old Apple TV just for the heck of it – Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

My “love” for the original Apple TV is well-documented. I purchased a 40 GB model not long after the device hit the market, and found it not to my liking. I hated how I had to slowly sync everything to the device, it had little space to begin with (yeah, I know I should have just swapped out the HD for a bigger model), it ran hot, and the UI was never up to Apple standards in my humble opinion.

So, with a new Apple TV on order for arrival later this month, I decided to take a look at the innards of the old device while also trying to recover a bunch of media that I had stored on the ATA drive in the old Apple TV. My idea was that I’d pop the unit open, take some pictures for posterity, disconnect the old drive, hook it up to my iMac with a cable that I use for recovering data from older machines, and then create a disk image of the content I had stored on this Apple TV. Follow along as I take this little geek journey — you might want to do this with your old Apple TV as well.

Gallery: The old Apple TV teardown