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The inclusion of an A4 chip and iOS in the new AppleTV made a jailbreak only a matter of time, but even we’re surprised by the Dev Team’s lightning-speed alacrity in cracking open Apple’s latest set-top box within mere hours of its delivery.
Just fives hours ago, Dev Team member MuscleNerd reported on his Twitter feed that he’d successfully jailbroken the second-generation AppleTV through the existing SHAtter exploit.
Currently, there’s not much to show for the jailbreak, since MuscleNerd hasn’t yet figured out how to run apps on the AppleTV, but with 8GB of internal storage in every AppleTV, we’re sure they are coming. What form will they take, though? 1080p output? Custom codec or external hard drive support? Content channels like Hulu Plus? Emulators for console systems like the SNES?
The second-generation AppleTV may well be feature-poor compared to similarly priced alternatives like Roku’s box, but jailbreaking really makes the possibilities of the new AppleTV pretty much limited only to the imagination of the hacking community… and hopefully, in time, to the imagination of the App Developer ecosystem at large.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
