It’s selling for just $99, and you know Apple’s making a profit, but exactly how much does it cost to make every second generation AppleTV? Just $64, according to market research firm iSuppli.

It only took hours for the iPhone Dev Team to successfully jailbreak the newest AppleTV through the SHAtter exploit once it slid through their front mail slot, which should at the very least open the door to hacks like native 1080p playback and which might — fingers crossed — allow the new AppleTV to run apps.
But how hard is it going to be to install and execute user apps on the new AppleTV once the jailbreak has been officially released?

iPhone hacker Steven Troughton-Smith has done some homework and there’s good news and bad news. On the one hand, he has confirmed that you can actually install applications to the AppleTV already. The bad news? There’s no way to launch them once they’re on the device.

Hot on the heels of the new Apple TV , Google is launching its own set-top box next week.

Made by Logitech, the Android-based will be unveiled next Wednesday October 6 at press events in San Francisco and New York (see the invite below).

Like Apple’s device, the Google TV is black, although it’s quite a bit larger than Apple’s diminutive box (see David’s photos comparing it to the old Apple TV). The Google TV will run on a 1.2-GHz Atom processor with 4 GB memory, 802.11n Wi-Fi, two HDMI-out ports, Dolby 5.1 surround sound and a pair of USB ports. It will also offer video-chat at 720p if you connect a webcam.

It promises an innovative search-based interface. Search for what you want, and it displays content from the Web, cable, satellite and compatible DVRs. Here’s a trailer showing how it works:

One rather mystifying omission from the new AppleTV’s feature set is the fact that it does not seemingly have the ability to play 1080p video. That’s a crock: hardwarewise, the new AppleTV is more than capable of 1080p, because the iPhone 3GS was capable of it, and it didn’t even have an A4 CPU to draw upon. The second-gen ATV should be more than up for the task if that lesser platform could manage it.

And, as it turns out, it is.

If, for whatever reason, your brand new iOS-driven AppleTV gets thoroughly corrupted, rest assured you won’t need to take it to your local Apple store: you’ll be able to restore iOS to your AppleTV yourself just by hooking it up to iTunes like any iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

It’s a little different, of course: the AppleTV doesn’t have an iPod Dock Connector, so you’ll use a standard mini USB cable. You also need to make sure that neither the power nor HDMI cables are connected, or the AppleTV won’t show up in iTunes.

Apple appears to face an up-hill battle convincing studios of the wisdom of the Cupertino, Calif. company’s plans to rent tv episodes for 99 cents. Time Warner’s CEO became the latest to speak out against the proposal, saying it ‘jeopardizes’ sales by the networks.

“How can you justify renting your first-run TV shows individually for 99 cents and episode and thereby jeopardizing the sale of the same shows as a series to branded networks that pay hundreds of millions of dollars and make those shows available to loyal viewers for free,” Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said during the London-based Royal Television Conference.

An iFixit teardown of Apple’s brand new AppleTV has revealed some interesting details about the new device’s insides, most notably the inclusion of onboard storage and its internal similarities to the iPad.

Despite a focus on streaming content, rather than storing it, the tiny new device includes a Samsung 8GB NAND flash chip, something Apple has chosen not to publicly disclose. Interestingly, right along side this NAND chip is an empty slot that could possibly accommodate another chip if more storage was necessary.

The new AppleTV also features 256MB RAM, which is the same as the iPad and the iPod Touch, but less than the iPhone 4 which packs 512MB. Another similarity to the iPad is that AppleTV runs the new A4 chip and Broadcom Wi-Fi chip.

The discovery of this onboard storage in the new AppleTV gives more hope to users wishing to jailbreak their device to run apps, games, and other content. It also means that we’d have somewhere to store our downloads from that AppleTV App Store that MacRumors recently reported about.

As the AppleTV slides through mail slots throughout the country, enterprising hackers are already hard at work plumbing the secrets of the firmware. They’ve already confirmed that the new AppleTV runs on iOS, and even spotted secret reference to two previously unseen iPhone models, and now we have two more tidbits to ponder.

The first is reference within the AppleTV’s IPSW to the future possibility of Facetime support.

We start off another day of dealing with something new in the spotlight: refurbished iPads. The Apple Store is offering refurbed 16GB, 32GB and 64GB Wi-Fi iPads for $449, $549 and $649, respectively. Apple is also offering a deal on the 160GB Apple TV for $129 – a $60 drop. Finally, there is another chance to get a 2-year iPhone warranty from the folks at SquareTrade. The $89 extended warranty covers spills and drops.

Along the way, we’ll also check out more software and hardware deals for your favorite Apple product. As always, details on these and many more bargains can be found on CoM’s “Daily Deals” page after the jump.

When Steve Jobs first unveiled the new AppleTV on September 1st, he promised the new streaming-only AppleTV would ship in the next four weeks.

It looks like Apple’s going to make its deadline: we’re now hearing reports from our readers and from other sites that people who have preordered the new AppleTV are starting to have their credit cards charged.

Apple usually only starts pushing through credit charges on preorders when they are actually ready to ship out hardware, so it seems pretty obvious that the AppleTV is about to start dropping onto people’s porches fairly imminently.

Any other readers getting payment notification for their preorders… or, even better, shipping confirmation? Let us know in the comments.