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Comment by GeneralMaximus | Hacker News Reader

  The device connected to my tv should be as open 
  and capable as a computer, yet still fit the form 
  factor.

Beautiful, incredibly easy to use, tightly integrated with your Mac, but not open. Nothing Apple makes these days is open. OS X was the last product they made that was sort of open.

(And I say this as a die-hard Mac user.)

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Sigh, I know. I wish AppleTV was a purely open platform. Let me throw apps on it, access websites I want, skin it, etc. The Mac Mini is the "real" appletv, except the interface doesn't work so well for a tv. Essentially here's what I want:

Put the mac mini, appletv, and time capsule in a blender. Appletv 10 foot interface, mac mini open-ness/computing ability, and time capsule size storage (TBs, not GBs).

Would a Mac mini and Boxee (http://www.boxee.tv/) work? It seems to match what you want (except for the storage space).

I had an older macbook hooked up to my tv, but it was lacking the stuff I mentioned and then some above.

I've been working on a hardware/software startup that does exactly this. It's running a pretty specific hardware combo with customized linux distro that works for the big screen for the price of a mac mini (with 6x the storage). It's heavenly.

http://webkit.org/

By "open", I didn't mean "open source". If you're talking about open source, then almost everything on OS X that does not have a GUI is open source, including the kernel itself. (Also, WebKit came from KHTML. Apple couldn't possibly have made WebKit a proprietary product without getting into legal trouble, but this is besides the point.)

By "open", I meant a hacker-friendly platform. The iPhone is not hacker friendly, and the iPod is a brick for those of us who use Linux/BSD.

For Apple, open source is merely a good software development methodology that has worked well for quite a while now. They don't give a rat's ass about the philosophy behind it.

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