Okay, say if we wanted to build our own Apple TV using PC components and the Apple OS (now that we have it out now), what parts would come closest to it? I would love to have a SATA 3.5" drive and have it in a cube-shaped form factor.

Any ideas of a shopping list of parts?

its gona be pricier, but if you just wanna have 3.5 hds and i dont know why a bigger box, you can start by buying the apple tv
it wil give you the best motherboard to work with and you can attach there a bigger 3.5 hd using an adapter..

going the other way will cost something near 300 dollars..

Thanks but I would like to reinvent the wheel for the challenge honestly. I was wondering which PC config comes closer to the ATV specs?

Then you go ahead and do that. Outside of Apple motherboards, no motherboard for PC's today has EFI that has been used successfully to do something with Mac OS.

Any other ideas? I'm looking for parts recommendations.

Well, not much is known about this right now, since its not -quite- up and running on the average hackintosh. A little patience may pay off for you so that you don't buy hardware that won't quite work.

If you are still die hard about it, look to see what is working for Intel boards (actual Intel brand boards) as far as audio sata etc for hackintosh 10.4.9. This is no guarantee that it will -work- with the aTV OS however. Let alone the fact that then you will need to go and get a video card that will work as well and try to get NATIT or Titan running.

If it were me, I would get a good solid core duo or core 2 duo setup...all working with 10.4.9. Then try to do the mods that some others have done in order to run this on their macbooks, imacs, whatever the case may be. That way you could still potentially run it as a regular old computer should you want to even making it so that the aTV 'finder' app runs as a different user That may not be the answer you are looking for...but either way good luck.

joneSi

edit: just reading that progress is being made in the hackintosh department, but not as much as 'real' macs. It will be only a matter of days.

so you'd recommend a core duo or c2d to reproduce something apple has done with a 1Ghz Pentium M?

i'd say the cheapest Celeron D (which handily has SSE3, so no messing about) would be adequate.

my current HTPC setup has a Celeron D 3ghz, and its going to have AppleTV OS on it as soon as I can get EyeTV.frapplication and DVDPlayer.frapplication downloaded. (NB: Before anyone gets all excited - these DO NOT EXIST as yet!)