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Apple TV stripdown reveals mystery solder pads

Future iPad innards?

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Photos Apple's new second-generation Apple TV is easy to take apart, easy to repair, and its guts may be poised for significant upgrades – or even double duty.

Apple TV

Apple TV: small, black, plastic, and containing the soul of an iPad

So discovered the repair-heads at the tools, parts, and tips website iFixit when they disassembled the pint-sized home-entertainment streamer.

Once inside, iFixit made the rumor-inducing discovery of a solder pad on one side of the logic board that, in iFixit's exuberant words, "look to be a *perfect* match for a dock connector!"

Apple TV, cover removed

"After some careful prying", a pink thermal-conduction pad is revealed — odd for an all-plastic case

One might posit that the Apple TV may someday include a port for Apple's standard 30-pin dock connector as is used on the iPhone/Pod/Pad. This might let you connect to USB-equipped computing devices and view content on a television connected to the Apple TV through its HDMI port.

Apple TV, ready for dock connector

The matchup between Apple standard dock connecter and the Apple TV solder pads is "*perfect*"

But allowing that capability would weaken the Apple TV's money-making capability by circumventing streaming from Apple's movie and video service — and as we've repeatedly said, Apple has never met a revenue stream it didn't like.

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Next page: A different idea

There already is a smaller iPad.

It's called the "iPod Touch".

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Testing

maybe Apple needed a test connector during development & proving? what more obvious than one they have as standard?

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Tech Colors

Shurely that should be ARGB, for the sake of transparency?

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