When Apple went from the ginormous original Apple TV to the minuscule black plastic box that is the second model, a lot of owners of the first-generation unit were suddenly asking themselves what to do with the aluminum and plastic slab. While we've seen the original Apple TV transformed into a regular clock, designers at Atelier Kurth had a better idea: using Nixie tubes to create a "proto-digital clock."
Nixie tubes were the vacuum tube equivalent of today's segmented LED displays. They were used in many early electronic devices, including calculators, to display numbers. Nixies give any electronic a certain Cold War
