Hey guys, it’s Greg with Apple Explained,and today we’re going to explore the history of the Apple TV.
This topic was the third place winner of lastweeks voting poll and if you didn’t get to vote, make sure you’re subscribed, thatway the voting polls will show up right in your activity feed and you can let me knowwhich video you’d like to see next.
So in this video I want to cover Apples settop box but also include additional elements of Apple’s involvement in the televisionmarket.
Because Apple has and continues to experimentin this industry despite never having released a traditional television set.
So, I’ll start off by briefly mentioningthe Macintosh TV.
This was a short-lived attempt in 1993 tointegrate TV and computers in a way that was pretty ahead of its time.
It was essentially a personal computer thatcould be switched between computing functions to a cable television display.
Users could watch TV in a desktop window,and it came with a small remote that controlled the TV functions from afar.
While it was a pretty novel idea, the MacintoshTV cost over $2,000, almost $3,500 today adjusting for inflation, and only about 10,000 modelswere ever produced.
It was discontinued the following year in1994 and Apple wouldn’t attempt to integrate TV and computing in quite the same way foranother twelve years.
Now, the Apple TV that we’re all familiarwith today was officially introduced in 2006 by Steve Jobs.
It was initially referred to as “iTV”,which used Apple’s traditional ‘i’ moniker, and was going to be Apple’s first big forayinto the home entertainment market.
But things got off to a rocky start, becausebefore the product was even launched, Apple was faced with some legal trouble.
The name iTV was already copyrighted by aBritish broadcasting network who refused to give it up.
They threatened legal action against the techcompany and Apple changed the name before its 2007 release.
This came as a surprise to many, consideringApples tendency to fiercely defend logos, names, and trademarks, but Apple yielded withoutputting up a fight and Apple TV began shipping to customers on March 21, 2007.
The very first generation of Apple TV wasn’treally anything ground breaking.
The device was a small, HDMI equipped settop box that you could connect to your TV and play video, music, podcasts, or displayphotos from your computer.
It ran Apple TV Software 1.0, featured a PentiumM 1 GHz core processor, and came with a 40 GB hard drive.
It displayed Apples FrontRow interface, borrowedfrom Mac OS X, which allowed users to change settings, select media, and change input sources.
But in order to load content onto the AppleTV, you had to use a computer with iTunes to transfer your files, and it could onlybe controlled using the Apple Remote.
Basically, any computer in your householdcould be hooked up to the device, run through the FrontRow interface, and used to watchvideos or play audio from a TV.
Luckily, a software update wasn’t far behindwhich allowed the Apple TV to be used as a stand-alone device.
Updates also did away with FrontRow and replacedit with a more user-friendly interface.
The 2.0 release in 2008 introduced an optionfor streaming YouTube videos, and the 3.0 update in 2009 gave a general “internet”option to connect to a browser.
This final first-gen update also includednew features, like iTunes extras, internet radio, and customization tools like contentfilters and font selections.
Apple also offered an “Apple Remote” appfor iPhone so that users could control the Apple TV from their phone, without the needfor an extra remote.
Now, this first-generation release was a littlebit clunky and not all that popular.
Video streaming wasn’t a big market yet,so Apple TV wasn’t in very high demand at the time.
And this seemed like a strange deviation fromApples traditional product strategy, since they were known for taking popular concepts,simplifying them, and releasing them in a user-friendly package.
It was an early-adopter kind of device, andits price of $299 really didn’t justify its functionality to most users outside ofhobbyists.
In fact, Jobs himself described Apple TV asa “hobby” a number of times – even as Apple was trying to figure out how to carvea niche in the television market.
In the following few years, the legacy TVindustry preemptively punched back at products like Apple TV and other set-top devices likeRoku and TiVo, by providing set-top boxes for customers for free or subsidized withtheir contracts.
And that meant the market for Apple TV goteven smaller.
Nonetheless, things started to look up a littlebit for Apple TV by its second-generation release.
This updated model came out in September 2010and stayed around for two years.
It featured a sharp new design that was smaller,shinier and black rather than silver. It also had flash drive storage and upgradedWiFi capabilities.
But the most important change to the secondgen Apple TV was its price.
Apple slashed the cost from $299 to just $99,and that alone made the Apple TV a much more attractive option for potential customers.
Another major change for this release wasthe operating system – Apple TV no longer ran a version of OS X, but rather a versionof iOS.
And perhaps the biggest change had littleto do with the Apple TV itself – because streaming video services had now become popular.
Netflix’s online streaming service had justblown up in popularity, and the second-generation Apple TV allowed users to play video not onlyfrom iTunes, but from the Netflix streaming service as well.
Subsequent updates integrated even more outsidestreaming and viewing options, including Vimeo, Flickr, and MLB TV.
Next came the third generation in March of2012. This release wasn’t dramatically differentfrom the second generation – it still featured an 8 GB flash drive, HDMI and USB ports, andan Apple A5 processor.
But it improved on its predecessor’s WiFicapability and video streaming quality, this time bumping up to 1080p.
Its size, weight, design, and price remainedthe same for the next three years. But in March 2015, the Apple TVs price droppedto just $69 – which may have been a response to the low price of other set top boxes onthe market.
Although the second and third generation AppleTVs were a vast improvement on the first generation, they were still little more than “hobbies”.
They were locked down with a set of apps thatcouldn’t be changed, and while Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and Amazon Video covered quitea bit of the market, there was no reason for most people to buy a device they couldn’treally customize.
Also, competitors like Roku and Google hadfar more reliable, affordable, and customizable devices that were taking over the market.
In 2014, a survey showed that Apple TV hadonly taken 17% of the set top box market share – losing out big time to Google’s Chromecast.
But Apple wasn’t giving up.
On October 30th, 2015, the company releasedthe fourth generation Apple TV.
This one came with its own dedicated operatingsystem, called tvOS.
And although tvOS wasn’t supported on earliergenerations of Apple TV, the new release was worth the upgrade for most.
It featured a 1.5 GHz dual core Apple A8 processor,Bluetooth 4.0 support, HDMI 1.4, and 32 or 64 GB of flash storage, compared to 8 GB inthe previous models.
And although it was a little bit taller, thefourth gen Apple TV maintained the sleek and attractive design of the second and thirdgeneration.
This model also introduced voice recognitionwith Siri and a new remote that included a touchpad for easier navigation and was ableto control the actual television set, as well as the Apple TV itself.
But the biggest addition to the fourth generationmodel was the App Store.
And this meant the Apple TV was now a gamingconsole. Apple was never very competitive in the gamingworld, with PC and other console manufacturers taking the lions share of the gaming marketfor decades.
But with the rise of casual and mobile gaming and the ever-increasing popularityof the App Store, Apple TV offered a new and exciting opportunity to expand the marketfor Apple gaming.
The introduction of tvOS, as well as a newsoftware development kit, allowed third-party developers to design and release apps andgames specifically for the platform.
But the fourth generation Apple TV came witha few drawbacks.
Its limited storage space proved to be a challengefor game developers who, due to a feature called “App Thinning”, had to limit appsizes and download content in segments, instead of all at once.
In addition to trouble with data loss in apps,the price of this generation shot up for the first time, from $69 to $149 for 32 GB.
Now, around this time in 2016, Apple alsoreleased something called the TV App. This app was designed for tvOS, but also ranon iOS devices like the iPhone.
It offered a replacement for some of the previousinterfaces Apple TV offered and came pre-installed with tvOS 10.1 and later.
It offered a way for users to not only accesstheir own media library, but streaming content from apps and the App Store as well.
It was another important feature to fullyintegrate apps into the Apple TV system.
At this point, Apple no longer released salesfigures for the Apple TV, and many speculated that it wasn’t doing too well.
But despite sales numbers, another generationwas released in September 2017.
The fifth generation, or Apple TV 4K as itwas named, featured even better hardware than before, including a 2.38 GHz hexa-core AppleA10X Fusion processor, a 13-watt power supply, and a brand new update for tvOS.
It was the same size and weight as the fourthgeneration, but did away with the USB-C port, leaving only an HDMI input and output.
Although its price rose once again from $149to $179 for 32 GB and $199 for 64 GB, this model also featured 4K video support, HDR10,Gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth 5.0, support for Dolby Vision, and automatic 4K video scaling.
Now there was quite a bit of controversy surroundingthe Apple TV remote included with the fourth and fifth generation models.
It featured much more advanced technologythan the previous remote making it much more expensive to replace if it was ever lost orbroken.
Replacing the remote costs $59, which is threetimes more than the previous $19 Apple remote included with earlier generations of AppleTVs.
And the new remote has turned out to be muchless durable since the glass trackpad is prone to cracking when dropped.
But Apple is known for sacrificing affordabilityand durability for great design and user experience.
So the Apple TV may never take control ofthe market or become an iconic Apple product.
But there is some speculation about whetheror not Apple will ever step up and tackle the problem of the actual TV set.
In his official biography, Steve Jobs spokeabout revolutionizing the television, changing it the way Apple has changed phones, tablets,and desktop computers.
He said that he wanted to create a TV thatintegrated with all a user’s devices – free from messy cables and set-top boxes completely.
But Apple has yet to fulfill this vision andmany in the tech industry don’t think it would be possible to achieve anyway.
For now, it seems like Apple will leave actualtelevisions to their manufacturers and stick to innovation in other areas of the market.
So, today, there are three Apple TV modelsavailable.
The Apple TV fourth generation is availableonly in a 32 GB model, and boasts 1080p video streaming, photo viewing, and an app marketplace.
The Apple TV 4K is available in both a 32GB and 64 GB model and features support for 4K, better performance, and support for DolbyAtmos.
So that is the history of the Apple TV, andif you want to vote for the next video topic, don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you nexttime.
This topic was the third place winner of lastweeks voting poll and if you didn’t get to vote, make sure you’re subscribed, thatway the voting polls will show up right in your activity feed and you can let me knowwhich video you’d like to see next.
So in this video I want to cover Apples settop box but also include additional elements of Apple’s involvement in the televisionmarket.
Because Apple has and continues to experimentin this industry despite never having released a traditional television set.
So, I’ll start off by briefly mentioningthe Macintosh TV.
This was a short-lived attempt in 1993 tointegrate TV and computers in a way that was pretty ahead of its time.
It was essentially a personal computer thatcould be switched between computing functions to a cable television display.
Users could watch TV in a desktop window,and it came with a small remote that controlled the TV functions from afar.
While it was a pretty novel idea, the MacintoshTV cost over $2,000, almost $3,500 today adjusting for inflation, and only about 10,000 modelswere ever produced.
It was discontinued the following year in1994 and Apple wouldn’t attempt to integrate TV and computing in quite the same way foranother twelve years.
Now, the Apple TV that we’re all familiarwith today was officially introduced in 2006 by Steve Jobs.
It was initially referred to as “iTV”,which used Apple’s traditional ‘i’ moniker, and was going to be Apple’s first big forayinto the home entertainment market.
But things got off to a rocky start, becausebefore the product was even launched, Apple was faced with some legal trouble.
The name iTV was already copyrighted by aBritish broadcasting network who refused to give it up.
They threatened legal action against the techcompany and Apple changed the name before its 2007 release.
This came as a surprise to many, consideringApples tendency to fiercely defend logos, names, and trademarks, but Apple yielded withoutputting up a fight and Apple TV began shipping to customers on March 21, 2007.
The very first generation of Apple TV wasn’treally anything ground breaking.
The device was a small, HDMI equipped settop box that you could connect to your TV and play video, music, podcasts, or displayphotos from your computer.
It ran Apple TV Software 1.0, featured a PentiumM 1 GHz core processor, and came with a 40 GB hard drive.
It displayed Apples FrontRow interface, borrowedfrom Mac OS X, which allowed users to change settings, select media, and change input sources.
But in order to load content onto the AppleTV, you had to use a computer with iTunes to transfer your files, and it could onlybe controlled using the Apple Remote.
Basically, any computer in your householdcould be hooked up to the device, run through the FrontRow interface, and used to watchvideos or play audio from a TV.
Luckily, a software update wasn’t far behindwhich allowed the Apple TV to be used as a stand-alone device.
Updates also did away with FrontRow and replacedit with a more user-friendly interface.
The 2.0 release in 2008 introduced an optionfor streaming YouTube videos, and the 3.0 update in 2009 gave a general “internet”option to connect to a browser.
This final first-gen update also includednew features, like iTunes extras, internet radio, and customization tools like contentfilters and font selections.
Apple also offered an “Apple Remote” appfor iPhone so that users could control the Apple TV from their phone, without the needfor an extra remote.
Now, this first-generation release was a littlebit clunky and not all that popular.
Video streaming wasn’t a big market yet,so Apple TV wasn’t in very high demand at the time.
And this seemed like a strange deviation fromApples traditional product strategy, since they were known for taking popular concepts,simplifying them, and releasing them in a user-friendly package.
It was an early-adopter kind of device, andits price of $299 really didn’t justify its functionality to most users outside ofhobbyists.
In fact, Jobs himself described Apple TV asa “hobby” a number of times – even as Apple was trying to figure out how to carvea niche in the television market.
In the following few years, the legacy TVindustry preemptively punched back at products like Apple TV and other set-top devices likeRoku and TiVo, by providing set-top boxes for customers for free or subsidized withtheir contracts.
And that meant the market for Apple TV goteven smaller.
Nonetheless, things started to look up a littlebit for Apple TV by its second-generation release.
This updated model came out in September 2010and stayed around for two years.
It featured a sharp new design that was smaller,shinier and black rather than silver. It also had flash drive storage and upgradedWiFi capabilities.
But the most important change to the secondgen Apple TV was its price.
Apple slashed the cost from $299 to just $99,and that alone made the Apple TV a much more attractive option for potential customers.
Another major change for this release wasthe operating system – Apple TV no longer ran a version of OS X, but rather a versionof iOS.
And perhaps the biggest change had littleto do with the Apple TV itself – because streaming video services had now become popular.
Netflix’s online streaming service had justblown up in popularity, and the second-generation Apple TV allowed users to play video not onlyfrom iTunes, but from the Netflix streaming service as well.
Subsequent updates integrated even more outsidestreaming and viewing options, including Vimeo, Flickr, and MLB TV.
Next came the third generation in March of2012. This release wasn’t dramatically differentfrom the second generation – it still featured an 8 GB flash drive, HDMI and USB ports, andan Apple A5 processor.
But it improved on its predecessor’s WiFicapability and video streaming quality, this time bumping up to 1080p.
Its size, weight, design, and price remainedthe same for the next three years. But in March 2015, the Apple TVs price droppedto just $69 – which may have been a response to the low price of other set top boxes onthe market.
Although the second and third generation AppleTVs were a vast improvement on the first generation, they were still little more than “hobbies”.
They were locked down with a set of apps thatcouldn’t be changed, and while Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, and Amazon Video covered quitea bit of the market, there was no reason for most people to buy a device they couldn’treally customize.
Also, competitors like Roku and Google hadfar more reliable, affordable, and customizable devices that were taking over the market.
In 2014, a survey showed that Apple TV hadonly taken 17% of the set top box market share – losing out big time to Google’s Chromecast.
But Apple wasn’t giving up.
On October 30th, 2015, the company releasedthe fourth generation Apple TV.
This one came with its own dedicated operatingsystem, called tvOS.
And although tvOS wasn’t supported on earliergenerations of Apple TV, the new release was worth the upgrade for most.
It featured a 1.5 GHz dual core Apple A8 processor,Bluetooth 4.0 support, HDMI 1.4, and 32 or 64 GB of flash storage, compared to 8 GB inthe previous models.
And although it was a little bit taller, thefourth gen Apple TV maintained the sleek and attractive design of the second and thirdgeneration.
This model also introduced voice recognitionwith Siri and a new remote that included a touchpad for easier navigation and was ableto control the actual television set, as well as the Apple TV itself.
But the biggest addition to the fourth generationmodel was the App Store.
And this meant the Apple TV was now a gamingconsole. Apple was never very competitive in the gamingworld, with PC and other console manufacturers taking the lions share of the gaming marketfor decades.
But with the rise of casual and mobile gaming and the ever-increasing popularityof the App Store, Apple TV offered a new and exciting opportunity to expand the marketfor Apple gaming.
The introduction of tvOS, as well as a newsoftware development kit, allowed third-party developers to design and release apps andgames specifically for the platform.
But the fourth generation Apple TV came witha few drawbacks.
Its limited storage space proved to be a challengefor game developers who, due to a feature called “App Thinning”, had to limit appsizes and download content in segments, instead of all at once.
In addition to trouble with data loss in apps,the price of this generation shot up for the first time, from $69 to $149 for 32 GB.
Now, around this time in 2016, Apple alsoreleased something called the TV App. This app was designed for tvOS, but also ranon iOS devices like the iPhone.
It offered a replacement for some of the previousinterfaces Apple TV offered and came pre-installed with tvOS 10.1 and later.
It offered a way for users to not only accesstheir own media library, but streaming content from apps and the App Store as well.
It was another important feature to fullyintegrate apps into the Apple TV system.
At this point, Apple no longer released salesfigures for the Apple TV, and many speculated that it wasn’t doing too well.
But despite sales numbers, another generationwas released in September 2017.
The fifth generation, or Apple TV 4K as itwas named, featured even better hardware than before, including a 2.38 GHz hexa-core AppleA10X Fusion processor, a 13-watt power supply, and a brand new update for tvOS.
It was the same size and weight as the fourthgeneration, but did away with the USB-C port, leaving only an HDMI input and output.
Although its price rose once again from $149to $179 for 32 GB and $199 for 64 GB, this model also featured 4K video support, HDR10,Gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth 5.0, support for Dolby Vision, and automatic 4K video scaling.
Now there was quite a bit of controversy surroundingthe Apple TV remote included with the fourth and fifth generation models.
It featured much more advanced technologythan the previous remote making it much more expensive to replace if it was ever lost orbroken.
Replacing the remote costs $59, which is threetimes more than the previous $19 Apple remote included with earlier generations of AppleTVs.
And the new remote has turned out to be muchless durable since the glass trackpad is prone to cracking when dropped.
But Apple is known for sacrificing affordabilityand durability for great design and user experience.
So the Apple TV may never take control ofthe market or become an iconic Apple product.
But there is some speculation about whetheror not Apple will ever step up and tackle the problem of the actual TV set.
In his official biography, Steve Jobs spokeabout revolutionizing the television, changing it the way Apple has changed phones, tablets,and desktop computers.
He said that he wanted to create a TV thatintegrated with all a user’s devices – free from messy cables and set-top boxes completely.
But Apple has yet to fulfill this vision andmany in the tech industry don’t think it would be possible to achieve anyway.
For now, it seems like Apple will leave actualtelevisions to their manufacturers and stick to innovation in other areas of the market.
So, today, there are three Apple TV modelsavailable.
The Apple TV fourth generation is availableonly in a 32 GB model, and boasts 1080p video streaming, photo viewing, and an app marketplace.
The Apple TV 4K is available in both a 32GB and 64 GB model and features support for 4K, better performance, and support for DolbyAtmos.
So that is the history of the Apple TV, andif you want to vote for the next video topic, don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you nexttime.
0 Comments