Apple TV (1st generation)

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~ the obit ~

the 1st-gen Apple TV was Apple's first stab at the living room. It shipped March 21 2007 at 299 dollars after a January 9 Macworld announcement, ten months before the iPhone changed what counted as an Apple consumer product. The box was an Intel-based small silver enclosure shaped like half a Mac mini, with a 40GB or 160GB internal hard drive, a remote, an HDMI output, and the firm requirement that you owned a Mac or a Windows PC running iTunes to feed it content. The pitch was: sync your iTunes library to the box, then watch on the television.

Steve Jobs called the product a "hobby" at multiple investor calls. The framing did real work. It told the press not to compare the unit to the iPod sales curve, told Apple's own teams not to expect a roadmap promise, and let the company ship a product without committing to the category. The hobby framing held for the entire 1st-gen lifespan. Analyst estimates put sales at around 1 million units by early 2008. The 2nd-gen-onwards line that replaced it eventually sold orders of magnitude more, but only after Apple dropped the hard drive, dropped the iTunes dependency, and built around streaming.

the silver box never had a Turkish positioning. iTunes Store video rentals were locked to a handful of countries in 2007, the US first, then a slow drip to the UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany. Turkey was nowhere on that list. To use the 1st-gen Apple TV from Ankara in 2008 you needed a US iTunes account funded by a US gift card, a US billing address you did not have, and content libraries that geofenced you out anyway. The hardware was not the obstacle. The store behind it was, and the store was the entire point of the device.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the 1st-gen received a software update in January 2008 (the "Take Two" release) that loosened the iTunes-sync dependency and added direct rental purchases from the box itself. Reviewers warmed up. The unit could now stand alone. Apple still treated the whole line as exploratory and never gave the device a marketing push to match the iPod or the upcoming iPhone. Sales grew slowly. The Roku DVP launched in May 2008 at half the price with Netflix streaming built in, and the competitive shape of the streaming-box category started to harden around devices that did not need a desktop iTunes installation to function.

~ what really happened ~

Apple announced the 2nd-gen Apple TV on September 1 2010 at a music event. It was a small black puck running a fork of iOS. It had no hard drive. It cost 99 dollars instead of 299. It streamed and did not sync. The 1st gen was discontinued the same day with no transition message and no migration path for the syncing model. Anyone who had bought into the original box was left with a unit that would keep working but never receive another software update past the 3.0.2 build that shipped the prior year. The hobby was over and the new product line did not look like the old one at all.

~ the long tail ~

the 1st-gen sits in an odd spot in the Apple TV lineage. Every subsequent generation, from the 2010 puck through the 4K models, traces its DNA to the iOS rebuild that replaced this device, not to the Intel-and-hard-drive box that started the line. The silver Apple TV is one of the only Apple consumer products to have shipped a full generation that was structurally abandoned by its own successor. The product name continued. The product idea did not.

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