Apple just sent out a press release announcing that the company expect Apple TV sales to top one million units later this week. It also announced that iTunes users are now “renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day”.
The best part? The Apple TV is not a hobby anymore, but is described by Apple PR as “the perfect iOS accessory”, thanks to AirPlay. That’s quite an evolution.
Press release below. Read more
I noticed this issue last week and I thought it was, once again, my ISP’s fault. The Vodafone Station connection I have here doesn’t exactly play well with…anything. Basically, I tried to set up the device using OpenDNS and I saw streaming speed of iTunes content go terribly down – even lower than what I’m used to with the Vodafone Station. It turns out, though, that it might not be Vodafone’s fault at all this time. Instead, it appears that the Apple TV doesn’t play nice with third-party DNS providers such as Google’s DNS or OpenDNS.
According to TUAW, developer Joe Maller and quite a few users on Apple’s discussion boards, setting different DNS other than your ISP’s in the Apple TV can cause iTunes to take even hours to start a streaming session. Maller’s Apple TV took 2 hours to start streaming content under a 20 Mbs connection. Read more
As if Wiimote hacks, third-party browsers and a brand new jailbreak coming before Christmas weren’t enough, jailbroken Apple TV owners can now enable a VNC server on their black boxes with a new hack called Exposed.
VNC access to the Apple TV should, from my understand, allow you to control the device remotely using apps like Screens and iTeleport.
The hack, however, is still in its early stages:
It’s method for getting screen data isn’t great and lacks some effects and animation, but it does work without HDMI plugged in. So if you want to try it out, grab Exposed and place it in the Lowtide Appliances directory. I think it is also important to note that this does require a jailbroken AppleTV 2G running Dustin Howett’s beigelist. Crazy busy with work, but I’m hoping to finish my site redesign by the new year. Peace.
So, jailbreak required and lots of bugs to fix. I’ll give this one a try once it’s more stable. [via 9to5mac]
Apple released iOS 4.2.1 for Apple TV 2nd gen last night, which is labelled as “4.1.1” in the device’s built-in software update checker tool. The OS was a 267MB download on Apple’s servers, and that lead us to think that it was mainly aimed at fixing a few bugs found in the previous build.
According to a support document on Apple’s website, the 4.1.1 update fixes issues related to resolution and download of movies and TV shows.
TV resolution fix: Addresses an issue that causes some high-definition TVs to incorrectly display at 480p.
Download fix: Addresses an issue that may cause a movie or TV show to be re-downloaded.
As we reported last night, the 4.1.1 update doesn’t seem to provide a fix for the “color issues” with certain Sony and Philips televisions.
As reported by MacRumors, a few minutes ago Apple released a software update for the Apple TV. The build is 8C154 and it’s labelled as iOS 4.2.1 for Apple TV second generation. This is a direct link to the update, courtesy of iOS E Lite. As you can see, it’s a 267MB download.
The update is also available through the Apple TV’s built-in software update checker. A changelog for the new OS hasn’t been provided yet, nor is the update online on Apple’s download website.
In spite of the update file being registered as “iOS 4.2.1” on Apple’s servers, the Apple TV reports “4.1.1” as the new installed OS. The same happened on November 22 when Apple released iOS 4.2.1 for iPhone and iPad and announced the availability of iOS 4.2 for the new Apple TV, although the built-in updater tool reported 4.1 as being installed.
According to early reports on Apple’s discussion boards, the update hasn’t fixed the color issues reported by several Philips and Sony TV owners.
ATV Flash is an excellent application for jailbroken Apple TVs that adds a browser, Last.fm integration and extends the media playback capabilities of Apple’s tiny black device. The latest update to the app, beta 2, which was released yesterday, adds a number of improvements and fixes and introduces support for iOS 4.2.1 – known as 4.1 for Apple TV owners.
The developers say that aTV Flash is perfectly compatible with the latest OS, even if a untethered jailbreak still isn’t available for iOS 4.2.1 / 4.1. If you don’t want to jailbreak your Apple TV with the current tethered redsn0w jailbreak, feel free to wait for the Dev Team to ship a better solution as, anyway, support for the latest software update is built into aTV Flash beta 2.
aTV Flash is available here. Check out the full changelog below. Read more
TIME magazine has listed 50 Top 10 lists on their web site this year - 50! Surely an Apple product made it into at least one of these lists, right? Of course, we wouldn’t have posted this unless there was. Silly question.
Time’s Top 10 Gadgets (for 2010) listed not one, but four, Apple products in this category. The iPad took top honors (of course!), the newly-revamped 11-in. MacBook Air took third place, the iPhone 4 took sixth place and the new Apple TV took seventh (with a much improved form factor, capacity and functions). That’s much respect to Apple, and well deserved. You can see the entire list below. Read more
Great news for jailbreakers this morning: the Dev-Team has been busy working on an untethered solution for the current iOS 4.2.1 jailbreak (which requires to boot the device using Redsn0w) and it should be released before Christmas. Last night, @musclenerd tweeted a video showing the untethered method running on a jailbroken iPod Touch 4th gen which relies on the kernel from iOS 4.2 beta 3.
According to @musclenerd, the current implementation doesn’t use any new exploit, but @comex is working on a better system that will perhaps be implemented in the final release. Read more
Walt Mossberg reviews the new Apple TV:
He also says AirPlay works great.
