December 27, 2010: Virtually 4 months after the second-gen Apple TV’s debut, Cupertino says it has bought 1 million of the streaming video units.
The information exhibits that Apple’s set-top field is gaining momentum. Nonetheless, Apple’s PR transfer can be a low-blow shot at competitor Roku, which lately stated it deliberate to hit the 1 million unit mark by the tip of 2010.
Apple TV gross sales
By 2010, the Apple TV had been round for 4 years. Cupertino confirmed off the first-generation mannequin in September 2006. Proper from the beginning, nonetheless, Apple described the system as a piece in progress.
Most opinions for the unique Apple TV had been middling. Nonetheless, some solid it as a notable misstep for Apple, with one reviewer going as far as labeling it “The iFlop.” In its first six months available on the market, the first-gen Apple TV bought simply 250,000 items.
The significantly smaller second-generation mannequin arrived in September 2010. Only a quarter the scale of the unique, it was the primary Apple TV to run a model of iOS as a substitute of OS X. It was powered by the identical A4 processor used within the unique iPad. In different phrases, it was a extra mature product — though that didn’t cease Apple from treating it like an afterthought. When Steve Jobs launched it onstage, he referred to as the brand new Apple TV “Yet one more factor interest.”
A rising interest
A few years later, Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner defined this “interest” thought course of on Apple’s half.
“Apple doesn’t do hobbies as a basic rule,” he instructed an viewers at Goldman Sachs. “We imagine in focus, solely engaged on a couple of issues. With Apple TV, nonetheless, regardless of the boundaries in that market, for these of us who use it, we’ve all the time thought there was one thing there and that if we stored following our instinct and pulling the string, we’d discover one thing that’s bigger.”
The truth that the second-gen Apple TV acquired to 1 million items a lot extra shortly than the first-gen mannequin confirmed that there was undoubtedly “one thing … bigger” that Apple may faucet into.
Nonetheless, the corporate nonetheless appeared uncertain as to what this was. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, the Apple co-founder alluded to an Apple tv set. That set off analysts on years of hypothesis that in the end got here to nothing.
Within the meantime, the success of rival corporations like Roku continued to develop.
It took till 2014 for Prepare dinner to say that the Apple TV had graduated to one thing greater than a interest. At present, Apple TV nonetheless isn’t the most important participant in set-top bins. However the Apple TV+ subscription service, which launched in November 2019, exhibits how severe Apple is about breaking into TV.
