December 27, 2010: Virtually 4 months after the second-gen Apple TV’s debut, Cupertino says it has offered 1 million of the streaming video units.
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, nevertheless, Apple described the machine as a piece in progress.
Most opinions for the unique Apple TV had been middling. 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 in the marketplace, the first-gen Apple TV offered 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 an alternative of OS X. It was powered by the identical A4 processor used within the unique iPad, which Apple launched earlier within the yr. In different phrases, the second-gen Apple TV was a extra mature product — though that didn’t cease Apple from treating it like an afterthought. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched it onstage, he referred to as the brand new Apple TV “One more thing hobby.”
A rising passion
A few years later, new Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner defined this “hobby” thought course of on Apple’s half.
“Apple doesn’t do hobbies as a general rule,” he instructed an viewers at Goldman Sachs. “We believe in focus, only working on a few things. With Apple TV, however, despite the barriers in that market, for those of us who use it, we’ve always thought there was something there and that if we kept following our intuition and pulling the string, we might find something that is larger.”
The truth that the second-gen Apple TV acquired to 1 million items offered a lot extra rapidly than the first-gen mannequin confirmed that there was undoubtedly “something … larger” that Apple may faucet into.
Nevertheless, 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 finally 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 passion. At present, Apple TV nonetheless isn’t the largest participant in set-top bins. However the Apple TV+ subscription service, which launched in November 2019, exhibits how critical Apple is about breaking into TV.
