From October 26 Apple gave the option to buy the new Apple TV in their online stores, with a delivery date of between 3 and 5 days so at least the delivery of the first units would be between October 29 and 30.
These dates coincided exactly with the sale of the device in the physical Apple Store of our country in which they were available on the same day, October 30, both versions, 32 GB and 64 GB.
In the Canary Islands it has taken another week and it was on November 6 when I was able to acquire, in the Premium Canary Island Reseller Banana Computer, a 64GB drive. After the unboxing that I am going to show you later in this article I can conclude that A good job has been done with this device and that over the months we will see how its versatility increases.
As you will remember, in January 2007 it was Steve Jobs who presented the first generation Apple TV in a Keynote. It was the first time that we could see a device of this type. It was a device that was going to allow users, both PC and Mac, enjoy media files hosted in iTunes library on your TV. In addition, it came loaded with connections that made it compatible with all the televisions that existed at that time in addition to their future versions since this first Apple TV had an HDMI connector, the standard that is still used today.
Likewise, that first Apple TV had the possibility of housing enough information inside it since it had an internal hard drive from 40 GB to 160 GB of the latest model marketed.
On September 1, 2010, during the company's special music event, the new and redesigned second-generation Apple TV is unveiled, priced at $ 99. The device became more powerful, decreased in size to a quarter of the original and it was losing internal storage, only keeping 8GB of storage for cache.
On March 7, 2012, the third generation Apple TV comes to us, which in appearance was the same as the second version but with internal improvements among which the possibility of 1080p resolutions stands out. On January 28, 2013, an update of the third improved version was launched and finally on October 30, 2015, the fourth version of Apple's black box was put on sale.
This latest version continues to have the same shape and color as the second and third versions with the exception that it has increased its size in height in addition to losing the optical audio output. In addition, those of Cupertino have gone back and have decided that the fourth generation Apple TV has internal storage capacity again launching two versions, one of 32 GB and the other of 64 GB.
Regarding the increase in size, the same is attributed to the A8 chip that mounts since by increasing its power considerably, a larger heat sink is necessary and that is precisely what forces the growth of the design in height.
This Apple TV continues to have the internal power supply allowing it to remain a compact and closed block. As for the rear connections they have been modified and the optical sound output has disappeared. Has the plug, an ethernet connector (less than gigabit) a USB-C port through which we will be able to connect the Apple TV to the computer for various actions and a port of HDMI 1.4 type C output. Thanks to this new type of HDMI port we will be able to control our television from the Apple TV remote.
As for its remote control, it has evolved and goes from being the Apple Remote to the Siri Remote. It takes that name because one of the novelties of this new Apple TV is the inclusion of the Siri voice assistant. The control is made of aluminum and black glass. It has a touch surface on the top that works as a trackpad with click included and five buttons to increase and decrease the volume, to return to the home screen, launch Siri, play or pause the multimedia content and enter the Apple TV menu.
Another novelty of this new Apple TV is your operating system, tvOS which has allowed it to arrive with its own application store under the arm. Apple knows that the future of television is to use the applications on it. Current smart TVs suffer from slow and unhelpful menus and that is where this new Apple TV wants to make a dent.