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Apple To Suspend iTunes Store Support For 'Obsolete' First-Gen Apple TV (arstechnica.com)
The original Apple TV, first introduced in 2007, will no longer be able to connect to the iTunes Store due to new security changes to be implemented by Apple. The news comes from a support document, which also mentions that PCs running Windows XP or Windows Vista will lose access to the most recent version of iTunes. Ars Technica reports: According to the document, the "obsolete" original Apple TV won't be updated in the future to support access to the iTunes Store. After May 25, users will only be able to access iTunes on second-generation Apple TVs and newer streaming devices. The same security changes affecting the first-gen Apple TV will also affect Windows XP and Vista machines. Users on such devices can still run previous versions of iTunes, so they should still be able to play their music library without problems. However, affected users won't be able to make new iTunes purchases or re-download previous purchases. Only machines running Windows 7 or later after May 25 will have full access to iTunes, including the ability to make new purchases and re-download older purchases.
So they are no longer supporting something that is now 11 years old, and didn't really sell that well in comparison to the numbers they are shifting of the newer models which are far more capable and based on standard (at least, for Apple) hardware that is a close relation to the hundreds of millions of phones and tablets they've also sold. Should this really be a surprise? I'm surprised they were still supporting it.
What other OEM set top box has been supported that long? Is anything even close?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This hardware is being sold like an "appliance" and it isn't failing as an appliance - it's being effectively remotely disabled.
The iTunes store will no longer be accessible from the Gen 1 AppleTV. Whether or not that is an inconvenience depends on how often you use your Gen 1 AppleTV to connect to the iTunes store.
I've got a Gen 3 AppleTV and it has been in use nearly 24/7 since the day I bought it in 2013. I think I've used it to access the iTunes store 4 times. If I were to lose access to the iTunes store tonight zero fucks would be given. I'd keep using it for streaming from my server, for Netflix, for Youtube, for Podcasts, for net radio, and all the other things that I use it for daily that aren't accessing the iTunes store.