Apple TV

As part of his talk at the D10 Conference today, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that while they'd sold nearly 3 million Apple TVs in 2011, they'd already sold 3 million in the first half of 2012 alone. That's double the rate of sales for last year so far, and we're not even in the traditionally strongest holiday quarter yet.

According to J. Crew CEO and current Apple board member, Mickey Drexler, Steve Jobs didn’t just want to re-invent the personal computer, mobile phone, and music industry -- he also wanted to take a stab at the car industry too. In an interview at Fast Company’s Innovation Uncensored conference earlier this week, Drexler said that Steve Jobs wanted to build... an iCar.

Seas0nPass, the popular jailbreak tool for the 2010 Apple TV (720p) has just received an update that will allow it to jailbreak the latest Apple TV software. Apple has just released the Apple TV software update taking it to version 5.0.1; it is actually version 5.1.1 inline with other iOS devices but Apple still files the version numbers differently for whatever reason.

Foxconn chiarman Terry Gou was recently quoted as saying that the manufacturing giant is making preparations for an Apple TV set, which included buying a significant stake in Sharp for access to LCD displays.

Apple has pushed out Apple TV software version 5.0.1 (4224), aka iOS 5.1.1 (9B206f). The update applies to both the 2010 Apple TV (720p) and 2012 Apple TV (1080p). No new features are shown following the update, and no new services seem to have been added, so this could well be a bug fix and performance enhancement release.

Apple has been involved in talks with major TV channel Epix over rights to streaming its content to the Apple TV or any other Apple device which has that capability. The Epix channel is backed by three major movie studios, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures and Lionsgate.

Brent Schlender, a veteran journalist that has been covering Apple for the last 25 yeras, has recently published new snippets of interviews with Steve Jobs. One quote in particular from 1998 sharply counterpoints recent rumours of a full-blown Apple TV set.

FireCore has released another update to its hugely popular software for jailbroken second generation Apple TV's (2010, 720p version). The new 1.5 release includes a revamped video player which claims to improve playback performance of most video file types.

Last week Tim Cook visited Valve, one of the biggest influencers in PC gaming, to talk about a work-in-progress TV set Apple is working on, according to anonymous sources.

Some recent poking around inside Apple's third-generation TV unit show that there's actually a dual-core A5 processor inside, and not the single-core CPU listed on the spec sheet.