We can’t say for certain just quite yet whether or not Apple’s latest “hobby” (read: AppleTV) will run iOS, but glancing through the latest iOS 4.2 beta certainly seems to heavily hint that it will. With an iOS-powered AppleTV comes all kinds of possibilities. On the more “legitimate” front, there’s the possibility we could see AppleTV specific apps. With TV’s continually hyping apps on the sales floor, Apple could instantly smash through all previous attempts to woo customers with such things. Even more exciting, however, is the possibility of jailbroken AppleTV’s.

Unlike the older generation AppleTV’s, the new models are molded around a rental-only approach. You can’t actually “purchase” and download TV shows and movies to your local drive anymore. But, with a jailbroken AppleTV, such things could be made possible. At that point, the AppleTV would be a whole helluva lot more interesting — in my eyes at least.

And yet, the AppleTV demo Steve showed off a few weeks back appeared to be running the same stock UI/OS the older AppleTVs did. With that said, I highly doubt Steve would demo one thing, neglect to say anything about iOS taking over navigational duties for AppleTV, and then release said product a couple of months later without any previous keynote/demo/limelight whatsoever.

So while we wait on the edge of our seats for anything more concrete, we’ll cling to the only clue we have: the “AppleTV2,1″ string found in the latest 4.2 iOS beta. Would anyone prefer an iOS-powered AppleTV over the old standard?

Source:
Crunchgear
ArsTechnica