A Legend Retires: Why Apple Just Killed the Most Resilient Apple TV Ever
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This week, Apple made a small update to its vintage and obsolete products list, as it’s known to do from time to time. However, while it’s easy to predict most of the products that slip onto this list, Apple threw us a curveball with this one by adding the original Apple TV HD as fully “obsolete.”
Normally, Apple only adds products to these lists when they’ve been off the market for at least five years, and that timeframe only qualifies a product for the “vintage” list; to hit “obsolete” it has to have been gone for at least seven years.
That’s not the case for the Apple TV HD. While that set-top box model has had a long and storied history, it also set records for remaining in Apple Stores for just over seven years after it first debuted — a run matched only by the iPod classic, which debuted in 2007 before finally being discontinued in 2014 when Apple could no longer economically source the necessary hard drives to power it.
Similarly, the Apple TV HD began its life as simply the “Apple TV (fourth-generation),” gaining the “HD” moniker only two years after the Apple TV 4K appeared alongside it. While it may have been the fourth set-top box to bear the brand name, it was an entirely new breed, as it was the first to run the more versatile tvOS operating system and offer support for third-party apps.
The 2015 Apple TV came in both 32 GB and 64 GB models. That larger capacity was discontinued in September 2017 when the Apple TV 4K came along, but Apple kept the 32 GB version on the market as an entry-level option for folks who didn’t need a 4K streaming box. It also took the opportunity to swap out the original black Siri Remote for the same slightly updated version that had a white circle around the Menu button.
It was a subtle update, to be sure, but also one that would turn out to be important later on when Apple added that 64 GB model to its vintage products list in 2022 and then promoted it to obsolete in 2024. Those came right on schedule — five and seven years after it was superseded by the Apple TV 4K.
Technically speaking, those earlier updates would have also encompassed both the 32 GB and 64 GB versions, as Apple never specified a capacity, listing it only as “Apple TV HD (Early 2016, sold with Siri Remote (1st generation) without white ring on Menu button).”
Still, it’s hard to imagine anybody at the Genius Bar ever refusing to service a 2016 Apple TV simply because the remote didn’t have a white ring. The hardware remained unchanged, as did the A1625 model number, and Apple had continued selling that model until October 2022.
The Apple TV that changed it all would go through two more transitions before finally being pulled off the market. First was the quiet adoption of the “HD” suffix in 2019 to help set it apart from the Apple TV 4K — and the streaming service that had just been introduced as Apple TV+. During that era, Apple seemed to tacitly avoid calling anything just “Apple TV” to avoid confusion, but it clearly got over that last year when it dropped the plus, effectively emphasizing that the streaming service is the flagship product, and the “Apple TV 4K” is a means to enjoy it.
The second transition was in early 2021. When Apple introduced the second-generation Apple TV 4K, it once again brought the Apple TV HD along for the ride, repackaging it with the new silver Siri Remote. That version still used a Lightning connector, and it would be the last one the 1080p set-top box would get; when the third-generation Apple TV 4K arrived in late 2022 with a USB-C remote, the Apple TV HD was discontinued instead.
Why Is the Apple TV HD Already on the Obsolete List?
The Apple TV HD may be the weirdest new entry to ever come to Apple’s obsolete products list. Not only was it still being sold less than four years ago, but Apple also delivered a tvOS 26 update to it last fall — a remarkable and surprising move for a ten-year-old piece of hardware.
Both those things hinted that the Apple TV HD should have had at least another year or two of support, but Apple has unceremoniously bumped it off the list of supported products earlier than expected.
The company’s reasoning likely hinges on what “last distributed the product for sale” means in technical and legal terms. That’s the language Apple has always used for its vintage and obsolete products list, and it’s telling that it doesn’t say anything about when they were last sold or even manufactured, so there’s likely some subtle nuances in how this actually works.
While it stretches credulity a bit, it’s not hard to imagine that Apple may have stopped making the A1625 set-top boxes in 2018, and therefore stopped “distributing them for sale” at that point. Product obsolescence has more to do with the core piece of hardware than the packaging or accessories — and in 2026, the supply of 20nm A8 logic boards that might be needed to repair the set-top is probably non-existent. Apple may have tossed a new remote into the box in 2021, but it was still the same A1625 Apple TV that was sitting alongside it.
The late 2017 version of the Apple TV (4th-generation) and Apple TV HD (as it was later called) would easily be reaching the point of obsolescence today, but if Apple really wanted to single those models out, it would have said so, much like it did with the original 2015 Apple TV by specifying the type of remote it was sold with. In this case, the obsolete products list flatly says “Apple TV HD, 32GB” with no qualifiers.
This makes it unlikely that we’ll see tvOS 27 come to the Apple TV HD later this year. Since that set-top box was the first to ever run tvOS, this will actually mark the first time any device has been stuck on an older tvOS version. Still, cutting off support doesn’t mean your Apple TV will stop working. Eleven years is a pretty good run, and as a basic streaming box it still outperforms many of its competitors’ devices even today.
