Rumors of a new Apple TV have been running rampant but nothing concrete has hit the scene until today. iH8Snow has revealed a new product, codenamed J33, which could very well be the first mention of one of our favorite “Hobby” products from Apple.
The name J33 makes its appearance in the latest beta release of iOS 5.1, and new product identifiers showing up in beta releases of iOS historically mean hardware revisions are beyond the mere internal testing phases, and actually imminent.
J33 comes on the heals of the first J code name (J2) which is also rumored to be a new iPad. Apple nearly exhausted the use of (K) for code names with K95, Apple’s CDMA iPad 2, so the switch to the next letter is both logical and was going to happen eventually.
We’d love to see a dual-core A5 Apple TV that would easily stream 1080P videos, though on the software end, a better organization for movies could be a key selling point. Currently, Genre is the only real sorting option you have for movies. A schema involving customizable tags would be a welcomed addition.
Another feature I’d personally like to see added to the Apple TV is the ability to restrict certain “Movie Folders” or “Playlists” (should these actually ever exist) so that a child’s Apple TV would only be able to watch movies that were age appropriate. The current method of restricting by MPAA rating alone simply isn’t adequate if these ratings aren’t kept up to date.
