It hasn’t been made official yet, but it looks like we’ll soon have two new members on Apple’s list of qualified “Vintage” products at the end of June. According to internal communications that the company sent to its authorized distributors and which I was able to confirm from my own sources, these new “vintage” products will be the original iPad Pro and Apple TV HD.
A product that is still sold today as “vintage”?
The original iPad Pro was launched in November 2015, with the A9X chip and a 12.9-inch screen that broke the mold in its day (we had only seen 9.7-inch screens on iPads until then). So it’s about six and a half years old, so it’s fitting that Apple is already thinking about starting to phase out support.
What is already more unusual is that the Apple TV HD, a device that still on sale today (and in fact I used it until literally the day before yesterday). The normal thing is for a product to enter the “vintage” list when it’s been more than five years since it stopped selling, and at the moment you can still walk into an Apple Store or Amazon and get some one for 159 dollars. The Apple TV HD was launched in 2015, yes, but it’s still selling out.
If the Apple TV HD is marked as “vintage” at the end of the month, it may imply that at WWDC 2022 we could see changes or news
This move with Apple TV may imply that at WWDC 2022 there will be news or changes that will make Apple TV HD lose at least some of its meaning. It is also true that currently virtually all living room TVs are sold at 4K resolutions, this may also be a reason for Necklace this Apple TV HD as “vintage”.
In this regard, rumors point to a future model of Apple TV focused on being cheaper to be able to compete with rivals. There are also older rumors of a device that merges an Apple TV and HomePod to go along with TVs, although there are still very few details about that.
It could also be that the Apple TV HD has sold so little lately that putting it on the “vintage” list doesn’t have too much of an impact.
Other purported changes to the list include the addition of iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus 32GB (a model that was later released for its siblings in some countries) and the arrival of the iPhone 4S in the list of obsolete models which are no longer accepted for repair by official technical services.
