While Apple may no longer support older generations of its Apple TV, there are still plenty of folks that use their older Apple TV boxes on a regular basis. Today’s announcement is for them. A new tool called “Blackb0x” was released this week for jailbreaking older Apple TV models.
Blackb0x works with third- and fourth-generation Apple TVs, and it lets users easily jailbreak such devices. The process is quite simple and is accomplished through a macOS app.
While older Apple TV models don’t run tvOS, so they don’t have access to the App Store like newer models, the jailbreak allows them to do more with the venerable old black box, opening up a way for them to add extensions and such, squeezing as much life as they can from their old set-top box.
As reported by iDownloadBlog, the jailbreak is tethered in some cases and untethered in others. It depends on the model and operating system version, as listed below:
- Apple TV 3,2 (A1469) (tvOS 8.4.x untethered, tvOS 7.x tethered)
- Apple TV 3,1 (A1427) (tvOS 8.4.x untethered, tvOS 7.x tethered)
- Apple TV 2,1 (A1378) (tvOS 7.1.2 tethered, tvOS 6.1.4 untethered)
The difference between a tethered jailbreak and an untethered jailbreak is that the tethered jailbreak process needs to be redone every time the device is restarted, while the untethered jailbreak is “permanent.”
You can read more details about the process on Blackb0x’s GitHub page.
