Thanks to the lovely people (cheers again!) here on Ars, I was able to try the "latest" officially unsupported model, TV 3rd gen. (anything older would likely be a paperweight by now, unless running Linux on it).
I'll try to add my findings on what still works and what doesn't anymore, editing my post as I try more things, for any future reference for any others who might be interested in up‑cycling such an old, unsupported and obsolete device, e.g. at a cottage or as a simple streaming box for people who don't ever want to connect their "smart" TV full of ads and spyware to the internet (the case here).
Up‑cycling obsolete Apple devices for good uses can be fun, but obviously you inevitably run into some limits as the systems and cloud architecture changes, so I hope my post might be helpful to others. Mind you, there might be also some security issues with using obsolete devices, but that can be hopefully mitigated by keeping the obsolete device strictly on the LAN part, even if zero or heavily firewalled WAN access prevents any streaming (I'd still have to further investigate if the
local sharing features even work without any WAN handshake with Apple servers).
Quite obviously, any of that might change at any moment, just like the above‑mentioned Netflix soon dropping service on TV3, but here is hoping at least the very basic features might still last a while.
So far, for TV3:
- WPA2 wifi only, obviously. No WPA3, best to use an ethernet cable. TV OS 7.x is old, so initially connecting via ethernet doesn't let you set up wifi. Weird.
- iCloud login doesn't work at all – totally deprecated. Hopefully not needed much anyway, as most of the cloud features it tied into were deprecated as well.
- iTunes login does work, enabling some iTunes/Music and sharing features.
- Home Sharing does work (though yet to test in Sonoma), so it can still likely be used to play compatible (likely H.264 only) movies and music in your own library, which can be pretty nice (even via TOSLINK to connect to your home stereo if you have one with optical input, though I haven't tested that yet).
- H.264 HD movies in your own library do seem to work via Home Sharing. Even up to HD H.264 movies. Haven't tried other codecs yet.
- Home Sharing music does seem to work, as per above.
- Netflix does still work, but per a post further above might be deprecated soon.
- Music and films bought on iTunes (now TV and Music stores) yet untested.
- TV+ subscription yet untested, but might require iCloud sign‑in (which doesn't work). No idea yet if it works with just iTunes sign‑in.
- Podcasts' syncing yet untested, but might require iCloud sign‑in (which doesn't work). No idea yet if it works with just iTunes sign‑in.
- Other streaming services (like the Disney+, Amazon Prime and a few others it supported back then) yet untested.
- AirPlay 1 seems to be a bit of a hit‑or‑miss. Needs more testing. Older host devices might work, newer ones might not. Needs more investigation. I surmise that AirPlay 1 will soon or have been already deprecated in all the newer OS versions, but I'll have to test this further. Probably best to consider AirPlay 1 as not working at all, just to be sure.
Mind you, that's for TV3, which is basically iPhone 5s times – a decade ago.
TL;DR: Even a functionally quite obsolete TV3 can still serve some media-centre functions as of now, but with obvious limitations. Still quite enough for some up‑cycling use cases, at least in a limited time frame. Going over to the (still supported so far, though that might change any moment) 4th gen. TV HD or the later TV 4K 1st gen. model would be obviously safer for up‑cycling, but so far even the old TV3 might still fulfil some use cases, at least for some time – hopefully...
despite using an SoC from the iPhone 4S, but the downside is that features like this aren’t there. That said, mirroring from the phone works fine for me.
