Most journalists now believe Apple will be releasing a TV this year. Speculating over Apple’s plans is close to impossible, but if we look closely at what Apple have been releasing over the last few years I think we can predict what an Apple iTV would be like. There are a lot of problems. All of which would be solved by taking the problems out of the TV set and instead making it a much more connected device.
The iPad three will probably have a button, but you’ll never use it. Before the iPad 2 was announced there were rumors that Apple were preparing an iPad without a home button. There was much debate and the rumor seemed drastic. But the rumors are actually true.
New interface gestures for iOS 4.3 which shipped on the iPad2 lets you multitask without using the home button. Pinch to homescreen let’s you close apps without the button and swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar let’s you exit apps that are running in the background. Effectively making the home button a relic of the past.
So from the release of iOS5 (probably with the iPhone 5 this june) you might never need to use a button on an iOS device again. Some of you might think that’s a great thing, I for one would love it since I rarely double click fast enough, and others might think it’s useless.
The tail end of this effect is that you could, theoretically, controll all the interactions with apps running on an Apple TV with a Magic Trackpad…
Let the rumor mills run wild! 
iFixit’s tear down of the new Apple TV reveals 8GB of internal storage. This means that the device, running iOS, is fully prepared to run normal iOS apps.
The only questions that remain are will Apple let us and how will the input work?
The were a lot of rumors around before the launch of the new Apple TV, the most interesting ones from Engadget that claimed the Apple TV would be fully compatible with iOS apps. But Steve Jobs claimed it had no local storage, how would that work?
Looking at the tech specs page of the Apple TV site I can’t find any information about storage though. There must be some storage to fascilitate buffering of video but it could work just fine with only RAM.
What the future of the Apple TV will be no one knows. But if it doesn’t have local storage it won’t ever handle apps. We’ll have to wait for the next generation.
Now begins to long wait for the post launch tear down that will tell us if it has local storage or not.