Enlarge / The fourth-gen Apple TV. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

If you’ve been thinking that the Apple TV’s hardware has needed a shot in the arm lately, it looks like you’re not alone. Bloomberg reports that Apple has hired Timothy Twerdahl, an executive who has spent most of the last four years serving as Director and General Manager of Amazon’s Fire TV team. Twerdahl’s extensive resume includes years of experience with hardware and TV projects, including three years at Palm, two at pre-Google Motorola, half a year at Netflix, almost two years at Roku, and three years as VP of Products at WIMM Labs, a wearable device maker acquired by Google back in 2013.

Pete Distad, a former Hulu executive who had been managing the Apple TV team, isn’t being let go. Rather, Twerdahl’s hiring will free him up to focus on “content deals,” possibly for Apple’s nascent scripted TV and movie projects.

The fourth-generation Apple TV represented a major overhaul of Apple’s longtime “hobby” project when it was released in October of 2015. It got a brand-new and dramatically faster CPU and GPU thanks to the Apple A8, it threw out the old iOS-lite Apple TV operating system for a new one with a revamped interface and more iOS APIs, and it picked up its own App Store and SDK. Yet despite CEO Tim Cook’s belief that “the future of TV is apps,” the platform seems to have stalled since then. You can find apps for most streaming video services (Amazon is the lone major holdout and its promised Apple TV app never materialized), but Apple’s gaming ambitions have sputtered. Even the new TV app, one of tvOS’ most visible additions in the last 16 months and another effort to fix streaming boxes’ “where the hell can I watch this” problem, is hobbled by its lack of support for Netflix.