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Comment by greedo | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand why the ATV doesn't have gigE. The BOM differential for 100mbit vs gigE can't be more than $1...

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While I always like to see the best specs on everything, there's nothing you could stream that even approaches 100mbit never mind gigabit. For something no one has anyone use for outside of a check mark on a specs sheet, saving $1 per unit is a huge profit increase when you sell 10 million of something. Crazy shit has been done by manufacturers to save pennies, never mind dollars. Not surprising.

In theory you could get upwards of 108 Mbit/s if you were streaming a UHD Blu-Ray over the network. Sounds a bit ridiculous just saying it, though, and I would have saved the $1 if I were designing it.

For now, few video streams are anywhere near 100mbit.

App downloads would be faster for the tiny slice of people with > 100mbit internet who also aren’t using wireless. I guess that’s something? Probably not worth a smaller margin to Apple.

It's also not just the gigE port, remember. It's stuff inside the device to handle 1Gbps on that interface and do something useful with it; i.e., actually render a video stream that is FAR higher bandwidth than anything we're using today, which likely means more CPU and better graphics hardware.

All this, for really no reason at all, since all video streams for the foreseeable future will fit just fine in under 100Mbps.

While I totally agree with you, the Apple TV also includes 802.11ac which is capable of negotiating a link speed far greater than 100mbit/100mbit.

Of course, speeds in excess of that are totally not necessary when streaming video, but I could see the case when downloading multi gigabyte files for games, etc. Personally, I have mine connected via wired instead of on my wireless network, just because it's more reliable and it sits right next to a switch already.

Planned obsolescence...

Apple wants to maximize profits, sure, but they also want the stickiness and network effects of an ecosystem. Which means building a large base of perpetual users to whom they can expose app stores and sell services. So planned obsolescence is a difficult argument to make, at least in this case.

Heard they're going to remove it in the next version, as well as hdmi. A USB dongle will be required to connect to your TV and internet is wireless only /s

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