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Comment by ra7 | Hacker News Reader

> FaceTime now features an incredible connected experience with Apple TV 4K. To see friends and family on the big screen, users can use Continuity Camera to start a FaceTime call on iPhone and hand it off to Apple TV, or initiate the FaceTime call directly from their Apple TV. With Center Stage, users stay perfectly framed even as they move around the room.

I was really looking forward to making FaceTime calls on my Apple TV with my parents who live halfway across the world. But of course, they restrict it to only Apple TV 4K 2nd gen and above. What possible reasons could there be to not support this feature in the 1st gen hardware? Is it just a money grab?

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History with Apple is that it's a little bit the older hardware isn't quite powerful enough, and a little that Apple's bar is high. They might be able to make a version of this that was not quite as polished or not as good of framerate etc that did work with older hardware, but they won't bc that's now how Apple rolls.

Sometimes this feels like they're trying to force people onto newer hardware, but Apple also supports old hardware for a long time and regularly adds things to devices that are 3-4 years old, so... it's not actually that one-sided AFAICT.

The main differences between those generations are the core CPU (the 2nd gen is an A12, the 1st is an A10) and the wifi 6 (vs 5 on the 1st gen).

Probably one (or both of those) aren't good enough to do what is necessary for the FaceTime.

And in my experience during the beta it was already pretty jank. Looking forward to trying it now that it may be fully polished.

The A10 came out in 2016... Facetime came out in 2010 on the iPhone 4, a device running iOS 4 on a an Apple A4 CPU and 2.4GHz-only 802.11n. Surely the A10 can handle making a call.

But can A10 handle the coordination involved between a phone and an AppleTV so that it can show the image on one but use the camera and microphone on the other but keep them in sync?

I looked up the specs, and the biggest glaring omission is that the A10 (not A10 fusion), does not appear to have hardware encoding of HEVC.

The Apple TV has to stream camera from the iPhone to the TV and the other participants (up to 32 participants) in real time without dropping frames or garbling the audio.

I'm not sure the the A10, say nothing of the A4, could reliably handle group calls. To be fair to the A4 and A10, group calls weren't a feature of FaceTime until 2018. Could the A4 handle an audio or low-res video call? Probably.

> Facetime came out in 2010 on the iPhone 4

You have a great recall of the timeline. I thought that it came out much earlier but I was mistakenly thinking of iChat AV. "In June 2003, Apple announced iChat AV . . ." [1]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IChat

FaceTime in full HD was not supported until 2020, and it was only on devices that released in 2017 or newer. It is more than just a 'call'

Whatever hardware they use for near field comms between the phone and the TV maybe?

> What possible reasons could there be to not supporting this feature in the 1st gen hardware? Is it just a money grab?

This is almost always a limitation of the hardware. Keep in mind the AppleTV has really old SoCs compared to iPhones and iPads of similar vintage. The AppleTV 4k 1st edition has an A10X SoC while the 2nd edition has an A12. The A10 is the same CPU as the iPhone 7 but was sold up through 2021.

Usually there's something subtle about the hardware that's lacking. Maybe not for this particular version, but the next iteration of it that Apple has already planned.

In these cases they usually just gate the feature to the latest hardware versions.

Probably requires a processor released less than a decade ago

1st gen Apple TV 4K was released in 2017.

It seems a new Apple TV is $129 ($149 if you want ethernet and more storage). Not actually a bad deal hmmmm.

ok, fewer than 7 years old... A10 released in 2016

I’m willing to bet it’s both hardware video en/decoding (which is necessary for the near zero lag double jump) and the Wi-Fi chipset. If most people are running these things in a tv cabinet on Wi-Fi, both need to be pretty decent for the experience not to be disappointing

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