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Comment by zamadatix | Hacker News Reader

1.16x simple mean on XBOX 1.22x simple mean on Apple

Closer than I expected, but some products are quite the outliers. E.g. Apple TV is 1.54x. That's gotta hurt.

Apple TV is a little worrisome, surprised the A-series devices jumped so much. They're on older lines and have mostly been a way to recoup R&D for flagships. Theyre either subsidizing other products to soften the increase, or older process nodes are under serious demand suddenly.

Doesn't bode well for the industry. PlayStation and Xbox both switched to mostly-commodity hardware this gen and are years old, yet also facing the same price pressure apparently

Tim Cook stated Apple is eating some of the price increases. I'm guessing they chose not to with the Apple TV.

The price increase may be factoring in the next Apple TV hardware revision, allowing that to be released without price being the dominant story around it.

Yeah, that seems to be the dominant theory, especially since the AppleTV hasn't been updated in a few years and is widely expected to be "due" for a new model within the next few months.

That makes a lot of sense

Is this true? I was under the impression that Apple signs long term deals with companies and the reason they didn't have a price hike for so long is because they were still getting parts are the former price

The trouble with long-term contracts is that they have an end date. Looking at my 5 year fixed mortgage which will end in just over a year, and it isn’t going to be pretty.

Apple doesn’t get a pass just because their contracts are many of orders of magnitude bigger.

As wonderful as long term deals are, if Apple signed a long term deal with a supplier who didn't secure their supply chain properly, said supplier is going to either:

1/ Force apple to eat a price hike. Failing that, they can:

2/ Terminate their relationship with apple

3/ Go bankrupt trying to sell $2 for $1 (which leads us back to point 1)

That has happened before with GT Advanced Technologies over iPhone screens. Apple frontloaded GTAT's Arizona facility buildout, but the contract had no obligation to buy and GTAT's yields were horrible, so Apple didn't pay the last installment of the loan and GTAT by contract couldn't sell to anyone else.

iPhone 6 launched without the sapphire screen and GTAT went bust.

Apple has a bit of a storied history of being the reason suppliers go bankrupt. Their contracts are usually one sided (who is going to tell Apple no and turn down that business?), and Apple does not like to be pushed around. They use multiple sourcing and pit their suppliers against one another and aren't above bullying.

The Apple TV barely has any storage or memory, it’s already massively overpriced compared to any other set-top box.

its so much better though. android junk UI and TV OS are so bad I will happily pay the Apple TV price just to get the remote and not get a headache when I get home from work and want to watch TV. the product name is too poorly thought out though

Yeah, it's one of the products where you are clearly paying an Apple tax for the hardware, but OTOH it's also one of the products where it's clearest that the Apple tax is paying for software that's both good and consumer-friendly. It's not a hackable box, but if you want to just hand something to a non-technical person to use in their house, it's considerably better than the alternatives.

I think it’s the only set top box that doesn’t show ads or sell viewing data.

Right, this is the only reason I’d go for one if I ever had a reasonable opportunity. My Bravia is a nice TV, it’s solid in many respects, but the UI pushing ads and generally being unstable makes me not enjoy it.

It’s wild to think people can pay $2000 for the pleasure of seeing ads whenever they turn on their television (even in “apps only mod”), not to mention, I never have and will never enable the mic on the remote because fuck that, Google.

Tbh, Google TV may be one of my least favorite and most insidious Google products.

Agreed. But my argument was about the rising price of the hardware itself. If you install third-party apps on it, the software-side also becomes sort of moot? There are open-source alternatives, I’d never recommend Android for your set-top box.

This isn’t the 1st increase they do on these consoles.

Xbox has had two or three other price increases before this most recent one.

1.67x on the ethernet version! $150 -> $250.

Here is an alternative: put any Linux distro that packages Plasma Bigscreen on a old laptop or mini-PC. Add an HDMI-CEC for control with the TV's remote. It even comes with Ethernet!

It's a mess, how would you remotely start up your laptop ?

The plasma big screen is also not very well made, I don't know if you can even compare it to Android tv or apple tv.

And the last nail in the coffin is that you don't get apps on plasma big screen. I need my internet provider app to acees the tv channels, otherwise I'd have to pay even more, and it's not available on Linux of course.

No, really, it's not an alternative.

It’s an alternative, but for the majority not a good alternative (unless you go the OSMC Vero route). I have tried doing this ever since it’s been possible to play video back on a PC (and before that I used SGI’s, and Macs with external video solutions) and continue to try it with many devices and hardware configurations. An Apple TV is easier to maintain and the quality of output is great.

The only thing not so great with Apple TV are the solutions for local media playback, OSMC and a Vero V is a better solution for that.

For reference I do this both for fun and work professionally in video workflow and pipeline solutions for 25+ years.

If you were going to use a streaming service, say Netflix or Prime Video, do you still get 4K and HDR10 this way?

No, you don't. And you probably also use a ton more power than a streaming box too.

Is 4K even relevant at a typical couch distance from the TV/monitor? Besides, 4K content can also be found elsewhere, it does not have to be streamed, and the viewing experience is probably better when it is not.

Yes the difference is noticeable.

Especially, that Netflix 4k seems to be on par with blue ray 1080p.

Why is the image quality on Netflix so bad? Do people really not care about not having 4k when paying for the most expensive tier of the most expensive streaming service?

Consumers consume. Most of those who pay for Netflix Premium don't even know what they are paying for. They believe Netflix that says it's better quality, of convince themselves that they're going to use off-line features on flights.

I’ve never once given a second thought to declining the “opportunity” to upgrade to Netflix 4k - nothing I want to watch requires that kind of quality because none of that content is necessary to begin with. We’ve been considering axing some subscriptions and Netflix is on the top of the list already - I can get my baking show from the highs seas and stranger things is done

A good opportunity to move away from this tier of locked-down garbage devices, which include, among other, consoles (Xbox, PlayStation), streaming boxes (Apple, Amazon, Google), phones with locked bootloaders (Apple, Samsung), Internet-of-Shit home appliances that depend on the "cloud" and non-free apps, and others.

Move to what?

Do I not have to buy RAM and an SSD if I opt for a Framework?

Your point is orthogonal to the fact that the price increases are at a level that affects ANY computing device.

Make your own RAM, n00b!

I am currently in projects using lots of open source hardware and SBCs and I would argue the price increases on those have been even worse (if they are available at all) because those companies are competing for the same components but without the buying power of Apple. It’s a bloodbath out there.

You can still get any of these devices for the price of 16 GB DDR5 or 32 GB DDR4 (which limits the choice and availability of CPUs). It's a terrible time to build freedom PCs.

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