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Comment by barake | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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