alt Hacker NewsI'm a little surprised at the price (especially when their newly-announced HomeView is the same price, and it has a screen!).
I love this product: it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data. I have two older ones and was looking to get something that supported 4K but waited for this to come out.
$300 might be a decent price if you use it for all of the things that it can do, but if all you're doing is launching streaming apps, $200 was already on the high end for that. $300 seems...a bit much.
Anything I'm missing here? The silver lining is that this product is almost certainly still in the "pay money then forget about it for a decade" tier, which is nice.
I'm also wondering if/how the "add up to four homepods" feature compares to "getting a soundbar". In the other thread for this someone noted that the HomePods only work with this box; so if you're running a game console that's no bueno. But apart from that, if $600 on an Apple TV + two HomePods mini delivers something comparable to a ~$500 soundbar, that's a decent value proposition.
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> mining my viewing habits
apple tv isn't private, apple does mine your viewing habits, read their eula.
You should also know that all non-apple apps like netflix have unrestricted network access and can/will do the same.
It is too bad that people accept apple's marketing about privacy, because they have dark patterns, they collect telemetry, they don't let you block it, and they help apps do the same things.
A privacy policy is not the same as being able to firewall your device, but apple doesn't allow firewalls.
> it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data.
It's mind-blowing how one of the most advanced technology forums on the internet can take privacy for granted just because the marketing of a for-profit corporation with previous histories of privacy violations (there's even lawsuits) claims their closed source device connected 24/7 to the internet, is private.
I've literally been waiting since 2022 for this.
I purchased the 2021 ATV just before the 2022 was released. It struggles with AV1 and VP9 (Infuse really struggles, VLC is better but still a problem). I just wanted the faster CPU (for software decoding AV1 and VP9). Almost bought the 2022 version in 2024 for that but didn't want to buy a 2 year old product.
Didn't expect to have to wait 4 years, and now the price is more than doubled. I can afford it but refuse to do so, especially since I don't use any of the onboard storage for anything.
Others have already pointed out that your assumption of Apple TV not spying on you is wrong, I’d like to make a meta-comment on that.
Apple regards privacy as a feature, and I mean that precisely: some places they implement it, other places they decide it’s not worth it, and they only ever tell you about the former. A good example is iMessage: everybody in tech knows it’s E2EE, many fewer realize that the other three copies of your iMessage data on Apple’s servers are just, uh, not encrypted.
You can’t have the same intuition for Apple and privacy that you would for a group like Signal. You need to instead ask yourself whether you fully understand what you need, then whether Apple has guaranteed precisely and fully that, without weasel words.
I bought one earlier this year right before they announced the $70 price increase. Going from $130 to $200 to $300 in the same year is crazy.
The person in the other thread is incorrect, an Apple TV connected to HomePods can be configured to advertise HDMI Audio Return Channel so that anything your TV is displaying has its audio routed through it.
Having said that I eventually replaced my pair of HomePod Minis with a Sonos soundbar because I wanted something with a bit more oomph to it, although I'd maybe have considered getting a pair of the big HomePods and using the Minis as rear speakers had this been available at the time.
Doesn't seem like it. Siri AI is not even available in all languages yet either. $429 CAD is crazy. You can get a whole mini PC and a Bluetooth remote for less and slap LibreElec on it even at today's crazy prices. And it'll be a better remote too.
HomeView, HomePod and AppleTV should be one device. A powerful home server + a bunch of low powered clients and receivers all over the home. No need for 8gb RAM in all of them..
I was watching stuff on my Chromecast 4k or whatever. That occasionally stutters or frameskips, so I moved to my PS5 pro.
The PS5 pro has plenty of horsepower. Fewer problems, but I see it occasionally skip or freeze slightly when playing back from some providers.
I've read Apple TV somehow has this figured out, and since I expected a new model I've been waiting for this one. It's not cheap but I want to be able to stream TV/film without any of those issues. I'm not quite ready to go the super premium route by getting a kaleidescape. I also want to use the bluetooth functionality from time to time.
Yeah it's way too expensive. I would like to upgrade my 4K ATV to a more powerful chip but not for $300. I only use mine for streaming and already have a home theater Atmos setup. Couldn't care less about Siri, AI features, microphones, etc.
At this price I’d also want a Dolby vision Blu-ray player. Strong overlap with this product and physical media people.
Maybe they'll release a 32/64 GB version once they have harvested the whales.
If it has decent RAM and had it been cheaper, OpenAI alone will keep this product out of stock. This is Apple's love for the retail consumers that they were forced to increase the price just so that Sam would think twice before hoarding them.
It’s worth it for me because I’m still using an Apple TV 4K 2017 that I bought in 2019. It struggles with a lot of Plex content. The price tag does feel high, but taking into account post-Covid inflation and component cost increases due to the AI bubble, it makes sense. An Nvidia shield pro cost exactly the same (in Canada, at least).
My home theatre set up is through a Denon receiver. I love my gen1 HomePods for listening to music, but I can’t understand why anyone would buy four HomePods rather than a proper surround setup.
I use mine for average of ~7 years, so that helps justify just biting the bullet and paying for whatever is best at the time.
> $300 might be a decent price if you use it for all of the things that it can do
What exactly can it do besides launching streaming apps?
This has been Apple's niche forever. Create a product with a few extra bells and whistles, better craftsmanship, and charge a fat premium that people who care about those things are willing to pay.