The second the $69 price drop was announced, the first thought I had was, new Apple TV in the pipeline, price dropped to clear out inventory. That said, this is a rumor, and the $69 Apple TV is a great deal.
New Apple TV reportedly debuting at WWDC, with App Store and Siri integration
I had the same thought. When Costco dropped their price to $67 with a free $15 iTunes card, I bit anyway. I’ll be watching HBO Now next month with no regrets, while Apple gets all the new kinks worked out of my next Apple TV in 2016 or later.
The other interesting thing to me is that the Apple TV button on the Apple Store now says “Starting at $69” instead of the flat “$99” it used to be. That to me reads as there’s going to be an expansion of the line soon.
Yeah, that’s a clear a tell as Apple ever gives.
When I look at the new MacBook (power efficient chip, no fan, limited ports) I really wonder if they shouldn’t be using ARM chips. I know this has come up before but I never saw a laptop that needs an ARM chip more than the new MacBook.
So I’m wondering if WWDC is where they announce compiler engineering for supporting ARM based OSX.
But, has Apple in recent memory at all used a price drop to clear inventory?
I’d be royally surprised if Apple didn’t have a skunkworks version doing just that.
… on the other hand, if Apple were to announce such a device at WWDC, why would the do that just 3 months after announcing the new MacBook.
My 2¢:
The threat of Apple making their own Mac processors is the leverage they have to influence Intel’s roadmap. The moment Intel slips up, like IBM did circa the G5 vs Intel’s offerings in the early-mid 00’s, that’s when Apple introduces the new Macs.
Voice integration … I don’t see us shouting across a room to give commands to Apple TV. It will likely be mediated through the use of an iPhone (or Apple Watch?). In that case, Siri already works with AppleTV … in a fashion.
The most obvious indicator that there was more to this story was from Tim Cook himself, who not once, but twice said on stage when talking about the TV said, “…and this is just the beginning”.
It makes sense for Apple to have a 1080p, simpler streaming option regardless of what any new hardware offers. The A8 process hopefully bodes for 4K support. If not for iTunes own content, then at least will allow for partners like Netflix or HBO to supply 4K material via the device.
4K … I bet ISPs are just salivating over all Netflix and HBO customers downloading/streaming one 4K show after another. 🙂
Maybe not so much.
For me here in Canada. For an extra $10 on my bill I get unlimited bandwidth- so there’d be no difference for me regardless.
But for everyone else, 4K distribution on a wider scale is tied to h.265, a more processor intensive but efficient video distribution codec- which can potentially provide great looking 4K video at only marginally more bandwidth than existing high-quality 1080p video. But this will require new hardware to do the h.265 decoding, which the A8 already does in the iPhone6.
Gene Munster, Gene Munster, Gene Munster.
Just hoping one of his unpaid interns searching for his name lands on this page.
Or you could just have a mic in the remote.