>The Apple TV is the same price

This is a funny framing. For those who don't know, the Apple TV 4K debuted at $129 USD. Apple then slightly improved the remote and bumped the price up to $199 USD.

Now today they announced a marginal upgrade -- they added a microphone in the base unit and not just on-demanded toggled on the remote, such that it will always be listening, along with a slightly improved CPU -- and they pumped the price to $299 USD.

So sure, the Apple TV is the "same price", to basically universal derision because they took a successful product and decided to turn it into a shakedown.

And to the root post about how great of a success this will be, virtually an identical top-ranked comment happened in the Vision Pro release. I mean, every flopped product has someone doing the "wow I guess it's going to be a huge success" when people question the point.

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compounding_it 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My guess is that memory is the real reason for the price upgrade. Apple probably added some things to mask the price increase but the real reason is the chip. The old 4GB ram in A15 Bionic probably bumped in price so it went up to 199$ and now the new chip costs even more. Also its easier for Apple to make the same chip in a lot of hardware as opposed to having multiple chips being made, especially when its fused with memory and thats costing a lot.

	▲	llm_nerd 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, Apple's BoM has definitely increased given the pressures on the fabs. By no analysis remotely at the pace that their MSRP has, however. The primary reason the price has spiralled is that Apple is running out of new markets, so every product needs to feed the greed to a greatest extent as they increasingly squeeze their existing customers. It's the same reason why there are paid ads in the AppStore, on Apple Maps, and so on. Expect this behaviour to become more obvious.

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troupo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And AppleTV which could've been the hub for home automation is crippled in every possible way and is all but useless for this purpose.

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a012 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Vision Pro would be successful if they priced it to sub $1000