Via MacRumors’s Buyer Guide, the current third-gen Apple TV 4K models were introduced in October 2022, and sport the A15 Bionic chip that debuted with the iPhones 13 in 2021. It’s widely believed that new hardware models are coming this fall. I mentioned yesterday that the steep price increases ($130 → $200 for the 64 GB base model; $150 → $250 for the 128 GB model with Ethernet and Thread networking) move Apple TV further out of line compared to the discount set-top boxes and sticks from companies like Roku and Amazon. But even setting aside the prices of competing devices, it just feels wrong to hike prices this much for four-year-old hardware running five-year-old pre-AI silicon. The higher-end model’s price went up 67 percent!
The only way this makes sense is if these prices are really meant for the upcoming new hardware, and those new models are more ambitious home hubs that warrant $200–250 prices. This makes the current models a really bad deal for the next few months, but come September or October, Apple can introduce next-gen Apple Intelligence-ready Apple TV hardware and the prices can remain $200/250. It’s Apple, so maybe the new hardware will have prices that are even higher, and these increases are just stop-gaps to ease the eventual sticker shock upon the new hardware’s reveal.
But as things stand today, no platform in Apple’s portfolio came out of these price increases looking worse than Apple TV. It’s especially painful to think about people buying one now, at these prices, only to have their purchase obsoleted in September or October.