The New Price Of Apple TV 4K

The Apple TV hardware has two main issues: lagging OS, and price. This week’s hardware refresh naturally didn’t do much to change the software experience — although Siri features a slightly more modernised UI and per-user voice recognition now — but they did tackle the price problem.

The previous lineup was $149 for Apple TV HD, a product first released in 2015, and two models of Apple TV 4K varying by storage capacity; $179 for 32 GB and $199 for 64 GB. This was simply outrageous pricing, in a market where competent 4K streaming sticks can be picked up for under $49. The premium advantages of the Apple TV platform were simply not worth four times more. I bought it because I’m a sucker, but I’d never recommend it to family or friends.

The new lineup is $129 for Apple TV 4K with 64 GB and $149 for Apple TV 4K with 128 GB. This time around, the higher-end model also differs in features other than storage; the more expensive Apple TV has an Ethernet port for wired networking and a Thread radio, for communicating with the latest Thread-only smart home devices.

In raw numbers, the Apple TV 4K is 28% cheaper than it was a week ago. The cheapest Apple TV you can buy is now 15% cheaper, and actually of respectable, recommendable, spec: the latest A15 chip, full 4K HDR support, and plenty of storage for future-proofing / space for downloading a dozen Apple Arcade games. And the obsolete Apple TV HD is gone for good, thankfully.

This is fantastic news. The lineup is much more reasonable now. If someone is mad that their Roku or Fire Stick is ad-ridden or behaving laggy, suggesting a $129 solution is now possible — an order of magnitude more palatable than the old $179 price point.

That being said, $129 is still too much for the Apple TV to capture significant market share. I wish Apple went further with stripping down the base model to push the price down more. $99 really feels like the target to hit, and they didn’t quite get there. A hypothetical 32 GB Apple TV model for $99 would have been appealing; very few will benefit from having 64 GB or 128 GB onboard storage. If you are just streaming video, you don’t care about the storage space.