There's no reason 4k video can't be down sampled and then sent out as a 1080p stream. This is digital content we're talking about. The A8 is more than capable of doing this in real-time.
Of course, that's how the iPhone will handle it. But anybody with a 4K set is not going to be interested in a 1080p down sampled video feed which they went to the trouble to shoot in 4K on a device with limited storage to accommodate it.
Of course, that's how the iPhone will handle it. But anybody with a 4K set is not going to be interested in a 1080p down sampled video feed which they went to the trouble to shoot in 4K on a device with limited storage to accommodate it.
You always win a list war if you control the list.
I love (hate) the subtle psychological effects here, too, where they highlight in green (good) their entire spec list while NOT highlighting any of their competitors that match the respective specs.
Highlighting, in virtually every other published comparison, is done across the board whenever specs are 1. the best and 2. match. Not doing this for matching specs gives the immediate appearance of being better universally.
You always win a list war if you control the list.
That's true, but there are a lot of valid points covered on their list. They did however leave out the price. The Shield TV starts at $199 with the gaming controller included, clearly higher than the competition.
I love (hate) the subtle psychological effects here, too, where they highlight in green (good) their entire spec list while NOT highlighting any of their competitors that match the respective specs.
Highlighting, in virtually every other published comparison, is done across the board whenever specs are 1. the best and 2. match. Not doing this for matching specs gives the immediate appearance of being better universally.
I think the green was more to differentiate their product (nVidia's brand color is green), but I do agree, it does have that psychological effect of something being "good".
The Shield has many ports of PC titles like Half Life 2, Resident Evil 5 or Borderlands: Pre Sequel.
During the reveal, nVidia was showing Crysis 3 running on the hardware.
Native titles are likely the least appealing factor for gamers. The ability to stream titles from a PC with a GeForce GPU, or use nVidia's GRID game streaming service, are the areas where it shines. GRID's service, which doesn't require you owning a gaming PC, can run games at very high settings, much higher than a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
As for SoC performance, the GPU's capabilities are well beyond what GFXBench 3.0 measures. It uses a Maxwell GPU which is capable of many things that Imagination's PowerVR 6XT (Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV) cannot do. CPU performance is still higher than the A8's.
As a media player? It's futureproof for the years to come. The next step up would be a HTPC.
KitGuru Says: While Nvidia no longer addresses smartphones and tablets with its Tegra chips, it still needs to offer predictability to customers in new segments. Apparently, “ping-pong” is designed to provide it. The biggest problems right now seem to be general-purpose cores. Development cycle of CPU cores at Nvidia does not seem to be aligned with development cycle of GPU architectures. As a result, the future of Tegra does not seem to be absolutely clear, at least from where we stand.
The Erista is supposed to be on the roadmap for 2015 fab'd by TSMC at 16nm, but who knows if that will happen, or when. I'm just thinking that Nvidia won't be able to keep up development on the Shield indefinitely against the onslaught of more general streaming boxes with gaming.
The Shield has many ports of PC titles like Half Life 2, Resident Evil 5 or Borderlands: Pre Sequel.
As a media player? It's futureproof for the years to come. The next step up would be a HTPC.
The Shield doesn't sell very many units. NVidia's whole Tegra business was $578m last year, which includes the Shield. If it was all for $199 units, they'd sell 2.9m units per year but Tegra chips are in a few products like tablets so they probably don't even sell 1m units of the box per year vs 8m+ for Apple. NVidia is pushing the gaming side over the TV side as you have to buy a remote separately and the controller is included. Gamers would be better off with a last-gen console (this applies to the ?TV too as far as gamers are concerned). Apple can appeal to more people focusing on TV/apps/channels first and casual gamers second. If someone already had a console, I'd expect they'd be more likely to add an ?TV than a Shield to the device list.
The reason 4K isn't a crucial factor is because from a normal viewing distance, upscaled 1080p isn't easily distinguishable from native 4K. You can test this with photos (avoid quoting the image).
This crop would be like a 10" square (filling an iPad Air size) viewed from across the room. You can see the difference clearly up close but moving further away, they get harder to distinguish quite quickly.
When you see 1080p on a 1080p TV, you are only looking at a 2 Megapixel image at all times so you will see jagged edges like you do on a non-Retina display. For both 1080p and 4K on a 4K display, you are looking at an 8 Megapixel image and the difference between 4K and 1080p sources is that 1080p is interpolating the existing pixels which may or may not match the actual 4K data so it's filling in 75% of the display's pixels with fake/interpolated data. This leads to a blurring of the image but from a sofa, you're not going to notice that much of a difference, mainly when you walk up close to the display.
It's obviously better having the 4K option and 4K panels are selling in enough volume to justify it but as we've seen with Apple's previous products, they gradually bring features out over time. Other manufacturers like to throw everything in at once and then they market about having the features years ago but the effect is that they run out of sales momentum quickly because they have nothing to offer buyers next year or the year after. There is still a possibility that Apple will want to make their own UHD display when the price point is right.
If they stick with the box route, Apple can put in an A9 chip and gigabit ethernet in a year or two and market it as both a 4K media and 4K gaming platform to people who bought the current model for its apps and gaming and get another round of upgrades whereas the Fire TV and Shield have already expired that upgrade feature.
Better than native, worse than real. Just like the upconverter DVD players for 480 to 1080 and just like we’ll have to deal with for the next few years until 2160 is more widespread. What more to be said.
The Shield has many ports of PC titles like Half Life 2, Resident Evil 5 or Borderlands: Pre Sequel.
During the reveal, nVidia was showing Crysis 3 running on the hardware.
Native titles are likely the least appealing factor for gamers. The ability to stream titles from a PC with a GeForce GPU, or use nVidia's GRID game streaming service, are the areas where it shines. GRID's service, which doesn't require you owning a gaming PC, can run games at very high settings, much higher than a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
As for SoC performance, the GPU's capabilities are well beyond what GFXBench 3.0 measures. It uses a Maxwell GPU which is capable of many things that Imagination's PowerVR 6XT (Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV) cannot do. CPU performance is still higher than the A8's.
As a media player? It's futureproof for the years to come. The next step up would be a HTPC.
Crysis 3 was also available on the PS3 and Xbox 360. It's hardly fitting of the phrase "can it run Crysis" anymore since the hardware you run it on will have a direct impact on visuals and gameplay. It's misleading to use Crysis 3 as an example considering it can scale across a wide range of hardware.
And if the Shield TV was actually capable of playing full AAA titles, then there would be no need to offer streaming from your PC or GRID> And have you seen the reviews of people who tried streaming games? It's all over the place where some had an excellent experience and others found it unplayable.
CPU performance is slightly higher than the A8. As to Maxwell you can only get so much performance per watt (manufacturing process is what really helps here), and considering how little power it consumes it's ridiculous to think it can get anywhere near a modern console in performance. So regardless of what you say about benchmarks not fully testing its abilities, you can easily measure its power consumption. Maxwell still has to abide by the laws of physics, and while CPU and GPU companies are always finding a way to extract more performance per watt, nobody really has chip that can, for example, do twice the work per watt. Companies are usually pretty close in this regard.
Future proof? How can a niche product that developers aren't supporting be future proof? Especially something using Android as the OS?
I think people are going to be shocked to see just how fast the (superior) development community for iOS (tvOS) is when it comes to bringing new Apps to Apple TV.
Apple really missed the target with this, its fourth iteration of AppleTV. A lack of 4K (even if it is still limited by a lack of 4K TV programming...productions will increase rapidly as my local electrical stores in London have all but stopped selling 1080p models) makes any news of a 3 x 4K editing capability feature with other iDevices completely superfluous. Apple should obsess about a coherent ecosystem across their product range. ATV is also a very expensive TV box when one adds in components many competitors have as standard.
No webview to assist developers with real-time URL's.
Another piece of SNAFU tech from Apple. With Steve gone, Apple are now just retreading historical blind paths. Not a whiff of innovative thinking from the current hardware and software teams. Worse, a fragmenting product range with no overview.
Incomplete. We can only compare the 4th Gen Apple TV on paper. Getting our hands on one, discovering the abundance or dearth of content available in the App Store, and seeing how well it actually works will have to wait until the unit goes on sale, and we can bring you a more definitive answer as to whether Apple TV is the future of TV, or Apple is barking up the wrong tree.
Yup. Another fairly uninformative "review" by the increasingly misnamed "AppleInsider" site. Oh well.
Apple really missed the target with this, its fourth iteration of AppleTV. A lack of 4K (even if it is still limited by a lack of 4K TV programming...productions will increase rapidly as my local electrical stores in London have all but stopped selling 1080p models) makes any news of a 3 x 4K editing capability feature with other iDevices completely superfluous. Apple should obsess about a coherent ecosystem across their product range. ATV is also a very expensive TV box when one adds in components many competitors have as standard.
No webview to assist developers with real-time URL's.
Another piece of SNAFU tech from Apple. With Steve gone, Apple are now just retreading historical blind paths. Not a whiff of innovative thinking from the current hardware and software teams. Worse, a fragmenting product range with no overview.
The Shield doesn't sell very many units. NVidia's whole Tegra business was $578m last year, which includes the Shield. If it was all for $199 units, they'd sell 2.9m units per year but Tegra chips are in a few products like tablets so they probably don't even sell 1m units of the box per year vs 8m+ for Apple. NVidia is pushing the gaming side over the TV side as you have to buy a remote separately and the controller is included. Gamers would be better off with a last-gen console (this applies to the ?TV too as far as gamers are concerned). Apple can appeal to more people focusing on TV/apps/channels first and casual gamers second. If someone already had a console, I'd expect they'd be more likely to add an ?TV than a Shield to the device list.
The reason 4K isn't a crucial factor is because from a normal viewing distance, upscaled 1080p isn't easily distinguishable from native 4K. You can test this with photos (avoid quoting the image).
This crop would be like a 10" square (filling an iPad Air size) viewed from across the room. You can see the difference clearly up close but moving further away, they get harder to distinguish quite quickly.
When you see 1080p on a 1080p TV, you are only looking at a 2 Megapixel image at all times so you will see jagged edges like you do on a non-Retina display. For both 1080p and 4K on a 4K display, you are looking at an 8 Megapixel image and the difference between 4K and 1080p sources is that 1080p is interpolating the existing pixels which may or may not match the actual 4K data so it's filling in 75% of the display's pixels with fake/interpolated data. This leads to a blurring of the image but from a sofa, you're not going to notice that much of a difference, mainly when you walk up close to the display.
It's obviously better having the 4K option and 4K panels are selling in enough volume to justify it but as we've seen with Apple's previous products, they gradually bring features out over time. Other manufacturers like to throw everything in at once and then they market about having the features years ago but the effect is that they run out of sales momentum quickly because they have nothing to offer buyers next year or the year after. There is still a possibility that Apple will want to make their own UHD display when the price point is right.
If they stick with the box route, Apple can put in an A9 chip and gigabit ethernet in a year or two and market it as both a 4K media and 4K gaming platform to people who bought the current model for its apps and gaming and get another round of upgrades whereas the Fire TV and Shield have already expired that upgrade feature.
This all assumes you are viewing the same size screen in all cases. 4K makes larger screens work better. 4K also allows for a wider color space and better dynamic range. 4K is a step on the way to 8K, 8K is IMAX quality. Here is a better comparison
I used a Roku at a Bed and Breakfast. It was very slow to change menus and Netflix app was very slow and cumbersome to browse movies. It worked best if you knew the name of the movie. Then we stayed at another bed and breakfast that had AppleTV. What a difference! That experience convinced me to get AppleTV....
I am surprised how seldom this aspect of the comparison is mentioned. I have not pursued anything like a complete sampling of competitors but I do have a Roku and its support of Plex, for example, is just painfully crude. In this case I compared it to the Mac client which may be unfair but an iOS version could easily have the same superior design and execution. This is an example where comparing specs can be unimportant since developer talent is probably much more important.
The overriding advantage of the new ?TV is that it will benefit from being the only setup box with access to the Apple TV App Store. Other issues matter but they are dwarfed by the reality of having the best app store (yes, it is the best before the first app ships because it shares the same architecture and programming talent of the iOS app store).
This all assumes you are viewing the same size screen in all cases. 4K makes larger screens work better. 4K also allows for a wider color space and better dynamic range. 4K is a step on the way to 8K, 8K is IMAX quality. Here is a better comparison
It all depends on the source. Streaming source isn't going to give you the same output as a 4k BD, whatever they are branding it as. Most people will be happy with low bandwidth 4k streaming, and likely won't even notice the small visual differences between it and 1080P.
I am surprised how seldom this aspect of the comparison is mentioned. I have not pursued anything like a complete sampling of competitors but I do have a Roku and its support of Plex, for example, is just painfully crude. In this case I compared it to the Mac client which may be unfair but an iOS version could easily have the same superior design and execution. This is an example where comparing specs can be unimportant since developer talent is probably much more important.
The overriding advantage of the new [SIZE=13px]?[/SIZE]TV is that it will benefit from being the only setup box with access to the Apple TV App Store. Other issues matter but they are dwarfed by the reality of having the best app store (yes, it is the best before the first app ships because it shares the same architecture and programming talent of the iOS app store).
Excellent points. While everyone seems focused on the lack of 4K/UHD/... they appear to be missing the most important new aspect of the Apple TV, which is the App Store.
Long term I would be very concerned were I Roku. Amazon, Apple and Google all have App Stores which is a big advantage. The offerings from Roku make it difficult to classify as an App Store. Google has never been able to commit to a product long term and Google TV/Android TV has never caught on. ChromeCast is an impulse buy and is a fairly low end media player. The Amazon Fire TV and the new Apple TV would seem to warrant serious consideration. The Fire TV does not support Chromecast and is only sold in a limited number of countries. Amazon has a weaker App Store than Apple. Except for 4K support with the new Fire TV ( is there even a 4K standard for streaming and such, or are we talking BETA vs VHS?), and the ability to side load Kodi, the only real advantage of the Fire TV is Amazon Prime. Not a bad choice really but in the longer term the App Store from Apple should propel the Apple TV far beyond anything the Fire TV will be doing.
Plex will be coming to the Fire TV, hopefully not the terrible version on the Fire TV.
This preview is missing a very important component of the future of the new Apple TV: a streaming TV service.
While Roku, Amazon and Google fight over who has the best access to Netflix, Apple will be offering access to live television and disrupt the cord cutter movement.
Live TV, gaming, photos, apps, music and home automaton, all in one box. That's gonna be tough to match.
You really believe it's going to be an Apple exclusive? The live TV providers are going to want to be on all the streamers/platforms to maximize revenue.
You really believe it's going to be an Apple exclusive? The live TV providers are going to want to be on all the streamers/platforms to maximize revenue.
I agree that major streamers will all eventually have some kind of live TV streaming. I'm not sure in what form as live TV does not have a whole lot to offer. Apart from sports, special events and news is there any reason why scheduled delivery of shows is required? Any reason to have 30% of the time interrupted by commercials! There are really fine TV shows at this time. If the cable providers just vanished people might really enjoy TV.
Who knows, maybe Apple will come up with an Apple Video service based on the iTunes Store video offerings. Apple is probably the only one in a position to really disrupt the way we watch TV.
The TV networks probably have a strong hand now. It will only diminish with time. People put up with TV. There's no great love for the current delivery process. It's kind of ridiculous.
Comments
You always win a list war if you control the list.
Yawn.
I love (hate) the subtle psychological effects here, too, where they highlight in green (good) their entire spec list while NOT highlighting any of their competitors that match the respective specs.
Highlighting, in virtually every other published comparison, is done across the board whenever specs are 1. the best and 2. match. Not doing this for matching specs gives the immediate appearance of being better universally.
You always win a list war if you control the list.
That's true, but there are a lot of valid points covered on their list. They did however leave out the price. The Shield TV starts at $199 with the gaming controller included, clearly higher than the competition.
I love (hate) the subtle psychological effects here, too, where they highlight in green (good) their entire spec list while NOT highlighting any of their competitors that match the respective specs.
Highlighting, in virtually every other published comparison, is done across the board whenever specs are 1. the best and 2. match. Not doing this for matching specs gives the immediate appearance of being better universally.
I think the green was more to differentiate their product (nVidia's brand color is green), but I do agree, it does have that psychological effect of something being "good".
The Shield has many ports of PC titles like Half Life 2, Resident Evil 5 or Borderlands: Pre Sequel.
During the reveal, nVidia was showing Crysis 3 running on the hardware.
Native titles are likely the least appealing factor for gamers. The ability to stream titles from a PC with a GeForce GPU, or use nVidia's GRID game streaming service, are the areas where it shines. GRID's service, which doesn't require you owning a gaming PC, can run games at very high settings, much higher than a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
As for SoC performance, the GPU's capabilities are well beyond what GFXBench 3.0 measures. It uses a Maxwell GPU which is capable of many things that Imagination's PowerVR 6XT (Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV) cannot do. CPU performance is still higher than the A8's.
As a media player? It's futureproof for the years to come. The next step up would be a HTPC.
KitGuru Says: While Nvidia no longer addresses smartphones and tablets with its Tegra chips, it still needs to offer predictability to customers in new segments. Apparently, “ping-pong” is designed to provide it. The biggest problems right now seem to be general-purpose cores. Development cycle of CPU cores at Nvidia does not seem to be aligned with development cycle of GPU architectures. As a result, the future of Tegra does not seem to be absolutely clear, at least from where we stand.
http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/nvidia-ceo-touts-ping-pong-strategy-for-tegra-system-on-chips/
The Erista is supposed to be on the roadmap for 2015 fab'd by TSMC at 16nm, but who knows if that will happen, or when. I'm just thinking that Nvidia won't be able to keep up development on the Shield indefinitely against the onslaught of more general streaming boxes with gaming.
The Shield doesn't sell very many units. NVidia's whole Tegra business was $578m last year, which includes the Shield. If it was all for $199 units, they'd sell 2.9m units per year but Tegra chips are in a few products like tablets so they probably don't even sell 1m units of the box per year vs 8m+ for Apple. NVidia is pushing the gaming side over the TV side as you have to buy a remote separately and the controller is included. Gamers would be better off with a last-gen console (this applies to the ?TV too as far as gamers are concerned). Apple can appeal to more people focusing on TV/apps/channels first and casual gamers second. If someone already had a console, I'd expect they'd be more likely to add an ?TV than a Shield to the device list.
The reason 4K isn't a crucial factor is because from a normal viewing distance, upscaled 1080p isn't easily distinguishable from native 4K. You can test this with photos (avoid quoting the image).
http://wallpaperrs.com/uploads/girls/face-breathtaking-hd-wallpaper-142952116610.jpg
This crop would be like a 10" square (filling an iPad Air size) viewed from across the room. You can see the difference clearly up close but moving further away, they get harder to distinguish quite quickly.
When you see 1080p on a 1080p TV, you are only looking at a 2 Megapixel image at all times so you will see jagged edges like you do on a non-Retina display. For both 1080p and 4K on a 4K display, you are looking at an 8 Megapixel image and the difference between 4K and 1080p sources is that 1080p is interpolating the existing pixels which may or may not match the actual 4K data so it's filling in 75% of the display's pixels with fake/interpolated data. This leads to a blurring of the image but from a sofa, you're not going to notice that much of a difference, mainly when you walk up close to the display.
It's obviously better having the 4K option and 4K panels are selling in enough volume to justify it but as we've seen with Apple's previous products, they gradually bring features out over time. Other manufacturers like to throw everything in at once and then they market about having the features years ago but the effect is that they run out of sales momentum quickly because they have nothing to offer buyers next year or the year after. There is still a possibility that Apple will want to make their own UHD display when the price point is right.
If they stick with the box route, Apple can put in an A9 chip and gigabit ethernet in a year or two and market it as both a 4K media and 4K gaming platform to people who bought the current model for its apps and gaming and get another round of upgrades whereas the Fire TV and Shield have already expired that upgrade feature.
Better than native, worse than real. Just like the upconverter DVD players for 480 to 1080 and just like we’ll have to deal with for the next few years until 2160 is more widespread. What more to be said.
The Shield has many ports of PC titles like Half Life 2, Resident Evil 5 or Borderlands: Pre Sequel.
During the reveal, nVidia was showing Crysis 3 running on the hardware.
Native titles are likely the least appealing factor for gamers. The ability to stream titles from a PC with a GeForce GPU, or use nVidia's GRID game streaming service, are the areas where it shines. GRID's service, which doesn't require you owning a gaming PC, can run games at very high settings, much higher than a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One.
As for SoC performance, the GPU's capabilities are well beyond what GFXBench 3.0 measures. It uses a Maxwell GPU which is capable of many things that Imagination's PowerVR 6XT (Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV) cannot do. CPU performance is still higher than the A8's.
As a media player? It's futureproof for the years to come. The next step up would be a HTPC.
Crysis 3 was also available on the PS3 and Xbox 360. It's hardly fitting of the phrase "can it run Crysis" anymore since the hardware you run it on will have a direct impact on visuals and gameplay. It's misleading to use Crysis 3 as an example considering it can scale across a wide range of hardware.
And if the Shield TV was actually capable of playing full AAA titles, then there would be no need to offer streaming from your PC or GRID> And have you seen the reviews of people who tried streaming games? It's all over the place where some had an excellent experience and others found it unplayable.
CPU performance is slightly higher than the A8. As to Maxwell you can only get so much performance per watt (manufacturing process is what really helps here), and considering how little power it consumes it's ridiculous to think it can get anywhere near a modern console in performance. So regardless of what you say about benchmarks not fully testing its abilities, you can easily measure its power consumption. Maxwell still has to abide by the laws of physics, and while CPU and GPU companies are always finding a way to extract more performance per watt, nobody really has chip that can, for example, do twice the work per watt. Companies are usually pretty close in this regard.
Future proof? How can a niche product that developers aren't supporting be future proof? Especially something using Android as the OS?
I think people are going to be shocked to see just how fast the (superior) development community for iOS (tvOS) is when it comes to bringing new Apps to Apple TV.
No webview to assist developers with real-time URL's.
Another piece of SNAFU tech from Apple. With Steve gone, Apple are now just retreading historical blind paths. Not a whiff of innovative thinking from the current hardware and software teams. Worse, a fragmenting product range with no overview.
Nope. How this comparison should have ended:
Incomplete. We can only compare the 4th Gen Apple TV on paper. Getting our hands on one, discovering the abundance or dearth of content available in the App Store, and seeing how well it actually works will have to wait until the unit goes on sale, and we can bring you a more definitive answer as to whether Apple TV is the future of TV, or Apple is barking up the wrong tree.
Yup. Another fairly uninformative "review" by the increasingly misnamed "AppleInsider" site. Oh well.
Apple really missed the target with this, its fourth iteration of AppleTV. A lack of 4K (even if it is still limited by a lack of 4K TV programming...productions will increase rapidly as my local electrical stores in London have all but stopped selling 1080p models) makes any news of a 3 x 4K editing capability feature with other iDevices completely superfluous. Apple should obsess about a coherent ecosystem across their product range. ATV is also a very expensive TV box when one adds in components many competitors have as standard.
No webview to assist developers with real-time URL's.
Another piece of SNAFU tech from Apple. With Steve gone, Apple are now just retreading historical blind paths. Not a whiff of innovative thinking from the current hardware and software teams. Worse, a fragmenting product range with no overview.
Nope.
The Shield doesn't sell very many units. NVidia's whole Tegra business was $578m last year, which includes the Shield. If it was all for $199 units, they'd sell 2.9m units per year but Tegra chips are in a few products like tablets so they probably don't even sell 1m units of the box per year vs 8m+ for Apple. NVidia is pushing the gaming side over the TV side as you have to buy a remote separately and the controller is included. Gamers would be better off with a last-gen console (this applies to the ?TV too as far as gamers are concerned). Apple can appeal to more people focusing on TV/apps/channels first and casual gamers second. If someone already had a console, I'd expect they'd be more likely to add an ?TV than a Shield to the device list.
The reason 4K isn't a crucial factor is because from a normal viewing distance, upscaled 1080p isn't easily distinguishable from native 4K. You can test this with photos (avoid quoting the image).
http://wallpaperrs.com/uploads/girls/face-breathtaking-hd-wallpaper-142952116610.jpg
This crop would be like a 10" square (filling an iPad Air size) viewed from across the room. You can see the difference clearly up close but moving further away, they get harder to distinguish quite quickly.
When you see 1080p on a 1080p TV, you are only looking at a 2 Megapixel image at all times so you will see jagged edges like you do on a non-Retina display. For both 1080p and 4K on a 4K display, you are looking at an 8 Megapixel image and the difference between 4K and 1080p sources is that 1080p is interpolating the existing pixels which may or may not match the actual 4K data so it's filling in 75% of the display's pixels with fake/interpolated data. This leads to a blurring of the image but from a sofa, you're not going to notice that much of a difference, mainly when you walk up close to the display.
It's obviously better having the 4K option and 4K panels are selling in enough volume to justify it but as we've seen with Apple's previous products, they gradually bring features out over time. Other manufacturers like to throw everything in at once and then they market about having the features years ago but the effect is that they run out of sales momentum quickly because they have nothing to offer buyers next year or the year after. There is still a possibility that Apple will want to make their own UHD display when the price point is right.
If they stick with the box route, Apple can put in an A9 chip and gigabit ethernet in a year or two and market it as both a 4K media and 4K gaming platform to people who bought the current model for its apps and gaming and get another round of upgrades whereas the Fire TV and Shield have already expired that upgrade feature.
This all assumes you are viewing the same size screen in all cases. 4K makes larger screens work better. 4K also allows for a wider color space and better dynamic range. 4K is a step on the way to 8K, 8K is IMAX quality. Here is a better comparison
I used a Roku at a Bed and Breakfast. It was very slow to change menus and Netflix app was very slow and cumbersome to browse movies. It worked best if you knew the name of the movie. Then we stayed at another bed and breakfast that had AppleTV. What a difference! That experience convinced me to get AppleTV....
I am surprised how seldom this aspect of the comparison is mentioned. I have not pursued anything like a complete sampling of competitors but I do have a Roku and its support of Plex, for example, is just painfully crude. In this case I compared it to the Mac client which may be unfair but an iOS version could easily have the same superior design and execution. This is an example where comparing specs can be unimportant since developer talent is probably much more important.
The overriding advantage of the new ?TV is that it will benefit from being the only setup box with access to the Apple TV App Store. Other issues matter but they are dwarfed by the reality of having the best app store (yes, it is the best before the first app ships because it shares the same architecture and programming talent of the iOS app store).
None of the AirPlay receivers for Android work properly.
This all assumes you are viewing the same size screen in all cases. 4K makes larger screens work better. 4K also allows for a wider color space and better dynamic range. 4K is a step on the way to 8K, 8K is IMAX quality. Here is a better comparison
It all depends on the source. Streaming source isn't going to give you the same output as a 4k BD, whatever they are branding it as. Most people will be happy with low bandwidth 4k streaming, and likely won't even notice the small visual differences between it and 1080P.
Excellent points. While everyone seems focused on the lack of 4K/UHD/... they appear to be missing the most important new aspect of the Apple TV, which is the App Store.
Long term I would be very concerned were I Roku. Amazon, Apple and Google all have App Stores which is a big advantage. The offerings from Roku make it difficult to classify as an App Store. Google has never been able to commit to a product long term and Google TV/Android TV has never caught on. ChromeCast is an impulse buy and is a fairly low end media player. The Amazon Fire TV and the new Apple TV would seem to warrant serious consideration. The Fire TV does not support Chromecast and is only sold in a limited number of countries. Amazon has a weaker App Store than Apple. Except for 4K support with the new Fire TV ( is there even a 4K standard for streaming and such, or are we talking BETA vs VHS?), and the ability to side load Kodi, the only real advantage of the Fire TV is Amazon Prime. Not a bad choice really but in the longer term the App Store from Apple should propel the Apple TV far beyond anything the Fire TV will be doing.
Plex will be coming to the Fire TV, hopefully not the terrible version on the Fire TV.
You really believe it's going to be an Apple exclusive? The live TV providers are going to want to be on all the streamers/platforms to maximize revenue.
I agree that major streamers will all eventually have some kind of live TV streaming. I'm not sure in what form as live TV does not have a whole lot to offer. Apart from sports, special events and news is there any reason why scheduled delivery of shows is required? Any reason to have 30% of the time interrupted by commercials! There are really fine TV shows at this time. If the cable providers just vanished people might really enjoy TV.
Who knows, maybe Apple will come up with an Apple Video service based on the iTunes Store video offerings. Apple is probably the only one in a position to really disrupt the way we watch TV.
The TV networks probably have a strong hand now. It will only diminish with time. People put up with TV. There's no great love for the current delivery process. It's kind of ridiculous.