Yeah removing the ethernet port from the base model makes no sense to be honest. Especially since Apple TVs are the preferred Home Hub for HomeKit. That's a device that needs 100% uptime so should always be wired if possible.
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New Apple TV Expected Later This Year With These New Features
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Not allowing the TV to harvest and sell your usage data for starters. Those TV companies can see everything you watch and do, with no privacy policy.
an M series ATV would be pretty great, then again, some of the higher A series are now able to play games like resident evil 8.
Then people would be outraged that it doesn’t dual boot macOS or triple boot iPadOS 😆
The Apple TV app is not the same thing as the Apple TV or tvOS.
I use the ATV almost every day and didn’t use the Apple TV app for many years.
I think you misunderstand what the Apple TV hardware does. The Apple TV app is on many different smart TVs and other hardware and is used to view Apple TV content. Think of this like Apple Music, which can be downloaded on both iOS and Android, as well as accessed through the web on Mac or PC.
The Apple TV hardware is a combined software and hardware platform, similar to iOS and the iPhone. Apple TVs have their own operating system with its own App Store and other settings. Instead of being forced to use the specific apps or configurations or setups of a Smart TV, you can use an Apple TV to download the specific streaming apps you want, and configure your Home Screen as desired. There are no ads, no forced data collection, and the apps don’t just randomly stop working like they frequently do on smart TVs. Picture quality is much better, can be calibrated with an iPhone camera, and allows much better controls over audio/video features. For example, you can connect multiple AirPods simultaneously to an Apple TV, while that’s basically impossible for most regular TVs. You can also control the TV much easier from your phone, better/more reliable Airplay, better integration with your iCloud library (I have it set to show a special photos album when idle), and so many other things. Overall, it’s just a much better software experience that is de-coupled from the specific TV.
App developers can also create apps that expand this functionally. For example, I have an app on my Apple TV that lets me connect remotely to my Xbox and play Cloud Gaming, right on my Apple TV while connecting an Xbox controller to it over Bluetooth. There are plenty of fantastic apps that further expand the functionality, just like the App Store on iOS.
Privacy. The TV manufacturers have started selling info about what you see. The safest way to deal with this s to have networking off on your TV.
User experience - the user experience on an AppleTV is much, much better. Both the UI, app selection, and responsiveness.
Device lifetime. Replacing an AppleTV is much cheaper than replacing a TV, when the time comes that the manufacturer no longer provides security updates.
The downside - for commercial reasons, Apple won't let you have apps for game streaming. Think gamepass ultimate or GeForce now. That would reduce their revenue.
Just wanted to mention, that’s not the case anymore. While Microsoft has chosen to not come out with an official app, there are plenty of third party apps that support GamePass and remote connecting to an Xbox. They are paid, but work great and also have iOS counter parts that are in my opinion better than the current web app officially supported my Microsoft. I’ve been using OneCast and it’s been fantastic, worth every penny
Eh, then you're forcing the user to put their iPhone in the mount for every FaceTime call (and not being able to refer to anything on their phone for the duration of that call), or forcing the user to fork out $500ish for a spare phone just to leave in the mount. Both seem like bad ideas.
A dedicated camera can just be left in place. And Apple could charge a separate $49 (oh, who are we kidding, it's Apple, so $99) for the camera, or could include it in the box with a "Pro" version of the Apple TV. If it's just for this purpose, all it needs is a camera sensor/lens (they're good at those), a CPU (they have tons of choices), a WiFi chip, a little RAM, and a battery. It could also be wired (USB-C just for power, or with possibly a longer cable, plug it into the Apple TV for power and video transfer - would get rid of the need for a battery).
I own a Tesla because I like the vehicle, not because of some opinion I might have of the person running the place. You clearly do not have one, because the self driving in my car is quite remarkable. Door to door start to finish on a five hour drive yesterday with self driving initiated. What tech or apps does Tesla force you to pay for? Self driving, faster acceleration, and other vanity features are completely optional. Hell, most of the optional items are now available on a month-to-month basis. All these user choices available, and they still allow any of the hardware that is pertinent to safety measures are provided to all owners at no cost.
You may want to step back from the keyboard and reassess your cartoon hatred of a man that was once beloved by those on your side of the spectrum. He's done a lot of good and advanced technology across so many sectors of life: online payments with PayPal, bringing EV's into the mainstream and developing battery technology with Tesla, and hopefully we put humans on Mars one day on the back of the reusable and capturable rockets from SpaceX. God forbid you ever find yourself in an area without cell tower signal, but Starlink will make sure you can still communicate.
"Space Karen" had the audacity of committing wrongthink because he disagrees with you on some issue. Let it go, man.
I'm hoping the new Apple TV has the following:
1. A18 SoC with 8 GB of RAM for faster video decoding and better games support.
2. New I/O chip with WiFi 7 (802.11be), UWB and maybe even Bluetooth 6.0 support.
3. More local storage (up to 256 GB), with a USB4/Thunderbolt 4 port for extra local storage expansion.
4. HDMI 2.1b port.
1. A18 SoC with 8 GB of RAM for faster video decoding and better games support.
2. New I/O chip with WiFi 7 (802.11be), UWB and maybe even Bluetooth 6.0 support.
3. More local storage (up to 256 GB), with a USB4/Thunderbolt 4 port for extra local storage expansion.
4. HDMI 2.1b port.
Spending nearly three hundred million dollars to push his preferred candidate into the White House and buy himself a top-level position in government so that he can absolutely wreck the government and funnel all the government's confidential data on everyone into his own servers with no oversight on what he did, for his own enrichment... is hardly in the same ballpark as "disagreeing on an issue".
But who cares about any of that, because you got a car you like. Glad you got your priorities straight.
It will probably be closer to how the Switch 2 does it - a standalone webcam that connects to your Apple TV via usb-c.
That's actually much worse. Now you're holding the remote out at arm's length for the entire duration of a call, with it inevitably wobbling around a bit, or you're putting it into some sort of stand, and then any time you want to change the volume or activate anything onscreen, you're reaching out to the camera and making it wobble around again.
I was using the apps on my smart tv until I read their updated privacy agreement. It was basically saying we can record you and sell the recordings however we please. I turned off WiFi and just use Apple TV now.
Yep, a lot of "smart" TVs these days have Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), that watches the image on your screen and tries to match it up with a library of known movies, shows, current broadcast TV, etc., so they can figure out what you're watching and when, so they can sell this information to data brokers, who use it to add to existing data they have about you, to in turn sell that information to (mostly?) advertising companies, who can in turn charge higher prices to companies that want to advertise, because they can say "this is a 30-35 year old single male living in zipcode 12345, who makes $X,000 per month, and likes watching football and Star Trek" - because they can charge more for showing an ad to a carefully defined person like that rather than showing it to "this is a person living in zipcode 12345".
I had my now 4-year-old TV connected to ethernet for a little while after I bought it, so it could get firmware updates, and then I pulled that cable out, so it can't phone home. I had made a point of not agreeing to all the EULAs that would have turned on their "built-in" (downloadable) apps, or their app store, or movie rentals, or ACR (see above), and I never used the apps in the TV for anything, but after a while someone in the marketing department at the company (LG) got the bright idea that they could use the "mail" facility in the TV (which had previously told me that firmware updates were available, or, say, occasionally when they added a new streaming service) - they figured out they could use that facility to start advertising all sorts of "special offers" to me, often multiple times for the same offer, so I'd turn on my TV and get 3 new messages every time, so I pulled that plug.
I use the TV's brain only to tune in broadcast television on occasion (SNL, the Super Bowl, the Olympics) - everything else is Apple TV or PS5, with the TV acting as a display panel and HDMI switch. It does that quite well - although it has this habit, sometimes, of saying, "well, I'm waking up because you turned on your PS5, but hey, the last thing I was talking to yesterday was the Apple TV, so I'll say hello to it too! ... oh look, the Apple TV is talking to me now - I'll switch over to that!" (because HDMI-CEC still isn't a completely supported standard, apparently).
Not all TVs have everything built in. Most only have a few apps. I can pick and choose my apps from the App Store. I have over 20 well known apps on mine. I have Xfinity. So I have Xfinity Stream app on my TV. So, no cable box I was paying for each month.
Yes, Apple TV requires WiFi or Ethernet.
But you can turn off WiFi on your TV itself. Then the TV can’t send any of your information to their servers.