Looks to have potential. Lack of 4K is problematic, but only if they plan to maintain the same upgrade cycle they have in the past. If they are actually moving to annual, or at the very worst bi-annual upgrades, they should be able to bring it when it's needed for a larger chunk of the market.
Like I said earlier, when Apple signs 4K content into the iTunes Store, 4K TVs drop in price and bandwidth caps aren't total bollocks for most of the world's population, then it will be a thing. Until at least 2 of those 3 barriers are lifted, we're stuck at 1080p.
My biggest question is who's going to make apps for it? Will we see Apple competitors on here? For example, no Vudu and no Amazon would be no buy.
That's going to be entirely dependent on them. Amazon has, to my knowledge, so far refused to be on Apple TV themselves and not due to Apple not wanting it there, primarily due to disputes over how Amazon Instant Video purchases made through an Apple TV app would be subject to Apple taking a share of the transaction as though it were an in-app purchase.
Another side question for me personally is regarding that replay feature. Other competitors have this to some extent (usually app specific), and I love it on my WMC DVR. It is incredibly useful to have the subtitles pop up for a few seconds on a replay.
The thing is all of those devices have a dedicated hard button, which is what makes using the feature so nice. There is no button here. Have they confirmed whether a gesture will active it? If not, "What did she say?" is exactly the sort of over engineering shit people whine about Apple for. Sure it's a nice optional method to do a replay, but if that's the only way it's terrible, over engineered crap. Makes what would be one of this product's best features (assuming it is system-wide) mostly useless in the real world. :\
I believe it's a way of being able to distinguish between backtracking with rewind for something missed visually and specifically going back because you didn't hear something. Some people don't want the subtitles when they step back, sometimes they do. There are only 2 ways around it: one is a setting where every time you rewind within a certain time range, the same effect occurs, which doesn't resolve the issue of subtitles becoming something mandated into rewind and simply frustrating a new handful of people; the other is a purpose-built button on the remote, which also ends up a frustration for people who want that simple jump-back feature without the subtitles (and working through that with more settings is more over-engineered than anything you could accuse Apple of) and if history teaches anything in this regard, that's how TV remotes have become bloated with buttons in the first place and Apple doesn't want to give a reason to promote purpose-built button features that will be requested ad nauseum and end up with a Harmony remote. That seems to be part of the point of putting Siri on this thing in the first place.
Old yes. It's just a standard IR remote. New, highly unlikely. It's a bluetooth remote.
Actually, it's Bluetooth AND IR. IR would be required for the volume functions to work with all televisions, and the remote's spec say IR is still present.
Daniel B·;178237808 said:
Ditching the D-Pad, in favor of a touchpad, is possibly a terrible idea for navigating core TV style apps, as when navigating to an item of interest, such as movie / tv thumbnail, you typically move the selection one item at a time, which is entirely natural with a D-Pad, unlike a touchpad. That's assuming the touchpad doesn't mimic a D-Pad, by registering top, bottom, left and right presses.
The touchpad seems to operate much differently than on Apple's capacitive devices, as they demonstrated with the fact that you can swipe or you can get the swipe motion to come to a dead stop by not releasing your thumb, unlike with iPhone and iPad which still has the scrolling sort of "float" under your thumb and any directionality on release causes further scroll.
There's also the number of times that Eddy Cue's slides got ahead of him because he was accidentally touching the touch pad on the remote, which tells me there likely is single-tap digital direction inputs, as well.
Just read that some of the Siri search stuff (such as show me films with actor x in) is exclusive to iTunes at launch and won't be able to search Netflix etc, major bummer.
Considering the contract hoops involved, I can't say I'm shocked. But it's really in all of their benefits to sign up for that, so they don't potentially end up being the only one who isn't at that party. It's also likely in part due to the APIs that these companies haven't had access to yet that are required to turn the function on and have it fully tested.
Honestly, they could have released the old box with Siri support and kept it $99. it would have been a great seller. But its twice the cost now with no 4K support and entirely reliant on subscriptions.
It makes it a difficult purchase.
No, I really don't think they could have. If their target is for Apple TV to be as snappy and responsive as it was on stage, stronger hardware was a necessity. The A5 in the old model was NOT going to cut it, since it barely cuts the mustard now when it comes to responsiveness. And if they were going with a new chip to make that happen, they might as well be using a modern chip that they fabricate for other devices to capitalize on current fabrication lines. That alone was bound to raise the price in and of itself. Couple that with an also-needed RAM boost from 512MB to further facilitate faster response, and the fact becomes an inevitability.
Siri isn't always on. It's activated by hitting the button on the remote. Also Siri isn't processor intensive. Siri's processing is handled on the server back end. The device just relays the audio data.
Also, apps aren't a requirement for TV OS to run. The question was about TV OS being put on to ATV3. You can easily do all the Siri functionality and leave out the app store.
The current Apple TV on shelves can barely do streaming playback fast enough for most people. But having the A5 in the old model sift through multiple subscription services for the same data and produce that data together as quickly as it does in the demos? Yeah, that would NOT happen on a current ATV3. Not in your wildest dreams.
Remember how well the Siri beta on iPhone 4S was able to interpret your voice? How long it took to interpret what you said before it called the server for information? Part of that is still attributable to the horsepower that the A5 chip provided.
So no, this fantasy that Siri is doable in any appreciable way on the current ATV needs to stop. You could theoretically make it work, but it would be 4S levels of terribad at doing it and not come close to how it performed on stage or in demos with the new model.
