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Apple TV 4K and HomeView: The best and worst of $299
Wow, $299. That’s a very surprising price. For HomeView, Apple’s all-new smart display, $299 feels surprisingly affordable. For Apple TV 4K, $299 feels surprisingly painful.
HomeView looks like a hit. Without actually seeing or hearing it, the verdict is still out. What we can judge now is the pitch.
In classic Apple fashion, the company is hardly the first to deliver a smart display. Yet HomeView appears to have the polish and consideration that an iPhone user would expect.
At $299, it seems Apple is pricing HomeView more as an invitation to try a new category of product. I’m intrigued.
Then there’s the Apple TV 4K. At $299, it feels priced more like specialized hardware. Unlike HomeView, Apple TV 4K has a price history.
In 2021, Apple sold two Apple TV boxes: Apple TV HD for $149, and Apple TV 4K (2nd generation) for $179.
Both boxes ran tvOS with an App Store, but customers didn’t love that 4K support costed nearly $200.
By the end of the following year, Apple TV 4K (3rd generation) arrived in two flavors: 64GB with no Thread or Ethernet for $129, or 128GB with Thread and Ethernet for $149.
This was viewed as a great cost correction compared to the previous generation. Better hardware and a better price? That sounds too good to be true.
But it was true for a while. Then Apple raised prices on a number of existing products in June. You may recall Apple TV 4K being one of the more painful price jumps, both due to the percent increase and the age of the hardware.