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Comment by skoczko | Hacker News Reader

While on the other end of the spectrum is the new Apple TV 4k with A15 bionic and 128 GB storage for $149. How wrong am I thinking this is a steal? Especially if I want to play Arcade games on this. I wonder if this baby can be jailbroken at some point to run a full blown macos.

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Can you explain to me what is the point of such powerful device to stream things? I don’t get the Apple TV. Every time I use it I can’t easily get to what I want and all the stuff that is offered I have to pay. I’ve been seeing it go discounted many times and I wonder if I should get it to replace my $25 Roku but I don’t know what problems it would fix

You can play games on it.

I just use it to watch streaming channels. It's a "nicer" experience than my FireTV.. the FireTV interface isn't great, and they have ads, etc.

And sure, most of the streaming services require payment.. that's no different than Roku or FireTV or alternatives.

As mentioned by other commenters: the point is playing games on Apple Arcade. For $149 you get a pretty powerful game console, more powerful than the latest iPad for a fraction of the price. You need to get a controller though or use a PS4/xbox one if you have those. Otherwise, yes, Apple TV is ridiculously overpowered for a streaming box. I actually don’t get why Apple is not promoting Arcade/gaming on this as the main use case. I was expecting that this would be the main marketing message. The remote should also be more geared towards gaming, initial reports suggested that it could’ve been the case.

Oh I see. I have a ps, pc and switch to play already so I guess Apple Arcade doesn’t pull me enough. Thanks for sharing!

Why get extra memory on an apple tv? What would that storage be used for?

The new Apple TV does have extra features at its higher price point (wired ethernet and matter/thread). But I've never understood why I would care how much storage is in a cloud device.

This is apple acting like a "computer" company (those windows laptops with a long lis of irrelevant stats), which they've elsewhere tried to get away from. What they've instead eliminated is any explanation of why you would care.

It can download media. Especially useful for media of a higher quality than you can stream, otherwise high quality media wouldn’t even be accessible to many people.

Ofc installing Arcade games is another obvious use-case. I find it pretty trivial to fill up a 64gb and 128gb phone so I don’t see what’s so unbelievable about filling up an Apple TV with 4K media and games.

If you're using it as a pure streaming box, there's no point.

If you're running games, you might reasonably want more storage and Ethernet.

If you're traveling some place that connectivity might be poor (e.g., you have an RV and want the family to be able to watch movies while you drive across $BORING_SCENERY_STATE), you can store more videos on it.

I would have said that previously….

I’ve got three of the ‘old’ base 4K models.

And they are constantly running out of space!

They never used to. But now they do.

OS updates are to blame maybe.

I’ve deleted as much as I can, and just have my core 4 streaming app. No games.

And yet still it is offloading things like YouTube and I have to reboot to have a chance of it reinstalling.

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