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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

What would be nice is if Apple pushed the boundaries of HDTV. One thing that's hard to deny, Apple has always been willing to push old technologies out the window without an apology. With the new iPad screen pushing beyond 1080p HD even on a 10" screen, it'd be nice to see a massive screen with a massive resolution to match. An 85" 4K TV screen with the content and delivery system Apple would be able to force might just make me buy whatever Apple required me to have.

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I'm really hoping they push the state of the art in TV interfaces and menus. All I've used are slow, unorganized, and often barely different from something they could have made in 1995.

While a higher resolution would be nice, I seriously doubt Apple would make anything above 1080p. Broadcast and cable area a mix of 720p and 1080i, possibly 1080p on some special channels. Blu-rays only go up to 1080p.

That leaves Apple to provide the content. At this point it's possible to stream 1080 on a decent connections, although it's compressed more than a Blu-ray. Short of FIOS or Google Gigabit, I don't think anyone could reasonably stream 2k/4k. Downloading such files would take a very long time too.

More importantly, 2k and 4k are what's currently used in theaters. Given the entertainment industry's constant anti-pirate fervor, I don't think there is any way they would cooperate with letting the public easily get such high quality streams. "The piracy risk would kill us".

I remember reading about some company that sold equipment to receive recent (or possibly still running) movies in your home. It was tens of thousands, and each movie was like a rental (at hundreds of dollars, if not more). It was aimed at the super rich who build their own mini-theaters in their mansions.

What are the chances they'd discount that a $6 rental from iTunes?

But we should keep in mind that while Apple products are on the pricey side, they are firmly within the reach of the common man. Apple products seem to be deliberately positioned below the utmost premium of the price scale for each of their products (ex: you can find laptops with higher performance and a higher sticker price). Their strategy is definitely not "bigger, better, pricier, is better".

If we believe in the "common man stretching his arms" ethos, then the 85" TV screen is definitely out of the question. How many people can even fit a 85" TV into their living rooms? (count me in as one of them)

Apple sells premium products, they just have the sales volume and operational chops to sell them at reasonable prices.

I think you missed the point. Look at Apple's MacBook line, for example. While it's true Apple makes great products, there are plenty of laptops out there with higher resolution displays, better processors, more RAM, and better video cards.

Like someone else said - Apple makes the BMW of products, not the Bugatti Veyron.

It's obvious that Apple doesn't compete on specs. Features like the iPad retina display though, or the laser-drilled sleep indicator on the MacBook Pro, or the unibody enclosures would be dramatically more expensive if they were even available, were it not for Apple's ability to secure them at large scale. There's no massive advantage or design taste in having marginally more RAM, so that's not where Apple's attention is spent.

"But we should keep in mind that while Apple products are on the pricey side, they are firmly within the reach of the common man."

Just so. With the caveat that it's more like "the common middle-to-upper-middle class (hu)man." There is something for nearly every level of consumer buying power within the Apple line, but the "fat middle" of the curve is within products that are slightly premium priced.

So, where would an Apple HDTV ideally be placed? At a price point where they can have mass market, premium appeal. (I'm utterly unfamiliar with TV set prices, so can't speculate upon a number.)

They'll want to create the "BMW 3-Series of TVs", not the Audi R8 or Bugatti Veyron. So the Retina quality 85inch screen is a non-starter.

To add to this, modern TVs are very poorly executed, with high latency, terrible UIs, bad color faithfulness, the whole >60hz motion interpolation disaster, bad software integration, bad handling of specs like HDMI, a tendency to be cheap and break... I would love to see Apple do TVs right.

As Apple's iTV doesn't support 24Hz output, I suspect that they are unlikely to change this aspect of the TV industry.

Well the iPad is a 2K screen already. Just a 2K screen in a 4:3 aspect ratio vs the HDTV 16:9. And OEMs are starting to create consumer 4K TVs and projectors now. I've heard the biggest cost of LCDs is the size of the panel, and not the pixel density. I'm guessing maybe iTV 3 might have the 'retina 4K display' and the original iTV might have start with a 1080p/2K screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinematography#Video_fo...

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