As most of you surely remember, last week Apple held its “Spring Forward”, which was buzzing with announcements. But amidst all the hype about the Apple Watch, which was undoubtedly the star of the show, a lot of you might have missed the news about the Apple TV, or at least not given it too much thought.
What Apple did was slash the price of the TV box from $99 to $69 and introduce the new HBO Now streaming service. A lot of people have speculated that this might be a precursor to an impending new Apple TV announcement and today a new rumor fuels speculations even further. Information slipped through the cracks that a new Apple TV is incoming and it will share the hardware platform of the iPhone 6.
This should mean that it will be powered by the A8 chip, found in both the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. What is more puzzling though, is that the new TV box will reportedly support 4K video playback, which is quite necessary to future-proof the device. This is kind of offsetting, because the current Apple smartphone devices don’t support 4K video recording, despite being based on the same chip.
This has been an ongoing speculation, ever since the two handsets were announced and if the above information turns out to be true, it really puts the Cupertino giant on the spot, but the reality is that 4K playback is definitely not the same as 4K video recording and even if the A8 is capable of handling true 4k video, the 8MP camera on the current iPhones has a maximum resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels, which is simply not enough.
Diving in the matter even further, because surely you’ll do so in the comments, 4K is precisely 4096 x 2160 pixels and is actually a cinema standard, just like 2K, which is just a tad wider than 1080p, but isn’t as preferred in consumer devices. Even if the new Apple TV and consequently the A8 chip supports consumer-grade UHD resolutions of 3840 x 2160 pixels, the 8MP camera of an iPhone is still not enough to cover that natively. Now there are a lot of software tricks that can achieve the desired effect, but that is a different story altogether.
All in all, the new alleged Apple TV sounds really exciting and if the rumor turns out to be true, it might be officially announced at the upcoming Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, starting on June 8. In the meantime, we really hope this new piece of information does not shift focus away from the TV box and start another unnecessary flame war about the iPhone 6 and its video shooting capabilities.
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