This is a great point, a lot of the press coverage missed this.
Not having a cheaper alternative (eg a stick) was curious though. The baseline price of $300 might cause sticker shock.
I still don’t quite know why i actually got a 64GB 4K first gen ATV when, in practice, a 32GB would’ve sufficed?
Do people really play games on these? Install that many apps on them?
If anything apple is probably bring value to new buyers of Apple TV in this market. At 299$ you are getting hardware that will last quite some time as opposed to a 200$ device that might cost maybe 250$ in six months and give you lot less hardware capabilities.
But everything is way more expensive than it was a year ago. Nothing escapes this inflation we are going through
If they're selling AppleTV at a loss to stimulate AppleTV+ subscriptions, then they're hemorrhaging money on two fronts. Without their App Store monopoly, Apple's annual service revenue would undoubtedly be a crater.
The strategy Netflix and Prime applied was that they just loaded it with average-costing in-house content and then a few were hits. With Apple they seem to be spending a lot on individual shows and their library is still small compared to others. I guess they can't really do anything average according to their philosophy. This is unfortunately not working in their favor with TV+.