After months of rumors and ardent sleuthing by the world’s gazillions of armchair Apple detectives, it now seems all but certain that a new Apple TV with 4K and high dynamic range support is on its way. And rather awkwardly for the infamously secretive tech giant, the source of this confirmation ‘leak’ is Apple’s own Homepod speaker.
Last night (August 6) iOS developer Guilherme Rambo tweeted that he’d spotted lines of code within the iOS system powering the Homepod that refer to an Apple TV capable of supporting not only 4K resolution and high dynamic range video, but also the Dolby Vision premium HDR solution and, even more intriguingly, the HLG version of HDR set to be used by broadcasters.
By adding Dolby Vision alongside support for the industry standard HDR10 format, the new Apple TV will deliver video capabilities which at least rival the Chromecast Ultra, and which outgun the likes of the Roku Ultra and Amazon Fire TV.
The apparent HLG support, meanwhile, suggests much more interest in integrating broadcasting-related solutions and features into the next Apple TV than we’ve seen with any previous Apple TV generation.
The only important omission from the apparent HDR support is Samsung's recently announced HDR10+ format, which, like Dolby Vision, adds a dynamic layer of extra information to the core HDR stream to help TVs deliver better picture quality. To be fair to Apple, though, actually Samsung TVs are the only products so far to promise HDR10+ support.
Unless Apple’s current iOS code is already thinking years ahead with the features it includes, this latest discovery by an apparently reliable source (Rambo is an iOS developer at Brazil-based PeixelUrbano, developer of the unofficial WWDC app for macOS) would seem to suggest that the launch of the next, vastly improved Apple TV really isn’t far away.
In fact, given that the current Apple TV has seemed to me to be out of date from the day it launched and as a result is now trailing all of its main rivals in the smart box sales charts, the new Apple TV really can’t come soon enough. Especially if Apple is as serious about maintaining a presence in the TV world as it has so often claimed to be.
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