An Apple TV ‘Ultra’?
Apple is closer than ever to a gaming console in the living room…
The site FlatpanelsHD published a review of the new Apple TV 4K a couple weeks ago that is great not only in how thorough it is, but also in how it frames around the gaming potential of the device. And I do mean potential. As even this new, more powerful Apple TV is not there yet. At least not compared to the current gaming consoles. But it’s also not as far as you might think. In fact, it’s closer than ever and moving fast.
I also recently got the new Apple TV and my review would have been something like: “it’s smaller, has no fan, the remote now has USB-C, and it’s maybe slightly faster, though it’s hard to tell in day-to-day use so far”.¹ But this review goes into far more detail about each of those things and gives more context about why the changes matter. In particular, there are some dots we can finally start connecting in gaming:
The CPU in A15 Bionic is much, much faster than previous-generation game consoles such as Xbox One and PlayStation 4. The A15’s CPU performance core is also significantly faster than PS5’s CPU core (single-core performance) but PS5 pulls ahead in multi-core performance because it has 8 cores as opposed to 5 cores in the Apple TV version of A15. PS5’s CPU equivalent is AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and here is a benchmark comparison with A15.
As for the GPU, Apple TV 4K (2022) on paper exceeds 1 TFlops of graphical performance but how much is a little unclear as there are no GPU info or benchmark apps available for tvOS. In terms of TFlops performance it still cannot match last-gen game consoles such as Xbox One and it has only half the amount of RAM (4GB vs. 8GB). On the other hand Apple TV 4K (2022) has much faster RAM and is equipped with a very fast NVMe SSD unlike the old-school hard drive in last-gen consoles. We are starting to get to a point where Xbox One and PS4 games should, in theory, be playable on Apple TV without too many compromises.
Again, this is a comparison to the last generation of gaming consoles not the current one. Still, it’s pretty impressive what Apple is able to squeeze into a sub-$200 puck. The fact that the A15 can beat the PS5 — the current state of the art gaming console — in any metric is incredible and would seemingly point to where this is all heading…
I’ve long wondered how tenable the gaming console market is given how fast mobile phones were improving and released on a yearly basis versus the consoles on five-ish year time horizons.² Presumably, the M2 chips found in Apple’s latest MacBooks and iPads can already compete with — if not beat — the chips found in the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Perhaps not in everything, as those are tailored for gaming, but probably in many things. What if Apple just stuck an M2 in the Apple TV…
Well, it would be more expensive, and the Xbox Series S (yes, Microsoft has awful naming conventions for their latest consoles — shocker, I know) is already being discounted to $249 this holiday season. Still, it just seems like these worlds are on a collision course — though I’ve also been saying that for coming up on a decade and well…
One more wild aside:
Apple TV 4K (2022) with the 5nm A15 Bionic is more power efficient and consumes even less power than its predecessors. It now has lower power consumption than Chromecast with Google TV and approximately 50% lower than Nvidia Shield 2019. Games that exceed 150W on PS5 such as The Pathless or Sayonara Wild Hearts draw 6W or less on the latest Apple TV.
The most impressive thing about the new Apple TV, which any regular user would never know but this FlatpanelsHD review highlights, is how little power it draws compared to both the previous versions of the device and yes, even compared to small dongles like the Chromecast. And it’s OMG-levels of difference versus the PS5 with a comparable game. Yes, yes, it’s not apples-to-apples exactly. But it’s not entirely not either!
A15 Bionic in Apple TV 4K (2022) is a binned version with only 5 CPU cores as opposed to 6 CPU cores in other A15-based Apple products, confirmed in our testing, and possibly also reduced GPU performance based on Apple’s claimed 30% GPU improvement, although we cannot confirm this due to lack of GPU diagnostics and benchmark apps for tvOS. It is the most efficient, fastest and first 5nm chip in a TV device and it delivers smoother navigation, improved performance with less throttling, and reduced power consumption. It is one step closer to console-quality gaming and 128GB of storage lets you install more games, but it is not quite there yet and in the end A15 falls between two chairs. It is overpowered for 4K60 streaming but underpowered for 4K120 streaming and console-quality gaming. Apple TV 4K (2022) is a decent casual ‘game console’ with a handful of good games from Apple Arcade and wide support for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo and other controllers but there is so much more potential here. Bring the M-series chip to Apple TV!
If you squint, you can almost see a world where Apple is gearing up to launch an “Apple TV Ultra” with say, an M3 chip, far more RAM and storage, and a great controller, targeted directly at living room gaming — and maybe more? The question would be price. Could they do it for $500? Sure. Would they?… Lol. And a $1,000 living room device just doesn’t seem viable in this market. Yes, yes, this is Apple. But they already learned a lesson with HomePod in a similar vein.
The more interesting dilemma here may be the forthcoming Reality Glasses, or whatever Apple is going to call their new wearable. Presumably a large focus of that device will be gaming as well, so they may just say why bother with creating a great dedicated gaming device for the living room.
Especially as the other console makers are clearly moving more and more into the cloud. As they should. Five year-plus gaps in hardware iteration isn’t going to cut it forever. And who wants to release new, expensive hardware every year? Well, Apple.
¹ I reviewed last year’s Apple TV 4K — well, mainly the new remote — here.
² It’s still mildly wild to me that the next Zelda game will be coming to the Nintendo Switch next year, when the console will be over six years old. This would be the equivalent of a new game launching on an iPhone 7. An iPhone 7! Behold: the power of great IP!
