Why Germany’s happy, successful: Its values are the opposite of Silicon Valley’s

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If Silicon Valley ever formed a political party, it might look a lot like the current iteration of Germany’s Free Democrats, or FDP. In the 2017 election cycle, the FDP offered a platform that reads like what Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg would come up with if they decided to disrupt Rand Paul. Its primary aspirations include creating a startup-friendly economy, digitizing Germany’s monolithic reams of bureaucratic paperwork (no small feat), and, yes, radically reduce income taxes, which currently top off at 45% for the highest earners.

The platform has propelled the party back from the dead. Having been kicked out of the Germany’s parliament, or Bundestag, in 2013, the FDP came roaring back with 10% of the vote in Sunday’s election.

To some, this might suggest that a cultural shift is afoot in Germany. After all, the FDP’s leader, a magnetic 38-year-old named Christian Lindner, has openly expressed a desire to shake things up. In an August interview with the Economist, in which he called Germany’s economy “a prosperity hallucination,” Lindner also explained that in his country, “entrepreneurship has long been undervalued … and societies that are prepared to be more daring and have efficient capital markets have overtaken us on this.” Germans could be “world leaders” in the new economy, Lindner said, “but we have to want it.”

But that’s the thing: the vast majority of Germans don’t want it. For progressive and even centrist Germans, the startup-style definition of Erfolg (or “success”) is utterly incompatible with their values—which do not center on individual wealth, recognition, or even careers. Though the FDP’s showing was meteoric compared to recent years, Germany’s cultural mores—which include a vehement defense of the country’s robust social safety net, largely credited for the relatively quick recovery from last decade’s recession—mean it is largely inoculated from the bootstrap fever that has long gripped the US.

Both the FDP’s renaissance—as well the scorn of its detractors, which we’ll get to in a second—are the doing of Lindner, who has inspired such descriptors as “charismatic,” “feisty,” “edgy,” “snarky,” and, not least of all, “camera-friendly.” He is a tight-pantsed, Teutonic Ayn Rand who won hearts and ballots with a series of campaign posters that literally consisted of black-and-white photos of him staring at his phone.

But he wasn’t a household political name until an improvised 2015 tirade in front of the state legislature of Nordrhein-Westfalen went viral.

In an off-script response to a heckler during a speech about startup culture’s positive attitude toward failure, Lindner memorably decried the fact that “people would rather go into public service than start something themselves.” He explained that, “when you’re successful, you end up in the sights of the social-democratic redistribution apparatus, and when you fail you’re sure to be the subject of mockery and derision.”

Lindner was correct on one point: Many Germans would rather go into public service than start a business themselves. But his theory about their motivation is all wrong. Lindner’s country-people simply don’t have the same enchantment with self-made financial success that he does.

To most of Germany, the hagiography of bootstrap capitalism is not just morally wrong; it’s incomprehensible. Thanks in part to a general leftward tilt on economic issues after the student revolutions of 1968, most of them view the collective good, and the comparatively high taxation that accompanies it, not as a sacrifice, but as a fundamental component of civilized society.

It’s not just the social contract that compels Germans to wrinkle their tanned noses at the FDP’s entrepreneurial fervor. They are largely content with their take-home salaries, but not out of altruism. Rather, they view the role of wealth acquisition and consumerism in a fundamentally different way.

To Germans, caution and frugality are signifiers of great moral character. Sure, they favor high-quality consumer goods—but they deliberate on what to buy for years, and expect their possessions to last for decades, from Birkenstocks to $7000 Miele ovens to Mercedes sedans. Yes, Germany has its super-rich citizens. But most of them, such as the late Albrecht brothers of the Aldi grocery empire, are notoriously reclusive—perhaps because extreme wealth is considered tacky.

Moreover, for Germans, a good work-life balance does not involve unlimited massages and free meals on the corporate campus to encourage 90-hour weeks. Germans not only work 35 hours a week on average—they’re the kind of people who might decide to commute by swimming, simply because it brings them joy. And a German wouldn’t be caught tot pounding down a bar or a glass of Soylent to replace a meal—a ritual that even on workdays takes two hours to consume al fresco over a book or an impassioned conversation, and is available at a neighborhood café for a reasonable price.

In other words, Germany is full of happy (albeit outwardly frowning) shoe salespeople and grocery-store cashiers who have completed 18-month training courses for those professions. They earn a decent salary with full benefits—including at least six federally-mandated weeks of their beloved Urlaub, or vacation, which, by the way, is the institution they approach with the kind of devotion Americans afford their jobs.

And so, just as Christian Lindner is obsessed with making money and driving sports cars, so have Germans been obsessed with making fun of Christian Lindner because they find his thirst for financial success so gauche. As such, this election season’s funniest moments came courtesy of the #thermilinder memes, which imagined the chiseled politician as an infomerical hawker of the beloved Thermomix, the wildly expensive appliance miracle that unsurprisingly graces many of Germany’s kitchen counters (and, yes, is expected to last until at least 2060, and if one doesn’t, you can be assured its owner possesses the warranty card, and will be writing a strongly-worded letter of disappointment to the manufacturer). Germans may enjoy technology in their homes, but most of them still aren’t buying what Lindner is selling.

In the aftermath of the election, many Germans are aghast at the advances of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, which won third place with 13% of the vote. Indeed, some are taking to the streets in protest of that party’s goals, which defile the cultural values Germans have struggled to build out of the rubble of the Second World War.

But Germans also have good reason to be wary of the FDP, because the techno-libertarian ethos both perpetuates Germany’s worsening income inequality and disregards the public good. This disregard is profoundly offensive to Germans. But it certainly does look handsome on posters.

Rebecca Schuman is the author of Schadenfreude, A Love Story: Me, the Germans, and Twenty Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Amazon announces new Fire TV

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Amazon today introduced a new Fire TV with HDR and 4K capabilities, which marks the first time the device has offered the higher-resolution video. The redesigned device, which resembles a small, square hockey puck, can display 2160p video at 60 frames per second. The device has Dolby Atmos integration and comes with an Alexa voice remote.

The new Fire TV is powered by a 1.5Ghz quad-core processor. It has access to thousands of apps and Alexa skills, and more than 500,000 TV episodes and movies, the company said. The device will go on sale for $69 and is available for preorder now. It will come out later this year. You can also buy a bundled Fire TV and Echo Dot for $80, or a Fire TV Stick and Echo Dot for $60.

Developing...



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U.S. does not believe Cuba is behind sonic attacks on American diplomats

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The White House does not believe the Cuban government is behind the mysterious sonic attacks against U.S. personnel in Havana, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation.

“No one believes that the Cubans are responsible,” said one source, echoing comments from others who are closely involved in the situation. “All of the evidence points that they’re not.”

Sources would not say who U.S. intelligence believes is responsible.

The Trump administation, as soon as Tuesday, will announce a major withdrawal of staff from the U.S. embassy in Havana, boosting the number of Americans affected by this “sonic device” to 25 from 21, with reports of cases occurring in the last several weeks, according to two sources.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will meet Tuesday with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, according to U.S. and Cuban officials, to discuss the attacks on American diplomats in Havana. The meeting will happen at the State Department, and came at the request of the Cubans.

It is the highest-level meeting between the two countries since Trump was sworn into office in January.

The withdrawal is not intended to punish the Cuban government but to protect diplomats and their families from the strange attacks. The administration considered closing the embassy for a period, but is seeking for a way to keep it open even with a skeletal staff.



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Apple TV 4K Is a Damn Good Set-Top Box 

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All images: Alex Cranz/Gizmodo

In the years since its release, Apple TV has often lagged behind competitors, seemingly forgotten by Apple in favor of phones, computers, and even watches. And the Apple TV’s status as the “other” on Apple’s list of sales feels evident when you notice how late to the 4K party it is. Roku launched a 4K box last year and Nvidia launched an Android-based one two years ago. Fortunately (for Apple fans) the Apple TV 4K is so polished it almost feels like it was worth the wait.

But just to be clear, unless you are already deeply attached to the Apple ecosystem, and in particular the iTunes store, the Apple TV 4K is not worth the wait. It’s very good at what it does—namely play back content in 4K with an expanded color gamut and HDR (it supports both HDR10 and Dolbyvision—the two competing HDR formats), but in the meantime, you could have had a very cheap Roku, or a pricey but more nimble Nvidia Shield. The Apple TV, at $180, is only a little cheaper than the $200 Nvidia Shield, which also does 4K and HDR and gaming. Only that device, because it runs Android TV, can also play Nintendo ROMs and stream Amazon Prime.

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So why on earth would one ever recommend the Apple TV? Because this thing does what Apple usually does best—it takes a finicky concept and boils it down into something a roommate, parent, or even that old college buddy with two kids, a full time job, and zero free time could use. tvOS has to be the most polished TV operating system I’ve used, and even when I’m faced with its limitations (no Amazon Prime until later this year) I don’t find myself too bothered. Everything is so pretty and so easy to use that it’s hard to be annoyed.

Typing in passwords is easy because I can just hold down the Siri button and spell them out, and while swiping on the remote’s little touchpad to navigate menus feels weird at first, after a couple of hours of use you won’t even notice (I certainly didn’t).

The remote is simple, and super easy to get familiar with, but the touch pad can take getting used to.

Apple TV also has the absolute easiest method yet for finding good 4K HDR movies to watch. I’m not talking about whatever Netflix airs on a whim—but movies that have just left the theater, like Wonder Woman or Kong: Skull Island. Sony was the first to offer first run 4K HDR movies with its expensive Ultra HD Media Player. You could watch the latest Spider-Man or other Sony films as soon as they left theaters, but the box and movies were pricey and the navigation menus were ugly.

There are exactly three ports on this simple box: Power, HDMI, and ethernet.

Both Roku and Android have offered solutions since, but those solutions have been bad. The apps (usually Vudu, Amazon, or a combination of both) are unattractive, and thanks to poor labeling, you’re never actually sure if the movie you’re spending $10-$20 on is actually in 4K and HDR. With the Apple TV, those movies are clearly labeled, and Apple promises that as movies already in its library are made available in 4K and HDR, the price for those flicks will remain the same, regardless of whether you bought it as an HD film initially or not. This makes upgrading your film library cheaper and easier than any other solution out there.

Finding 4K HDR content is super easy, and the content is actually good?

But there’s is one big wildly irritating caveat. 4K HDR content tends to be big—too big for the 32GB to 64GB of storage available on an Apple TV. Not to mention the fact that at the moment, you can only stream 4K content from Apple. (Apple recommends a minimum download speed of 25 Mbps download speed for streaming 4K.) So you have to stream these big gorgeous films, and if your internet is crummy, or you don’t have a wired ethernet cable straight from the box to your router, you will be in for a world of frustration. After dropping $20 to watch Baby Driver on the Apple TV (Apple often makes films available for purchase while they’re still in theaters), I found myself less than impressed. The Apple TV was running off my wi-fi, but sitting in a less than ideal location, so the film stuttered and stopped and frequently downgraded the stream to 720p or worse.

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Once I plugged in an ethernet cord (I wasn’t about to reconfigure the whole room for a better wi-fi signal next to the TV) I could see the stubble on the baby-faced lead of the film. Wonder Woman looked great too, and Sense8, Stranger Things, and Daredevil season 2, three Netflix shows shot in 4K and HDR, all looked as good an vibrant as they do on the Nvidia Shield.

Since I sorted the internet issue the 4K Apple TV has had few issues. It’s a solid device. If you’re already invested in the iTunes store, don’t want to mess with the potential fussiness of Android on the Nvidia Shield, or you’re desperate to have very nice looking first run movies without dropping cash on a Blu-ray player, then the Apple TV 4K should be at the top of your list. It can’t do as much as the Nvidia Shield, and it isn’t as cheap as the Roku Ultra, but this little $180 box usually just works, and it looks great while it does it.

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  • It plays back content at 4K with HDR when applicable. Finally.
  • The menus and navigation are all intutive and handily the most attractive available.
  • First run movies, and even films still in theater, can be had for $20 a pop, and they’ll automatically upgrade to 4K HDR when available, with no additional cost.
  • Definitely plan to string along an ethernet cable if you want to enjoy 4K content.


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Justin Thomas is a goal-setting inspiration to us all

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Following Justin Thomas’ hoisting of the FedEx Cup, news of his list of 2016-2017 golf-related goals is everywhere this morning.

Eschewing paper and pen like the millennial he is, Thomas typed a note on his iPhone in late February outlining what he hoped to accomplish inside the ropes this season.

As you might suspect, he did most of what he set out to do. But a closer look at the list is interesting because Thomas focused both on results (winning a major) and stats (ex: +.25 in strokes gained: putting).

While you can’t say Thomas’ text document is in any way representative of what pros do, it certainly worked for him.

Justin Thomas shows reporters his season goals. Justin Thomas shows reporters his season goals.

Here are the goals JT accomplished.

  • Tour Championship: Y
  • Win at least once: Y (Won 5 times)
  • Be in the final 2 groups of a major on Sunday: Y
  • Win a major: Y (PGA Championship)
  • Make Presidents Cup: Y
  • +.25 strokes gained putting : Y (+.289, 47th on tour)
  • Above 1 strokes gained tee to green: Y (+1.33, 6th)
  • Top 10 in all-around stats : Y (6th)
  • Top 10 in half my starts: Y (Taking the Dell Match Play out of the equation)
  • Under 70 scoring average: Y (69.359, third)
  • Less short sides: Y (we assume)

And the two he didn’t, well, he didn’t miss by much.

  • Under par on par 3/4/5: N (Thomas was under par of par-4 and par-5s)
  • Top 30 in scrambling: N (Thomas finished 54th. It should be noted he was well outside the top 100 last season)

You don’t have to be a self-help expert to know goal setting is a powerful thing. And while it would be wrong to say Thomas went from one win last year to five wins (including a major) and winning the FedEx Cup solely because of a text document on his phone, it would be likewise wrong to suggest it didn’t play a part.

So pull out your smartphones or notepads and set some goals for the year ahead—although it’d probably be a bit overzealous to make “Tour Championship” the first item on your particular list.



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Analysis: Most Stocks Aren’t Good Investments.

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The New York Times has an excellent graphic filled with some startling datapoints:

Most stocks aren’t good investments. They don’t even beat the paltry returns of one-month Treasury bills, [Hendrik Bessembinder] has found.

But a relative handful of stocks are extraordinary performers. Only 4 percent of all publicly traded stocks account for all of the net wealth earned by investors in the stock market since 1926, he has found. A mere 30 stocks account for 30 percent of the net wealth generated by stocks in that long period, and 50 stocks account for 40 percent of the net wealth.

See the chart below, and check out the entire column. More on this later…

 

The Best Investment Since 1926? Apple
click for ginormous graphic

Source: Prof. Hendrik Bessembinder (W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University) via Karl Russell/The New York Times

 

 

Notes: Wealth creation is total stock gains, including dividends, in excess of one-month Treasury bill returns. Company listing follows the guidelines of the Center for Research in Security Prices. Companies that are new iterations are marked with an asterisk*. Companies that no longer trade are marked with a dagger†.

 



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How NFL players learn not to go broke

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Until recently, bets might have been taken as to just how long that money would last him.

Not anymore.

While pro athletes have been mismanaging their finances for decades, a combination of the realization of health risks and greater financial savvy have led many of Stafford's NFL contemporaries to reverse that trend.

"I saved (my first pay check)," says retired 11-year veteran Osi Umenyiora, who won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants after being drafted in 2003.

"I was really smart about my money, because the knowledge had started to come out (that) a lot of players were going broke."

During the tail end of his career, Umenyiora, who was born in London and raised in Nigeria, launched a financial planning company for African-born NFL players with the help of his brother.

"I was given a lot of advice from former players," Umenyiora tells CNN, noting that his one big purchase as a rookie was the house he lived in, calling it a "win-win situation" as an investment.

"The NFL really tried to harp on you not going broke because they don't want to see that statistic."

The dreaded 78%

"That statistic" Umenyiora refers to was spawned from a

2009 Sports Illustrated article

that claimed 78% of NFL players were penniless only a few years out of retirement.

The 2012 ESPN documentary

Broke

, which chronicled the financial ruin of several high-profile athletes, only reinforced that idea.

More recently, a

New York Times article

that profiled the 25 first-rounders drafted in 1990, uncovered that seven had encountered severe financial distress, while one, former Los Angeles Raider Anthony Smith,

was convicted of murder.

Tragically, the most famous member of that class, Hall of Famer Junior Seau, committed suicide and was later diagnosed with CTE, a degenerative disease caused by head injuries. Seau, a linebacker, played 20 NFL seasons and was known for his vicious hits.

With those stories ingrained in this generation of players, you're now as likely to see a gridiron star

interning on Wall Street

as you would be bumping into a shirtless Rob Gronkowski

racking up a reported $100,000 tab at a nightclub.

Thirty-five year-old Umenyiora says he had his own financial adviser out of college who assisted him, and cites star teammate Michael Strahan -- who has gone on to stardom as a morning show host -- as someone who offered advise on how to invest his money wisely.

But another of Umenyiora's teammates, Jack Brewer -- who had a far more typical NFL lifespan, appearing in just 40 games in four seasons -- is perhaps a better case study in the advancement of career planning within the league. (The average NFL career lasts just 3.3 years, according to the NFL Players Association.)

As an undrafted rookie, Brewer signed with the Minnesota Vikings and took his bonus check -- all $8,700 of it after taxes -- and invested it in an on-campus bar at the University of Minnesota, while purchasing a car to promote events.

During his playing career, the NFL introduced its

Continuing Education Program

, where it would reimburse active players for taking college classes in the offseason.

"No other league has a robust program like the NFL," Brewer says. "The NFL is by far the best, and gives the players the most resources when it comes to education."

A new approach

Now running an investment firm in New York, Brewer took executive classes at Harvard and Wharton, and eventually finished his MBA from the University of Miami, all paid for by the NFL and the NFL Players Association, he says.

"A player in the National Football League today has no excuse for leaving the game and not having his education, no excuse for leaving the game not being prepared," he says. "The resources are there. They would have to choose to not use them."

Brewer's company The Brewer Group, now works alongside the University of Miami in recruiting athletes to enroll in its business school. So far, he has mentored 80 former professional athletes who have completed their MBAs.

"If you go into NFL as if it's a stepping stone, and you want to use the access you get from the NFL to do great things, your finances are going to be fine," Brewer says.

Former Seattle Seahawks receiver Sidney Rice, who won a Super Bowl in 2014 and retired at 27 after sustaining multiple concussions, is an example of a player taken under Brewer's wing.

Rice completed his executive MBA at the University of Miami and owns a number of fast food and coffee franchises in the Seattle area, as well as a sports apparel company. Before retiring he had already invested in a string of Fresh Healthy Vending machines.

Twenty-nine-year-old Sergio Brown, who played in eight games for the Buffalo Bills last season, is another University of Miami MBA. Rather than try out for another team, the seven-year veteran called it quits in the offseason and signed with Google instead, as a digital advertising account manager.

"No doubt, there a lot more guys like Sergio Brown coming out," says Brewer, noting how the greater knowledge about head injuries has impacted players' decisions to change careers while still able to play.

"It's the awareness that's changing the game more than anything," he says. "Guys are going brain dead right now, guys are developing Alzheimer's early. When those are the realities of the game, you will probably approach things a little bit differently."

When asked to respond to Brewer's comment, the NFL said in statement: "The health and well-being of our players is our priority, and (we) offer numerous programs and benefits for former players."

It cited a number of league-driven initiatives, including a slew of health benefits for retirees, such a stipend of up to $5,250 per player for knee, hip or shoulder replacement surgery, monthly payments to players who have a mild or moderate neurocognitive impairment, and medical cover of up to $130,000 for those who suffer from dementia, ALS and

Parkinson's disease

.

Short careers, long foresight

Like Brown, who grew up in a rough part of Chicago, Brewer comes from a modest upbringing in Fort Worth, Texas. He says he understands the pitfalls of immediate wealth which can lead to bad planning.

"A lot of these guys come from poverty, and once they get a little bit of money they feel so indebted to their families and close friends that they want to take care of them," says Brewer.

"They don't want to leave them in the conditions they are living in while they advance. It's almost like you have a sense of guilt, and so that is a tough situation to deal with."

Brewer used to invest money on behalf of NFL players, but found the process "emotionally and physically draining."

"There is so much hand holding (which takes) so much time," he says. "You've got to deal with their parents, their families get involved ... it's a little bit overwhelming."

Instead, Brewer often gives free advice to athletes on how to handle their money, at least until their NFL pension kicks in.

Umenyiora, who lives in London and works as an NFL analyst for the BBC, is quick to point out he won't see a dime of his retirement fund until he turns 55. In order to qualify, a player

must have played in at least three games in each of three seasons.

"There are 25, 30 years for most players before they can start collecting on that pension," he says. "So you still have to be really smart and wise about how you spend the money you earn, because, quite frankly, the career isn't' that long."

Today's NFL players, it appears, are certainly getting the message.



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Apple TV 4K review: so close, so far

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It doesn’t light up all of the lights.

Listeners of The Vergecast know that I’ve been ridiculously excited about the new Apple TV 4K for weeks now, because there isn’t a great standalone streaming device that supports Dolby Vision 4K HDR and the new Dolby Atmos surround sound format. I just haven’t been able to use the full capabilities of my home theater — lighting up both the Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos lights on my receiver and TV — and I was excited for Apple to put out a polished, high-end product that got me there. Apple is firmly at the high end of the market: the Apple TV 4K starts at $179, much more than competing 4K HDR-capable devices like the $89 Roku Premiere+ or the $69 Google Chromecast Ultra. I was really expecting — hoping! — this thing would blow me away.

But the new Apple TV doesn’t support Atmos. And it doesn’t support YouTube in 4K HDR. And it doesn’t have Disney or Marvel movies in 4K HDR. And it makes some 1080p content look less than great.

I’m going to explain why these limitations exist, but you’ll have to bear with me. I suspect most reviewers will focus on the interface, the TV app and the various content deals that populate it, and the bare fact that the Apple TV now supports 4K HDR playback. But I need to tell you about video format arcana, because Apple’s decisions around some very wonky specs directly influence what it’s like to use the new Apple TV 4K.

Put some tape on your glasses. This is going to be nerdy.

The Apple TV 4K is more or less a processor bump update to the fourth-gen Apple TV, which launched in 2015. Apple took iOS, reworked it for TVs with the clever name of tvOS, opened a TV-focused app store, and declared that the future of TV was an endless stream of apps. Last year, it pushed ahead with a new TV app that presents a single interface with aggregated content from partners like Hulu and ESPN. It’s clear Apple intends to simply make the TV app the home screen, but until app support gets built out, it’s just another app on the familiar icon grid home screen we’ve seen for years.

A brief collection of AV terms

The TV world is full of acronyms and standards. Here are the important ones:

HD: You know. A 720p or 1080p video.

4K: The next bump up in resolution. It’s four times the number of pixels as HD, but if you want to get all technical, it’s generally 2160p.

HDR: High Dynamic Range. HDR TVs can display a much wider range of brightness than before, just like HDR photos on your phone can capture a much wider range of brightness. You want this in your next TV.

SDR: Standard Dynamic Range. What we’ve got right now.

HDR10: There are two competing HDR standards. Every HDR TV supports HDR10, which is free to use, and some companies, like Samsung, only support HDR10 on their TVs. HDR10 sends static metadata information about the average and peak brightness of a given video to your TV.

Dolby Vision: This is Dolby’s proprietary HDR system that costs money to license. It’s supported by Apple, LG, Vizio, TCL, and some Sony TVs. Most people (including me) think Dolby Vision looks way better than HDR10 — it sends brightness metadata dynamically as the video plays, and supports brighter and more colorful video.

Dolby Atmos: Atmos and its competitor DTS:X are the next generation of surround sound formats, which the industry calls “object-based surround.” Unlike traditional surround, which sends specific tracks of audio to specific speakers, Atmos allows audio engineers to place sound “objects” in 3D space, and your receiver or soundbar figures out how to recreate it.

Since 2015, Apple’s competitors, like Roku and Amazon, have come to dominate the market, mostly with cheap streaming sticks like the Roku Express, the Amazon Fire TV stick, and the Google Chromecast, all of which cost less than $50. 4K HDR smart TVs have also gone mainstream and gotten much smarter, preloaded with apps like Netflix and Amazon Video that support 4K HDR. The new Vizio interface is a dead ringer for the Apple TV. One of the best TVs of the year so far is a $600 4K Dolby Vision Roku TV. If you buy a new 4K HDR TV, you often don’t actually need an external box.

While all of this was going on, the Apple TV was limited to 1080p and had an opening price of $149. So Apple looked at all of that, added 4K HDR support to this new Apple TV, and upped the starting price to $179. Okay then.

The only standalone box that can do Dolby Vision

Now, you do get a lot for that $179: the Apple TV is the currently the only standalone box that supports the Dolby Vision HDR standard, which is a big deal. (The $69 Chromecast Ultra supports it, but it’s spotty and it lacks its own interface.) Apple’s worked deals with most major studios to price 4K HDR movies at a cheaper $19.99 instead of the usual $29.99 Vudu and Google Play charge, which is terrific. And every HD movie you’ve already bought on iTunes will be upgraded to 4K HDR for free as they get remastered. Several of my movies have already been upgraded, which is very nice, especially because Apple’s encoding is much better than other services. If you have a large existing iTunes library or you buy a lot of movies, you might come out way ahead by investing in an Apple TV 4K.

What’s more, outside of gaming consoles, custom-built home theater PCs, and the extremely niche Nvidia Shield, the Apple TV 4K is the most powerful mainstream box you can stick under your TV. It has the same A10X Fusion chip as the iPad Pro in it, which means it’s as powerful as some laptops. The new processor means the bottom is slightly reworked, with a circular air vent, but it’s otherwise the same size and shape as the previous model.

New Apple TV remote on the right, and the old one on the left.

The Apple TV 4K remote has also been subtly redesigned: there’s a white ridge around the menu button now, which makes the thing far easier to pick up correctly in the dark, and there’s a new three-axis gyroscope in it for better motion tracking. The touchpad is still frustrating, however: I much prefer navigating the Apple TV interface with the D-pad on my Harmony remote. It’s very cool that opening a text-entry field sends a notification to your iPhone. All you have to do is swipe down and start typing on your phone, which is much nicer than swiping through the why-is-it-horizontal on-screen keyboard. It’s a terrific idea. tvOS is full of terrific ideas. It’s one of the most idealistic and ambitious TV operating systems ever.

tvOS is one of the most ambitious TV operating systems ever

But that idealism leads to strange decisions. Apple is very proud of the fact that the entire tvOS interface has been reworked to run in 4K HDR, but it also won’t let the device switch modes on your TV: from 4K to 1080p, from HDR to SDR, or from a 24Hz refresh rate (for movies) to a 60Hz rate (for games and interface animations). That means that, out of the box, any non-4K content you watch will be upscaled and processed into 4K HDR, running at the highest refresh rate your TV supports, which is usually 60Hz.

The Apple TV also automatically preferences refresh rate over any other setting: if your TV supports 60Hz HDR10 but only 30Hz Dolby Vision (like 2016 LG OLEDs), the Apple TV will pick HDR10, even though HDR10 looks worse than Dolby Vision. Apple told me that’s because it wants the interface and games to run as smoothly as possible; it’s found that the interface judders at 30Hz. So you’ll get worse HDR but a smoother interface, all because the Apple TV won’t switch modes.

(I said this was going to be nerdy.)

The lack of mode switching also means that Apple’s picking its own video upscaling and processing system over whatever’s in your TV. Your TV just thinks it’s getting 4K HDR video all the time. It won’t know that it’s actually displaying an HD source, and won’t do any of the tricks 4K TVs do to make those sources look better.

If you have a previous Apple TV, this lack of mode switching is familiar, but remapping SDR content into HDR is a whole new ballgame, and unfortunately, Apple’s HDR video processing is hit or miss. It was great when I watched HD content from iTunes, but it fell down in other apps. I watched The Dark Knight in HD on HBO Go with our video team, and the Apple TV 4K HDR processing blew out all the contrast in the image, sharpened everything to hell, and turned the film grain into noise. The same movie looked fine on iTunes, but it just looked bad from HBO Go. I checked on my older 1080p Apple TV, and HBO Go looked fine. So there’s definitely work to be done here.

Apple’s HDR processing is hit or miss

The good news is Apple told me it’s continuing to refine the processing it’s doing with the goal of making HD SDR content look normal, and the Apple TV gets regular software updates, so it’s not an empty promise. But right now, if you just want to pass along an unmolested HD video feed, you’ll have to change the output settings of the entire system.

All of this adds up to a real devil’s bargain that wouldn’t exist if the Apple TV would simply switch modes on your TV. I asked about it, and Apple told me it thinks mode switching is “inelegant,” because TVs often flicker and display built-in interface elements when they do it. (There’s some classic Apple-ness here.)

So from the jump, the Apple TV forces you to run your nice new 4K HDR TV at a suboptimal setting at some point during the course of using it. The specifics of this problem might only be of interest to A/V nerds, but the way it looks in the end will affect every single Apple TV 4K owner. I suspect Apple will eventually add an advanced setting to allow for mode switching, but out of the box right now, this is what you get.

After years of absence, an Amazon Prime Video app will come to the Apple TV in a few months, but it’s not here yet. When it does arrive, it’ll integrate into Apple’s TV interface, which is very nice. Apple’s also high on Hulu and DirecTV Now, which integrates live TV into the TV app. But Netflix is still a holdout, so you’ll be bouncing into the Netflix app eventually.

While getting 4K HDR movies for $20 (and $6 to rent) is great, not every studio is on board. Specifically, Disney hasn’t signed on, which means Disney movies and Marvel releases like Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Captain America: Civil War are still in HD, even though they’re in 4K HDR on other services like Vudu. The movies that are in native 4K HDR look terrific, of course, and the 4K HDR library is growing rapidly, according to Apple. There’s definitely stuff in iTunes I haven’t seen anywhere else. You can also ask Siri to show you 4K HDR movies and they’ll pop right up, which is great fun.

Apple doesn’t support YouTube 4K

There are wonkier content issues, as well. (Of course there are.) Apple doesn’t support YouTube’s VP9 video format, which means YouTube on the Apple TV 4K doesn’t support 4K HDR playback. Apple doesn’t have any timeline as to when or if that might happen; it’s a problem that affects Safari on the Mac and iOS devices as well.

Again, the specifics of the issue are nerdy, but the result is that no one who buys a new Apple TV can watch 4K YouTube videos — and YouTube is the single largest source of 4K video. Until Apple and Google figure it out, MKBHD and #teamcrispy will all be running at 1080p on the Apple TV 4K. Sorry, boys.

Apple also doesn’t support modern surround sound standards like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, which place sound effects in 3D space around you. I have an Atmos setup, and it’s easily the most impressive surround sound upgrade I’ve made in ages. The Apple TV supports a decent range of surround formats, but not Atmos, and Apple insists on doing the decoding on the Apple TV and sending out either PCM audio or downmixed Dolby Digital 5.1.

This is mystifying: almost every new movie that’s been remastered in Dolby Vision has also been redone in Atmos, and support is basically everywhere now. The cheapest Roku players support Atmos passthrough. The Xbox One S handles Atmos. Atmos soundbars were all over CES and they’re just getting cheaper. Netflix is rolling out Atmos support. It’s about to be as mainstream as 5.1 surround.

Apple says Atmos support is on the roadmap

Apple told me that the lack of Atmos isn’t a hardware limitation, and that support is on the roadmap. I strongly suspect that getting Siri’s voice into the Atmos mix is a big goal here, and it’ll be cool when the company figures it out. But right now, for $179, at least offering the option of losing Siri in favor of Atmos passthrough should be a no-brainer. The Apple TV is utterly dependent on other devices in your living room to output any audio or video, and it simply doesn’t seem to acknowledge the idea that they might be better at doing those things.

Part of the reason these wonky settings issues are so frustrating is that the Apple TV is full of extremely good ideas. I love that Apple’s single sign-on system lets you log into your cable provider once and then instantly authenticate every app that’s supported across every tvOS and iOS device, even if major players like Comcast are holding out for now. The speed and iOS roots of the Apple TV allows streaming apps add layers of interactivity and polish that just aren’t possible on other boxes: the ESPN app lets you quickly assemble a quadbox of four simultaneous live feeds and instantly go to fullscreen and back with zero lag. It’s a little anemic right now, but the TV app really is the beginning of an entirely new TV home screen experience, especially with the addition of live sports and breaking news alerts.

Apple TV streaming apps have features that just aren’t possible on other boxes

Apple says the Apple TV is a “video-first” device, and that it’s not focused on games as a primary experience, but it’s also really fun to just click around the App Store and discover the medium-sized collection of games to play. It’s not a PS4, but a bunch of iOS games have jumped to tvOS, and many of them are free-to-play, which feels less scammy on the TV for some reason. I spent more time playing a cheapo tennis game than I’d otherwise care to admit, and I got lost playing a free version of Sonic the Hedgehog. It wasn’t a console, and the controls weren’t great, but it was still fun.

Siri on the Apple TV is still a subset of Siri on iOS, with more focus on TV and movie results and little personality. Competitors like Google and Amazon are integrating their virtual assistants with their TV products at a deep level. You can tell a Google Home to play something on a Chromecast, and Amazon is rumored to be building a Fire TV box with an Echo-like far-field mic array built right in. That’s not the Apple TV; you’re still holding the remote (or your iPhone with the remote app open) up to your face. We’ll see if and how that changes when the HomePod comes out.

I want to love the Apple TV 4K. I want to love it a lot. It is by far the closest thing to being a fully realized vision for the future of TV that exists. But because it’s so ambitious, it’s also the farthest away from the vision it’s trying to achieve. Cheaper devices with fewer dreams about unified interfaces are much better at simply turning on and putting some video on your TV, with less aggressive video processing and better surround support.

For Apple to justify the Apple TV 4K’s $179 price tag against the apps already built into your TV and those very popular cheap streaming sticks, it needs to offer a perfect utopia of the best technical capabilities, a complete content catalog, and a simplified interface. I know a lot of video nerds, and all of them were hoping the Apple TV 4K would be the One True Box. That's what Apple does: it rolls in and confidently fixes complicated tech problems with elegant solutions.

The Apple TV 4K does not do that. Worse, its attempts to solve the thorny technical problems of home theaters are less flexible and sometimes not as good as other, cheaper boxes. If you buy one of the most expensive TV products on the market, you shouldn’t have to think about whether you’re getting access to a complete content library, the best audio and video quality possible, and YouTube in 4K. You should get it all, and never think about it again. It should light up all of the lights.

If you just want to watch some Netflix in 4K, stick with your built-in apps

If you’re already invested in a huge iTunes movie library, or you buy so many movies that Apple’s cheaper pricing makes a big difference to you, you’re not going to be unhappy about buying an Apple TV 4K. It’ll be fine, and having your existing library get upgraded will be nice, although the HDR upscaler will occasionally make you sad.

But if you just want to watch some Netflix and you’re fine with renting movies from a service like Vudu or Amazon, stick with the apps on your existing 4K HDR smart TV for now or pick up a Roku. If you absolutely must spend a bunch of money, buy an Xbox One S bundle for $249 — you’ll at least get a free game out of it as well. All of this stuff will be messy and annoying in different ways, but they’ll get the job done.

I am very confident Apple is going to figure this TV thing out. It’s the only company that has the combination of power and care to actually do it. But the Apple TV 4K’s unrealized potential just makes it obvious that the future of TV is still pretty far away, and it’s simply too expensive to gamble on in the meantime.

7.5 Verge Score

Good Stuff

• Ambitious, easy-to-use interface

• Lots of apps, with Amazon on the way

• Cheaper 4K HDR movie rentals and purchases than the competition

• Existing iTunes libraries get updated to 4K HDR for free

Bad Stuff

• HDR processing makes some HD videos look bad

• No YouTube 4K HDR support

• No Disney or Marvel movies in 4K HDR

• No Atmos support

• Expensive



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Consciousness Goes Deeper Than You Think

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An article on the neuroscience of infant consciousness, which attracted some interest a few years ago, asked: “When does your baby become conscious?” The premise, of course, was that babies aren’t born conscious but, instead, develop consciousness at some point. (According to the article, it is about five months of age). Yet, it is hard to think that there is nothing it feels like to be a newborn.

Newborns clearly seem to experience their own bodies, environment, the presence of their parents, etcetera—albeit in an unreflective, present-oriented manner. And if it always feels like something to be a baby, then babies don’t become conscious. Instead, they are conscious from the get-go.

The problem is that, somewhat alarmingly, the word “consciousness” is often used in the literature as if it entailed or implied more than just the qualities of experience. Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, for instance, insisted that “it is very important to realize that attention is the key to distinguish between unconscious thought and conscious thought. Conscious thought is thought with attention.” This implies that if a thought escapes attention, then it is unconscious. But is the mere lack of attention enough to assert that a mental process lacks the qualities of experience? Couldn’t a process that escapes the focus of attention still feel like something?

Consider your breathing right now: the sensation of air flowing through your nostrils, the movements of your diaphragm, etcetera. Were you not experiencing these sensations a moment ago, before I directed your attention to them? Or were you just unaware that you were experiencing them all along? By directing your attention to these sensations, did I make them conscious or did I simply cause you to experience the extra quality of knowing that the sensations were conscious?

Indeed, Jonathan Schooler has established a clear distinction between conscious and meta-conscious processes. Whereas both types entail the qualities of experience, meta-conscious processes also entail what he called re-representation. “Periodically attention is directed towards explicitly assessing the contents of experience. The resulting meta-consciousness involves an explicit re-representation of consciousness in which one interprets, describes or otherwise characterizes the state of one’s mind.

So where attention plays an important role is in re-representation; that is, the conscious knowledge of an experience, which underlies introspection. Subjects cannot report—not even to themselves—experiences that aren’t re-represented. Nothing, however, stops conscious experience from occurring without re-representation: Dreams, for instance, have been shown to lack re-representation, despite the undeniable fact they are experienced in consciousness. This gap between reportability and the contents of consciousness has motivated the emergence of so-called “no-report paradigms” in the modern neuroscience of consciousness.

Clearly, the assumption that consciousness is limited to re-represented mental contents under the focus of attention mistakenly conflates meta-consciousness with consciousness proper. Yet, this conflation is disturbingly widespread. Consider Axel Cleeremans’s words: “Awareness…always seems to minimally entail the ability of knowing that one knows. This ability, after all, forms the basis for the verbal reports we take to be the most direct indication of awareness. And when we observe the absence of such ability to report on the knowledge involved in our decisions, we rightfully conclude the decision was based on unconscious knowledge.”

Because the study of the Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) is, by and large, dependent on subjective reports of experience, what passes for the NCC is liable to be merely the neural correlates of meta-consciousness. As such, potentially conscious mental activity—in the sense of activity correlated with experiential qualities—may evade recognition as such.

As a matter of fact, there is circumstantial but compelling evidence that this is precisely the case. To see it, notice first the conscious knowledge N—that is, the re-representation—of an experience X is triggered by the occurrence of X. For instance, it is the occurrence of a sense perception that triggers the metacognitive realization one is perceiving something. N, in turn, evokes X by directing attention back to it: the realization one is perceiving something naturally shifts one’s mental focus back to the original perception. So we end up with a back-and-forth cycle of evocations whereby X triggers N, which in turn evokes X, which again triggers N, and so forth.

As it turns out, characterizations of the NCC show precisely this pattern of reverberating back-and-forth communications among different brain regions. Researchers suspect even that when damage to the primary visual cortex presumably interrupts an instance of this kind of reverberation, patients display blindsight. That is, the ability to correctly discriminate moving objects despite the reported inability to see them. This is precisely what one would expect if the reverberation in question were the oscillations between X and N: The objects are consciously perceived—which therefore explains how the patients discriminate them—but the patients do not know they consciously perceive the objects.

By mistaking meta-consciousness for consciousness, we create two significant problems: First, we fail to distinguish between conscious processes that lack re-representation and truly unconscious processes. After all, both are equally unreportable to self and others. This misleads us to conclude there is a mental unconscious when, in reality, there may always be something it feels like to have each and every mental process in our psyche. Second, we fail to see our partial and tentative explanations for the alleged rise of consciousness may concern merely the rise of metacognition.

This is liable to create the illusion we are making progress toward solving the “hard problem of consciousness” when, in fact, we are bypassing it altogether: Mechanisms of metacognition are entirely unrelated to the problem of how the qualities of experience could arise from physical arrangements.

Consciousness may never arise—be it in babies, toddlers, children or adults—because it may always be there to begin with. For all we know, what arises is merely a metacognitive configuration of preexisting consciousness. If so, consciousness may be fundamental in nature—an inherent aspect of every mental process, not a property constituted or somehow generated by particular physical arrangements of the brain. Claims, grounded in subjective reports of experience, of progress toward reducing consciousness to brain physiology may have little—if anything—to do with consciousness proper, but with mechanisms of metacognition instead.

Editor’s Note: This essay is based on the paper, “There Is an ‘Unconscious,’ but It May Well Be Conscious,” published in Europe’s Journal of Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 3,  559572.



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