There's a difference between "luxury" and (the visual equivalent of) "audiophile." People with money to waste buy Beats headphones, not Sennheisers. Thus why Apple acquired the former instead of the latter. Targeting the high-market buyer doesn't usually imply making your product capable of doing all the latest and greatest bleeding-edge things and beating the competition in a highest-numbers contest, any more than BMW sells its products as race-cars.

Of course, some rich people are racing-car enthusiasts, or audiophiles, or whatever else—and it seems to be more common in the high-end, simply because more of the rich can afford to actually get these things when they want them. But that doesn't mean that the desire is a rich-people thing, or that making something super-duper-high-numbered will make it sell more to the rich.

(Of course, if you give the thing a super-duper-high-numbered price tag, you might inspire some rich people to get it as a Veblen good, which can often look like a desire for the bleeding-edge. You'll frequently find things purchased in this way being underutilized—4K "Veblen TVs" purchased in order to watch 480p Seinfeld re-runs and so on.)

They've done this before; the ATV1 didn't support 1080p, at a time when 1080p TVs were starting to exist in the semi-mainstream (though the vast majority of the market was 720p or 1080i still), but there was little content for them.

Ultimately, it'd presumably add cost for a feature useful to few people. Connectivity for 4k also remains a mess; there's HDMI 1.4 (24hz at 4k, so not good enough; the interface presumably runs at 60fps like all other Apple interfaces), and HDMI 2.0, which does support 60hz at 4k, but which is somewhat rare, and has its own problems: http://www.avsforum.com/forum/168-hdmi-q-one-connector-world...

I expect in a couple of years when 4k TVs are more common, content exists for them in significant amounts, and the connector standard (possibly HDMI 2.0a?) is sorted out, they'll support it.

I don't know if their brand image can be defined that easily. They sell their stuff at Wal-Mart, after all.

I get where you're going, but I would argue that Apple's brand image isn't luxury at all. Apple sits squarely in the mid-to-high end bracket — anyone who's essentially "middle class" can afford Apple products, and their pricing indicates this. Examples of luxury brands that few people can afford: Hermes bags, Lambourghini cars, Cartier watches.

You can buy a 50 inch 4K TV right now for only $750. http://www.amazon.com/VIZIO-M50-C1-50-Inch-Ultra-Smart/dp/B0...

That puts 4K squarely in the "middle class" market, if you ask me, and if Apple TV doesn't support it, that means they aren't even targeting middle class. They are basically targeting poor people with an expensive luxury item that can run apps (half of which, like Netflix and Hulu, already run on most users' smart TVs). Their marketing strategy is borderline nonsensical.

I think it fits squarely into the 'affordable luxury' armed; it's kind of the equivalent of, say, Bosch or Neff for kitchen appliances. A little bit more expensive than the entry level brands, and not really that different, but it looks good, and the oven door feels a bit more solid. Apple's certainly not in the true luxury segment, except arguably with the gold watch.

Especially since it's not that expensive a feature anymore. There's actually a $15 Pi-like ARM board called the Orange Pi PC that does 4k, because apparently ARM media SoCs with 4k support are that cheap that you can put one in a bargain-basement board that's not even aimed at media applications. Admittedly it's restricted to 30 FPS at 4k, but still, I'm sure Apple could do better if they wanted to.

    Apple's brand image is "luxury"

That's their image, but supporting 4k would probably add a few bucks to the cost of the Apple TV, which would be unacceptable to Tim Cook. 4k will be included when it's achieved decent market penetration.