As I understand it, it has nothing to do with "will your hardware support it", it has to do with preventing people from saving the high quality stream to disk.

As I understand it, it has nothing to do with "will your hardware support it", it has to do with preventing people from saving the high quality stream to disk. Hence the reason they don't allow 1080p except on certain, locked down platforms. Pretty much every device/player in existence supports 1080p at this point, Netflix just won't allow it.