I agree 4K is too far out to be realistic for an Apple TV released next year, but in general it's a common Apple strategy to essentially finance the production

I agree 4K is too far out to be realistic for an Apple TV released next year, but in general it's a common Apple strategy to essentially finance the production of a new component and buy up the entire production capacity for that component, so that sometimes even the vendor selling it to Apple can't use it for their own product. We've seen them do this sort of thing with Samsung a few times, just to pick one example.