You have hit the double whammy of a new range coming out, above the previous flagship that you bought, 8 to 9, followed by the model year upgrade, F to G. So more frequent, to your perception, than the normal yearly update pattern.
To muddy the waters even further, or maybe to clarify them, I don’t know, you now have this to consider, the AG8.
Though if you want the greatest, nothing less than the AG9 will do. And you have to ask yourself - if you had been considering the AF8 and the AF9 after the AF9 had come out, would that £700 drop have been enough to sway you from the AF9? My guess is it wouldn’t.
And indeed, if you are looking to migrate to the G sets, you now have that choice again, between 8 and 9.
Sony are showing here that the AF9 wasn’t intended to supersede the AF8, or there would not be an AG8 offered alongside the AG9. Just that either way, you can buy the latest, but buying the greatest means jumping up the model range.
TVs have now got like first computers, and then smartphones, got; if you waited, there would have been a better one along soon - but if you waited, you wouldn’t have one to use now.
But both those markets have now matured, and change is small and incremental, so when you buy matters much less in those fields.
But TV, which was a mature market for years with consumers generally replacing their TVs on a 5-year cycle, has now become one of constant change and improvement again, and will be for a few years to come, until it all settles down again. So chasing the latest and greatest will be an expensive process, involving frequent change and paying top-of-the-range premium prices.
My 2015 TV isn’t significantly showing its age, but my 2016 soundbar is, and my 2017 UHD player is no longer the south-of-£400 bargain it seemed at the time.
OTOH, I’ve just unpacked our 2012 32in Smart TV set, relegated to the loft because it couldn’t do Netflix, and it is every bit as good as our later 32in sets (all untroubled by HDR, HDMI 2.whatever, Dolby Atmos and so on), and given a whole new lease of Smarts by a couple of sticks. I didn’t think that would happen for it....
My favourite bedtime reading is a Sony product manual…
