1080 Apple TV; Best Buy says Apple's HDMI cable is low quality and will yield poor quality image to TV. They argue emphatically that I should purchase at least a $60 HDMI (Cinnamon grade) for Apple TV. Will this make a difference in viewing quality?

Welcome to the Apple community.

They may or may not be partially correct. The Apple TV 2 required a standard HDMI cable where is the Apple TV 3, if it is going to use 1080p, requires a high-speed cable. With that in mind, so long as the specifications of the cable meets your requirements the Apple cable is of fairly good quality, personally I would never spend $60 on an HDMI cable.

OMG NO!

This is complete B.S. As long as you are using a HDMI cable that can run 1080p (see above), you are fine! DO NOT BUY MONSTER CABLE or other expensive 'premium' HDMI cables. They simply don't work better than a standard no-name HDMI cable. Digital either works or it doesn't - there's no quality difference.

See this article:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385272,00.asp

Tom and Ray, hosts of NPR's "Car Talk" radio show, refer to this sort of accessorizing as a "Boat Payment". When the mechanic needs to make the payment on his Boat, all sorts of expensive stuff becomes "essential" for you to have.

Whilst I largely agree, with the additional comments in this thread, I don't feel we should get carried away and assume that the cheapest HDMI cable will be just fine. The tolerances in HDMI cables are quite fine, for example if one of the strands is just one 80,000's of an inch longer or shorter than the other the signal will become out of sync. Similarly, the diameter of each strand should be uniform, otherwise impedance will occur and signals will be bounced back along the length of the cable.
Some HDMI cables are better shielded, some are thicker, some are better crimped or have better connectors. The notion that they simply work or don't work is not entirely correct, and poor cables can produce a degraded picture. Often, common events such as being run over with a vacuum cleaner can more quickly damage low quality cables.
In summary, I personally do not believe you need to spend a lot of money on a HDMI cable, but I also believe you should avoid really cheap ones.

The problem with the tests that these people do, is that they plug them in and report what they see, and that's about it. I seriously doubt they pull them in and out, run power leads alongside them or run over them with vacuum cleaners.

I wouldn't spend 60$ either. But if you have a huge home theatre system you've spent thousands on.... better not to crap out on lower quality cables. But I doubt that is the case here.

The $19 HMDI cable from the Apple store works just fine. It's amusing to me how sales people justify Monster audio calbles, tube amplifiers for thousands of dollars, and vynal records over CDs. But everyone's got to make a living. But just use your common sense when buying.

virg

I just received my Apple TV and I ordered Amazon's cheapie HDMI cable at the sametime. It was something like $5.98 for a 1 meter cable. It does support the latest HDMI spec 1.4 and that's the only thing I was looking for. I suppose if I were running cable a long way I might get better, heavier cables. Only reason I didn't buy one from Mono Price for about half of that $5.98 was I was worried it wouldn't be here when the ATV came and I knew Amazon would be.