New Delhi: The fourth-generation Apple TV 4K was announced Tuesday at the company’s “Welcome home” event, and preorders are open now. Units ship November 13. That’s two weeks later than the October 30 date Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman floated before the event, so the leaks got the box right but the calendar wrong.
The box looks the same as before. The changes are inside.
It runs on Apple’s A19 chip, which Apple says gives 50% more CPU performance and double the GPU performance of the last model. The more practical addition is a dedicated AV1 decoder. AV1 is a video codec built to deliver good picture quality at lower bitrates, so if your internet is shaky, streaming should hold up better. For anyone on a mediocre connection, that may matter more than the extra horsepower.
The bigger shift is voice. The new Apple TV has three far-field microphones, so you can talk to it from across the room without touching the remote. That’s where Apple’s new Siri AI, built on Apple Intelligence, comes in. Ask who’s in the scene you’re watching, what a show is rated, or whether it won anything, and the answer pops up in a small overlay while playback keeps going. It’s a neat idea, and it’s the sort of thing people currently do by grabbing a phone and searching.
Of course, a TV box that’s always listening for a wake word will make some people uneasy. Apple seems to know that. It says microphone data is handled in a Secure Exclave, kept apart from the main tvOS system, and that any request needing the cloud goes through Private Cloud Compute, which Apple says doesn’t store user data. Those are the company’s claims, and independent scrutiny will have to confirm them. Still, it’s notable that the privacy pitch comes up this early.
The remote gets a quiet but welcome upgrade. It keeps the aluminum design but now has a built-in speaker and an ultra-wideband chip, which puts it on the Find My network. Lose it in the couch cushions and you can make it chirp or track it with Precision Finding on an iPhone. Anyone who has torn apart a sofa looking for a Siri Remote will see the appeal.
Audio gets a boost too. Pair the Apple TV with matching sets of HomePod (2nd gen) or the newly announced HomePod mini 2 and you can build a four-speaker surround setup.
Apple used the same event to show off other home products, including a HomePod mini 2 and a wider smart home lineup, so the TV box is one piece of a larger push. The price is the part I keep returning to. At $299, it isn’t aimed at casual buyers, and the case for it rests on how well Siri AI works day to day, which nobody outside Apple has tested yet.
