The Apple TV 4K Gets Serious (and Takes Your Wallet With It)

While the marquee product by far at this morning’s “Welcome Home” event was the new HomeView, Apple also took the opportunity to refresh some other key components of its living room lineup — updates that are notable not for what they bring so much as how long it’s been since they’ve brought us anything new.

The Apple TV 4K is an interesting refresh partly because it actually packs in the most powerful silicon in the lineup. While the HomeView only got the 2024-era A18 chip, the Apple TV 4K moves to the A19 — the same chip still being used in the iPhone 17.

We’ll have to wait to see if this is a “binned” chip, as Apple doesn’t spell out the number of cores on the Apple TV tech specs page, but either way, it’s more than ample for handling Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, moving Apple’s set-top box into the modern era.

On the outside, the new Apple TV 4K looks essentially identical to its predecessor. Apple tweaked the third-generation model slightly in 2022 to drop the letters “tv” off the top of the box, and the new fourth-generation model retains that styling.

However, the new Apple TV 4K offers one interesting twist that nobody in the rumor mill saw coming until the eleventh hour: built-in far-field microphones now allow users to talk to Siri AI from anywhere in the room. While it’s been possible to do this in the past via a microphone on the Siri Remote (hence the accessory’s name), the new Apple TV 4K will let you do this hands-free.

While that’s a nice touch, it’s going to be redundant for anyone with one or more HomePods in the room, which is even more likely now as the Apple TV 4K not only supports two full-sized HomePods for an immersive Home Theater mode, but up to four HomePod or even HomePod mini speakers to create a surround sound experience.

“The new Apple TV 4K is our most immersive home theater experience yet,” said Bob Borchers, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With Siri AI, finding something to watch becomes a full-screen, conversational experience, and with built-in far-field microphones, it’s completely hands-free. Pair it with HomePod for the best surround sound setup we’ve ever offered, and it makes managing your Apple Home accessories easier than ever. Now, alongside HomeView, HomePod mini 2, and Apple Home Collection, it’s part of the most connected Apple Home we’ve ever built.”

While it was previously possible to use two HomePod mini speakers with the Apple TV 4K, that only delivered a stereo soundstage. Four can naturally do real surround sound, and they’ll even intelligently recognize their position in the room for automatic calibration.

Apple specifically lists the HomePod mini 2 as a requirement, suggesting this may not be possible with the original HomePod mini. However, it’s worth noting that it explicitly lists the HomePod (2nd generation) as a requirement, despite the original HomePod having been previously supported for two-speaker Home Theater audio.

The good news is that you won’t need to shell out for four full-sized HomePods. While that would obviously give you the best sound, Apple suggests you’ll be able to mix and match, “as long as the front and rear speaker pairs match,” so you can use two full-sized HomePods for the front speakers, and two HomePod mini speakers for the rear (or vice versa, in theory, although that would probably sound weird).

The new Apple TV 4K also includes a fourth-generation Siri Remote that may look similar to the older models, but actually packs in Find My support with Precision Finding and an option to play a sound on the remote. Apple added Find My Remote three years ago in iOS 17, but that relied on Bluetooth proximity detection. The new one presumably includes an ultra-wideband chip to allow it to be located as precisely as an AirTag. That should eliminate the need for kludgy workarounds.

If you’re someone who’s always losing your remote, the new Siri Remote can also be purchased separately for use with any tvOS-based Apple TV, even going back to the 2015 Apple TV HD.

Apple is also highlighting a new “rich, full-screen experience” for Siri AI, although it’s a bit unclear whether that will be exclusive to the new Apple TV 4K, as the footnotes say “Siri AI is available as a beta on Apple TV 4K (2nd generation or later).” Those older A12- and A15-powered models won’t be able to handle Siri AI natively, and as of this writing, the latest tvOS 27.2 betas still show the classic Siri, so we’ll have to wait and see if that’s a typo or if Apple has something else up its sleeve, like leaning more into Private Cloud Compute.

Apple has also ditched the choice of storage options, simplifying to a single, 128 GB model that includes Gigabit Ethernet and Thread networking. It’s available for preorder today for $299 and expected to arrive in stores and in customers’ hands on November 13.