The Next Apple TV 4K Might Be Overpowered (In a Good Way)

By all reports, a new Apple TV set-top box is just around the corner. In fact, odds are good that it will be unveiled as part of a segment of home products during tomorrow’s “Surprise and Shine” event alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, the long-awaited foldable iPhone, and two new Apple Watch models.

Considering it’s been nearly four years since Apple last refreshed the Apple TV 4K, it’s definitely long overdue. While Apple hasn’t been exactly consistent in updating its set-top box, the longest we’ve ever had to wait before was 44 months, from the first Apple TV 4K, which launched on September 22, 2017, to the second-generation model that arrived on May 21, 2021. However, Apple got our hopes up when it debuted a third-generation Apple TV 4K less than 18 months later, on November 4, 2022.

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The good news is that if a new report today is accurate, the new Apple TV 4K may be worth waiting for. To be clear, we’re not expecting any groundbreaking design changes — it’s likely to be the same little black box that we’ve known for years — but it’s about to get a lot more powerful.

When Apple introduced tvOS with the fourth-generation Apple TV in 2015 (the box that was later rebranded as the “Apple TV HD”), it’s used the same A-series chips found in the iPhone. However, it’s also traditionally lagged behind the latest silicon. It wasn’t too bad at first; the 2015 Apple TV used an A8 chip from the 2014 iPhone 6, while the first Apple TV 4K in 2017 came with the exact same A10X chip that had been introduced in the iPad Pro only three months earlier.

However, when the second-generation Apple TV 4K came along in 2021, Apple saddled it with a 2018-era A12 Bionic chip. That might explain why it needed to rectify that only 18 months later by releasing a third-generation model with the A15 Bionic that had debuted with the iPhone 13 lineup the previous year (although it still oddly had one core disabled, offering a five-core CPU, instead of the six cores found in every other device that used that chip, suggesting Apple may have also released it just to get rid of some “binned” chips that had come off the line with fewer functioning cores).

Now, a new leak by MacRumors analyst Aaron Perris reveals that this year’s Apple TV 4K will get either an A19 or an A19 Pro chip.

That’s a nice bonus. Many originally expected it to get the A17 Pro, although those rumors also started back when we thought we would have seen the new set-top box a year or two ago. Still, even an A18-class chip seemed more likely, so seeing that Apple is going to stick with some semblance of currency is great news.

It’s still a year-old chip, of course, but it would be silly to hope for anything more, considering TSMC’s fabrication lines likely have their hands full cranking out A20 Pro chips at an alarming pace. Plus, with the standard iPhone 18 not expected to arrive until next spring, there are likely no base A20 chips in production at all yet.

The jury is still out on whether the Apple TV 4K will see the A19 or the A19 Pro, but either will allow for advanced gaming capabilities — the A17 Pro brought AAA console gaming to the iPhone 15 Pro lineup three years ago — as well as Apple Intelligence with Siri AI.

The primary difference between the two chips is the 12 GB of RAM on the A19 Pro allows for more advanced Siri AI features with expressive voices thanks to the ability to load the more powerful on-device AI models into RAM. However, even the A19 would boost the Apple TV 4K from the 6 GB of RAM found in the current model to 8 GB of RAM, giving it enough headroom for standard Apple Intelligence models.

The A19 Pro also features a higher-end GPU and faster memory bandwidth, although the number of GPU cores vary even in the current production runs, with the iPhone Air having a 5-core GPU versus the 6-core GPU of the version used in the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max. Still, unless Apple really is planning to turn the Apple TV 4K into a gaming console, it’s unlikely to need that kind of power inside the set-top box. Using a standard A19 chip is more than sufficient for most use cases, and is less likely to melt the plastic casing.

However, if Apple follows tradition, the Apple TV 4K will almost certainly use “binned” versions of the A19 or A19 Pro, so don’t be surprised if it has one less CPU or GPU core, much like the current A15-powered model.