The pricey new Apple TV 4K is still the best streamer around | The Verge

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Apple knows how to make a great streaming box to be the center of your home theater, but there are some misses with the new model.
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See All by John Higgins
Photography by Hunter McRae for The Verge
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Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
See All by John Higgins
I’m sitting in front of my TV, puppy nuzzled up next to me, with four HomePods spread around my living room — two flanking my TV and one at either end of my couch — connected to the brand new Apple TV 4K. Young Anakin Skywalker hits the throttle and flies through the room. There hasn’t been an Apple surround sound system until now, and since it was announced, I was excited to try it out. And let me tell you, watching a pod race with an all-Apple audio setup is a whole lot of fun.
Surround sound across four HomePods is one of the flagship features of the fourth-gen Apple TV 4K, which is out tomorrow for $300. It’s an expensive streaming box — double and in some cases quadruple the price of competing options — that tries to earn its place in your living room with premium and convenient new features: a powerful chip, lots of storage, a trackable remote, and lots of AI. If you’re deep in the Apple ecosystem and willing to splurge, the box is a solid choice. But for everyone else, I’m not convinced the added features do enough to justify that steep new price.
From the outside, it’s hard to tell what’s new about the fourth-gen Apple TV 4K. Compared to the 2022 model, it’s the same size, in the same finish, with the same number of ports (in the same configuration), showing the same interface, with the same HDR support. Where things are upgraded is largely on the inside: there’s a more powerful chip — the A19, which first showed up in the iPhone 17 — and 128GB of storage by default, which was previously an upgrade. The flip side is that there is no lower-cost 64GB model anymore, which is a shame because I don’t think most people need any more than that.
The included aluminum remote is visually the same as the previous one. It charges via USB-C, has a voice-activation button on its side, and its clickpad is touch-sensitive, which can thankfully be disabled in the menu. There is one small quality of life change, though. The remote now has the Find My feature. It shows up in the Find My app on your phone, which does a great job of pinpointing the remote’s location; it can also make a sound when you can’t spot it. For a busy family like mine, this is great when one of us unintentionally brings the remote into the kitchen or bedroom (or when it’s buried in the cushions or pillows of the couch).
Siri AI is here, too, though it’s also coming to second- and third-gen Apple TV 4Ks with tvOS 27.2. The new Siri can be pretty great, when it works, especially when using personal context to understand your requests. If Apple Intelligence is enabled on your iPhone or iPad and it’s on the same network as the Apple TV 4K, the box can recognize your voice and securely connect to your device to help personalize answers to you. My friend had recently texted me about a show to watch, but I couldn’t remember what it was. When I asked Siri to find the show he had recommended, it searched my messages and opened it up on the TV (it was Pluribus).
But Siri had occasional issues with personalized answers. I asked this request a few times over my days of testing, and it didn’t always give the same answer. While it opened Pluribus on a few occasions, it also once opened The Bondsman which, to be fair, he did recommend to me… just way back in October of 2025. But even when I clarified, “No, the show he messaged about yesterday,” Siri wasn’t able to find it.
The Apple TV 4K also had trouble recognizing my voice from one moment to the next. A few minutes after asking about Pluribus, I put on an episode of Bobby Flay’s The Line. I asked Siri about his competitor Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant Hav & Mar — where it is, what type of food it serves, if it had any accolades (I found out it was awarded two stars by The New York Times), and when it would be open during an upcoming trip to New York City. But when I changed the topic to a movie my wife and I were texting about, Siri suddenly couldn’t recognize my voice to use personal context, even though it had answered my Pluribus question minutes before. My iPhone was still on the coffee table in front of me and on the Wi-Fi network, so the connection between it and the Apple TV 4K should have been strong enough for personal context to work without issue.
Requests can be misunderstood, too. My days of testing overlapped with the F1 Brazilian Grand Prix, which is broadcast on Apple TV. When live coverage of the race started, I asked Siri, “Play the F1 Brazilian Grand Prix.” Instead of the race, it started the music track “Hymn of the Racers” by the 1995 band F1. “Play the São Paulo F1 Grand Prix” played the song “São Paulo,” a collaboration between The Weeknd and Anitta. I spent more time trying to get Siri to understand what I wanted than it would take to use the remote to start it.
When it hits, Siri AI is great. “Play Empire Strikes Back” started the Star Wars film on Disney Plus in seconds without having to mention the streaming service. Getting Pluribus to open from a question relatively scarce on details was awesome (when it happened). But as it stands right now, Siri AI is still very much a beta project and needs some work and refinement to be consis