The fourth-gen streaming box also gets a surround-sound upgrade and the ability to find your Siri remote.
The fourth-gen streaming box also gets a surround-sound upgrade and the ability to find your Siri remote.
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Apple is introducing a refreshed Apple TV 4K today with a pair of interesting new hardware features: far-field microphones to talk to Siri hands-free and Find My built into the remote. The fourth-gen Apple TV 4K, announced at Apple’s Welcome Home event in New York City, is the first model to support the Siri AI voice assistant and has a new home theatre feature that lets you pair up to four second-gen HomePods or HomePod Mini 2s for surround sound.
The new Apple TV 4K costs $299 , more than twice the price the prior-generation Apple TV 4K debuted at and $50 more than the current top-of-the-line model (which is being discontinued). The fourth-gen model matches that version’s specs with 128GB of storage, an Ethernet port, and support for Thread and Matter, but it’s getting a bump up to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. It will be available on November 13th, with preorders opening today, October 13th.
Apple announced the device as part of a major new push into the smart home, which includes the new HomeView smart display ($299), HomePod Mini 2 ($149), and a collection of smart home devices developed in collaboration with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric.
The new Apple TV comes with an A19 chip, first seen in last year’s iPhone 17, which adds Siri AI support out of the box. It will launch in beta and be available in English in eight countries — the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, and India. Apple says Siri AI lets you use natural language to talk to the voice assistant through the remote or the new microphones and ask for recommendations, such as “What are the best nature docs on Apple TV right now?”
Unlike on the HomePod or HomeView, Siri doesn’t speak its responses aloud on Apple TV; they appear either full screen when you search for content or in a text bubble when you ask general knowledge questions. In the demo I saw, someone asked if the soccer team we were watching in an episode of Ted Lasso was real, and Siri displayed a few sentences answering the query (no, it’s fictional) that covered the top-right corner of the screen.
We’ve already seen AI-powered search features on Google’s TV Streamer with Gemini and Amazon’s Fire TV with Alexa Plus, but Apple is taking its streaming box’s AI capabilities further with the addition of personal context. Personal context uses information from your Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone, so you can say “Play that show my friend texted me,” and it will pull from your text messages and find what you were sent.
The design of the streaming box and its remote hasn’t changed, but the fourth-gen Apple TV 4K now supports an expanded surround-sound setup. You can use four compatible HomePod speakers in pairs, up from the two you can use with current Apple TV models. Compatible speakers include the HomePod second-gen and the HomePod Mini 2, also announced today for $149.
There are three available configurations: four HomePod second-gens, four HomePod Mini 2s, or a pair of HomePod second-gens and a pair of HomePod Mini 2s. The feature is exclusive to the new Apple TV 4K, and Apple says the speakers automatically calibrate with the device to understand where they are in the room and relative to each other, then tune the audio levels to fit the space.
I’m most excited to be able to say “Hey Siri, can you find the remote?” Apple has finally added Find My to the Siri Remote. It can now play that familiar ringing sound so you can find which cushion it’s fallen under. If for some reason you can’t hear it, you can now use the Find My app on your iPhone to track its precise location, thanks to Apple adding support for Bluetooth channel sounding , a location technology similar to ultra-wideband, but without the need for a UWB chip.
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