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Apple TV 4K (4th Gen) review
The Apple TV 4K (2026) has been a strange product to review. I’ve been an Apple TV user since the Apple TV 3rd Gen, released in 2012 — in over a decade of sticking with it, I upgraded to the first 4K version, and the 2021 4K version with the better remote. I skipped the Apple TV 4K 2022 version, since the upgrades were minimal.
Despite this, I still recommended that version wholeheartedly to people buying for the first time, for the same reason that home theater enthusiasts online have recommended it. Its picture quality is best-in-class, its format support is excellent, and it offers more privacy protection (and an ad-free home screen) than its rivals from the likes of Roku, Amazon and Google — even though it’s more expensive than those models. The premium was worth paying.
But the premium has changed. The 2022 model launched at $129 / £149 / AU$219 as the starting price. In the middle of 2026, the price rose to $199 / £249 / AU$399. Now the new model is $299 / £299 / AU$449.
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This is compared to $84.99 / £99.99 / AU$149 for the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, which has also had a price rise this year. The two products have basically the same format support, too.
I should mention here that the Nvidia Shield Pro is also now $299, but has much older tech in it than that this new Apple TV 4K. So the new model isn’t bad value compared to the most direct competitor, the question is whether anyone really wants to pay this much for what’s on offer from either of these compared to the cheaper equivalents.
Let’s address it bluntly. Is the Apple TV 4K worth its higher price for upgraders from previous 4K models? Short answer: no.
Is it worth its higher price if you’re new to Apple TV boxes? Only if you care a lot about image quality and privacy.
Let’s start with the basics. The box runs tvOS, which is software specific to these devices, and is a spin-off from the iOS software used on iPhones. As a result, the Apple TV 4K is more versatile than most other streaming boxes. Yes, you have all the big streaming apps, but you also have practical apps that might be useful for some people — though obviously 99% of people will be focused on streaming.
The Apple TV 4K (2026) also supports games, in the sense that it works like a mini console, and you can connect games controllers to it (including the official PlayStation and Xbox controllers). This all works well enough, and there are some pretty decent games on there… though there are no game streaming services, due to restrictions in Apple’s policies, and I think this is a huge miss here in 2026.
We didn’t mind this too much when Apple released the last version, but cloud gaming has only grown in that time — and with the price of consoles and PCs spiking too, it’s becoming an increasingly tempting option.
It’s one of the slicker bits of streaming software in terms of performance, opening apps super-quickly and generally feeling perfectly smooth to move around. It does have its foibles — rearranging apps is theoretically an intuitive process, and yet suddenly this is where performance became less predictable. But I would say it’s generally the least annoying of the streaming systems.
That’s partly because it doesn’t have the same aggressive advertising right on the home screen that all the other platforms do. When you highlight a particular app, it might show recommendations from the app at the top of the screen, but you never have shows pushed on the home screen unless you’re already hovering over the app.
Apple also has, predictably, included some excellent integrations with its own products. The most useful is easily the ability to share passwords saved on your iPhone’s Passwords app instantly with the Apple TV when you try to log into a service or app, though the ability to your iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to search or type information in is also excellent.
There are lots of other integrations as well, some will be more useful than others to individuals. You can see your iCloud photos and use them as a screensaver (though the Apple TV’s beautiful built-in screensavers are one of its highlights). You can use your iPhone for FaceTime calls, where you see other people on the big screen, and your iPhone camera beams your image over to the TV and then to the person you’re calling. You can beam audio or video over to the box from your phone using AirPlay.
The remote that comes with the latest Apple TV is relatively easy to use. You don’t have lots of buttons for directly launching streaming services, for better or worse — this is, let’s be clear, a form of advertising of its own, but it’s one that can be pretty useful. That said, there is a button that looks like a TV, and pressing this once launches the Apple TV app, which includes the Apple TV streaming service’s wares — but it’s also a hub for things you’ve been watching in other services, so it’s not purely a play to get you to watch Apple’s own stuff.
Unfortunately, the Apple TV hub doesn’t work with every major streaming app, with Netflix being the most egregious omission. Netflix also doesn’t work with Siri’s ability to play movies or the universal search function. So it’s possible to ask Siri to find a particular movie, the system will tell you which of your apps have it so you can watch it right away… except you have to check Netflix separately.
There’s a button on the side of the remote to invoke Siri if you want to use your voice to find and control things, but Apple has now also added microphones to the Apple TV box itself, so you can — in theory — use the device hands-free. Just say ‘Siri’ and ask what you want to ask.
And the reason Apple has included these new mics is because Siri has now been upgraded to Siri AI, and the company is surely hoping you’ll want to use Siri way more now that it’s smart. The problem is that while Siri itself may have become smart, its implementation often still isn’t.
The most obvious gripe for me was the information presentation, and the density of that information. Sometimes it’s too crowded, packing paragraphs of information with no formatting to aid readability into a small window on the side of the screen. At other times, it’s too simple, taking over the full screen yet displaying text so large that only a few words fit in before the cut off (and if you click the remote hoping it will open the rest of the text, it doesn’t — a different part of the screen is selected by default). It’s always too much or not enough, and it’s somehow never just right.
How smart Siri is at recognizing things within a movie/show is really variable. This might be tied to whether the default tvOS player is used by the app, because in some of them I’d ask Siri a question about what I’m looking at, and it would claim there’s a blank screen.
Watching Netflix, it told me it couldn’t see what I was viewing, and asked me to just tell it the name of the movie — but if I paused it, causing the name to appear on screen, and asked the same question, it was now able to see the title. A system that responds so differently per-app is not really a reliable system.
I asked it to identify the music playing in the background of a scene of Tony on Prime Video, and it claimed the song was… the movie Tony on Prime Video. I asked it who the guy on the screen was, and it recognized Dominic Sessa, bringing up info about his work. Then I asked the same question when Stavros Halkia was on screen, and it brought up info about Dominic Sessa again.
It worked better when I watched a documentary about chefs, and the system was able to identify Marco Pierre White instantly when I asked — but that was on a service that used the native player, so I don’t know if that helps Siri have better visibility of what’s on-screen.
Later, I asked the system to show me some good Jason Statham movies available on the streaming services I have. It was able to suggest some movies on the services I have, but there was no visible info on how they were rated, even though the results took up the whole screen. So I asked a follow up question about whether any of them were actually worth watching, and then it showed movies it considered to be good, but not whether they’re available on my services. So I asked a third time if any of these good movies were available on my services, and it finally narrowed down to a list of what I originally asked… except the first movie on the list wasn’t accessible on any of my streaming apps.
I browsed to The Pelican Brief’s page on Netflix, and I asked if I would like this movie. I thought maybe it would use the fact that I own a lot of ’90s thrillers — including Grisham thrillers The Firm and The Rainmaker — in my Apple TV Store library to make a recommendation.
Instead, it gave me an okay text-based answer about what people generally think of the movie, presented in the dullest way possible as just a column of text. I really hoped it might do something clever here, because not only do I own movies like the ones mentioned above, but I also own The Pelican Brief. So it was a trick question, but I really thought a smarter system would be able to spot that I might like a movie that I went to the trouble to buy already.
One thing it pointed out in its description of whether I might like it is that some people think the movie is overlong. So I asked for similar but shorter movies available on all my services, and it gave me exactly two middlingly reviewed options. I own Witness in my Apple TV library, so couldn’t it pull that recommendation out for someone looking at an on-the-run potboiler thriller lasting under two hours?
Incidentally, it offers source citations for answers, but you can’t open them to check if it’s actually pulled correct information from the pages. It’s an attempt at being reassuring, but I have witnessed LLM answers cite a source where the source says something totally different to the answer, so I personally see little use in citing a source I can’t click to verify.
Another challenge: I asked Siri which episode of Taskmaster has Ed Gamble melting down over transporting some ducks in the garden. It identified the episode. It didn’t offer to play it, so I prostrated myself and asked if we could watch it, please. It fired up the relevant app and played… the most recent episode, not the correct one. That could be an issue with the app rather than Siri AI, but the result is a failure either way.
I tried the same thing with another show I thought might work better, because I owned it in my Apple TV library. I asked which episode of 30 Rock had a particular quote from Alec Baldwin (which I got slightly wrong). While it identified the episode correctly, yet again it didn’t consider whether maybe I’d like to watch it. So again I asked to play it, and this time it took me to the correct episode, presumably because it has better access to individual episode data, given I own them within the Apple TV app. But also, it didn’t automatically play it even though that’s what I’d asked; I still needed to click to play it. So if I’m trying to do all of this hands-free with the new mics on the box, without touching the remote, it was a failure.
Ultimately, Siri still feels half-baked on Apple TV. It’s just that now it’s a much more elaborate type of bread that’s been half-baked. And sure, it’s technically in beta still, so Apple might say it should be no surprise that it’s been half baked — but what are we paying so much more for the elaborate chip inside the new Apple TV 4K for, if not the AI powers? It’s not like the movies play any differently.
I know that the mics that are always listening will be contentious with people. And while it’s possible to turn this functionality off in the settings, there’s nothing like the switch Sonos has on its products that electronically disconnects the mics so they literally cannot hear any more — it’s just a software change, which won’t reassure everyone.
However, the built-in mics are useful for one of the few truly notable new tricks of this Apple TV, which is that you can now use these hands-free mics to ask Siri to find your remote when it’s lost. The remote will make a noise, saving you from hunting in vain.
Crucially, this even works while the Apple TV 4K is in standby mode — you don’t get any sign from the box itself that it’s heard you (I thought maybe its little white light might flash). But sure enough I asked “Siri, where’s the remote” while my whole system was off, and it started chirping from under a cushion.
I mentioned early on that image quality is one of the most important elements that draws enthusiasts to the Apple TV, and that’s for a few reasons. One is its support for both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ advanced HDR formats, not to mention the HDR10 and HLG standard formats.
It can also change formats on the fly, including switching to 24fps output for movies, so that you get more natural movie motion, especially if you have a 120Hz TV.
But it also has excellent upscaling of lower-resolution content, better than the vast majority of TVs people own at home. The latest flagship TVs with good neural-network-based upscaling might beat it, but there’s also a lot more mediocre ‘AI upscaling’ in TVs — the Apple TV takes non-4K content and makes it look naturally sharp, consistently, without looking like it’s been messed with.
On top of this, the other factor is that the Apple TV movie store offers basically the highest-quality streaming you can get outside of expensive specialist services such as Kaleidescape. These moves come at a higher bitrate (meaning the amount of data transferred per second) than anything like Netflix or Disney+ offers, so they look cleaner and more detailed, especially in scenes with lots of motion.
And while you can buy movies from the Apple TV store on other devices, the highest bitrate quality is reserved for Apple TV 4K boxes only — and the movies look fantastic. It’s a big part of why I use them to this day. The problem is that these movies look exactly the same as they do on the previous 4K model, which was less than half the price at launch.
So let’s talk about whether there’s really anything here for upgraders. I already said I think there basically isn’t, but I should at least show my working. When it comes to picture and sound performance, there are no meaningful changes.
Even if I thought Siri AI was a great upgrade, it is coming to the last two generations of Apple TV 4K too, so that isn’t a reason in itself. Some people obviously might like the hands-free mics, and the remote that can play a noise so you can find it. The latter is a truly useful upgrade; it just isn’t worth the price if you have one of the previous models.
The new model does have faster Wi-Fi. Again that doesn’t mean much in itself, but it appears to have enabled this version to support a full surround system using HomePods for the first time (seemingly due to lower latency in the wireless tech, based on what Apple’s said about it).
You can have four HomePod or HomePod Mini 2nd Gen speakers (two at the front, two at the back), or two HomePod 2nd Gen (at the front) and two HomePod mini 2nd Gen (at the rear). Because these are separate products, I’m not going to factor them into reviewing the Apple TV 4K — however, I have been very impressed with the HomePod 2nd Gen as TV speakers with Apple TV in the past.
The price of getting a setup like these used to be highly competitive too, though after HomePod price rises they’re a little more middle of the pack compared to wireless home theater speaker options from the likes of Hisense and Sonos.
Ultimately, I’m dropping our score for this model to 3.5 stars from 4.5 stars for its predecessor, and it all comes down to value. Yes, prices are rising everywhere, but I think this Apple TV box has simply fallen outside of the point where I can argue that it’s good value despite being more expensive than the competition.
If the money is no problem to you, I strong recommend it. But compared to the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, is the extra privacy and slick Apple integration worth an extra
Apple TV 4K (4th Gen) review: Price & release date
- Released on November 13th, 2026
- Priced at $299 / £299 / AU$449
Apple TV 4K (4th Gen) review: Specs
|
Storage |
128GB |
|
Ports |
HDMI 2.1, Gigabit Ethernet |
|
Wireless |
Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 |
|
Processor |
Apple A19 |
|
HDR formats |
HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision, HDR10+ |
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Audio formats |
Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus |
How I tested the Apple TV 4K (4th Gen)
- Tested at home for 10 days
- Tested with normal home use — I use the Apple TV as my main streaming source
- I’ve used Apple TV products as my preferred option for over a decade
I used the new Apple TV 4K at home, connected to my OLED TV, as a straight replacement for the 2021 I’ve been previously using. I used tvOS 27.2 for my testing, which includes the Siri AI beta.
Generally, I just used it the way I always use the Apple TV, as my main source of viewing at home. I watched live streaming channels, and on-demand video. My partner particularly tested the Sing app.
I have a primarily Apple-device household, so I was able to test the integration with other Apple products easily.
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Matt Bolton
