Apple just announced a handful of new features for the Apple TV 4K at WWDC 2025. These will appear in the forthcoming tvOS 26 update, which will become available to viewers later this year after first being released to the developer community.
I watched the live WWDC presentation both in my professional capacity but also as an Apple TV 4K owner, and a big reason I tuned in was to see what changes would be coming to Apple’s box, which TechRadar recommends as the best streaming device for most people.
By the end of Apple’s presentation, however, I was mostly underwhelmed. The new Liquid Glass visual enhancements are cool, and they will make the Apple TV box, which sometimes seems like an overlooked stepchild in the Apple product portfolio, seem more like a core member of the family.
The other changes, however, seem like mostly minor updates. That is, unless you’re a big user of the Sing feature on the Apple TV 4K’s Apple Music app, which lets you use it for karaoke, now complete with an iPhone microphone.
The one new feature that caught my attention during the presentation was Display Profiles. This feature is one that’s already been available on the Apple TV 4K, and it lets you switch between custom Apple Music and Apple TV libraries for different users in the same household.
Display Profiles: what’s new
What’s new for Display Profiles in tvOS 26 is an option to display all viewer profiles when the Apple TV box wakes from sleep. Instead of the last logged-in profile, you will see a list of profiles you can switch between. This will show the viewer a customized library and list of content recommendations when using the Apple TV, Apple Music and other Apple-centric apps.
Although Apple’s announcement was light on specifics, a screen grab (see the image at the top of this article) from the presentation reveals a custom ‘content cloud’ for a specific Apple TV user. Not only is this screen visually pleasing, but the layout indicates it could be used to easily jump back into shows, movies, games, and apps, with the relative size of the icon possibly indicating how recently you’d engaged with that content.
These announced enhancements for Display Profiles aren’t exactly groundbreaking, but they do show that Apple is making an effort to keep up with a key competitor: smart TVs.
Who needs a streaming box?
The smart TV platforms on TVs from brands like LG and Samsung have taken major steps in recent years. Once a visually cluttered, ad-stuffed wasteland, they are leveraging AI and other technologies to better customize not just the interface, but picture and sound settings, for specific viewers in multi-viewer households.
A great example of this is LG’s webOS 25 smart TV platform found in the LG G5 and LG C5 OLED TVs. This can be set up to automatically change viewer profiles using voice recognition – no need to wade through menus to make that adjustment. And once your profile is activated, you’ll see a custom homescreen with your preferred selection of apps, along with content recommendations made specifically for you based on your viewing history.
Having a refined, AI-enhanced smart TV platform is one tactic LG and Samsung are using to stay ahead of their upstart TCL and Hisense competition, both of which rely on the comparatively generic Google TV platform in the US. By making the smart TV interface and features genuinely useful, they are adding considerable value to their TVs, which are typically priced quite a bit higher, while in some cases providing mostly similar performance.
Where does the Apple TV 4K fit into all of this? I still have an Apple TV 4K, and as an iPhone user, I appreciate the tight feature integration between the two devices when it comes to content and control. But with smart TV interfaces steadily improving, I find myself using my Apple streaming box less and less over time.
Looking down the road, Apple needs to do much more than copy the smart features found on the best TVs to keep its streaming box relevant. But the forthcoming enhancements to Display Profiles look like a step in the right direction, and it is also the type of feature that Apple, with its extensive software resources, could easily push to make the Apple TV 4K stand out from the crowd.
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al.griffin@futurenet.com (Al Griffin)
