I'm a little surprised at the price (especially when their newly-announced HomeView is the same price, and it has a screen!).
I love this product: it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data. I have two older ones and was looking to get something that supported 4K but waited for this to come out.
$300 might be a decent price if you use it for all of the things that it can do, but if all you're doing is launching streaming apps, $200 was already on the high end for that. $300 seems...a bit much.
Anything I'm missing here? The silver lining is that this product is almost certainly still in the "pay money then forget about it for a decade" tier, which is nice.
I'm also wondering if/how the "add up to four homepods" feature compares to "getting a soundbar". In the other thread for this someone noted that the HomePods only work with this box; so if you're running a game console that's no bueno. But apart from that, if $600 on an Apple TV + two HomePods mini delivers something comparable to a ~$500 soundbar, that's a decent value proposition.
apple tv isn't private, apple does mine your viewing habits, read their eula.
You should also know that all non-apple apps like netflix have unrestricted network access and can/will do the same.
It is too bad that people accept apple's marketing about privacy, because they have dark patterns, they collect telemetry, they don't let you block it, and they help apps do the same things.
A privacy policy is not the same as being able to firewall your device, but apple doesn't allow firewalls.
1) By default, every word (each character, actually) you input into Spotlight/Siri gets time-stamped and sent to `smoot.apple.com`
2) Even with a Pi-Hole blocking *.apple.com (i.e. using MacOS >> Networking >> DNS Server), on boot all modern Apple Silicon reaches out to security.apple.com (i.e. bypassing the user's manual-input DNS setting), using the DHCP-issued DNS IP [0]
pro-tip: use your router's DHCP to auto-issue your local Pi-Hole's IP address [as DNS] with your IP-leases; then you'll actually be able to block all *.apple.com traffic (using the PiHole which your DHCP issues to, by default)
[0] this is for security chip "lockout" detection (e.g.) and it is pervasive across NICs (i.e. it REALLY seeks any attempt for DNS resolution to security.apple.com)
> 1) By default, every word (each character, actually) you input into Spotlight/Siri gets time-stamped and sent to `smoot.apple.com`
Huh? How do you expect Apple to show live search results if they don't send what you're typing to their servers?
> 2) Even with a Pi-Hole blocking *.apple.com (i.e. using MacOS >> Networking >> DNS Server), on boot all modern Apple Silicon reaches out to security.apple.com (i.e. bypassing the user's manual-input DNS setting), using the DHCP-issued DNS IP [0]
From a quick google search, it seems to be if you enable "Find my" or pass word recovery with an Apple account. I think that's reasonable to expect if you enable these features.
This has been Apple's niche forever. Create a product with a few extra bells and whistles, better craftsmanship, and charge a fat premium that people who care about those things are willing to pay.
> it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data.
It's mind-blowing how one of the most advanced technology forums on the internet can take privacy for granted just because the marketing of a for-profit corporation with previous histories of privacy violations (there's even lawsuits) claims their closed source device connected 24/7 to the internet, is private.
>It's mind-blowing how one of the most advanced technology forums on the internet can take privacy for granted
that's not what I did
> just because the marketing
not just because of the marketing
> of a for-profit corporation with previous histories of privacy violations (there's even lawsuits) claims their closed source device connected 24/7 to the internet, is private.
in other words, they are being watched and held accountable when they do screw up, which obviates a lot of the "well maybe they're stealing your data and we don't know about it" nonsense elsewhere in the replies.
I'll ask something specific: We know that Rokus and built-in smart TVs are actively tracking and monetizing everything you do on your television. People can prove this by looking at what calls are made on your network.
Apple literally does do the same thing. Especially (!) with Apple TV. Go read the eula's again. Apple TV, Apple Maps & Apple News all perform data mining largely akin to how their competitors do it. There are specific carve outs for those three services.
A quick search suggests that Roku does ~380 network requests per hour. LG smart TVs running webOS typically generate regular hourly background checks, plus periodic or continuous telemetry and Automatic Content Recognition requests.
Does Apple TV even do ACR in any form? Is it scanning my network and phoning home about it?
Ah nice. You know Apple literally invented Bonjour and mDNS? They know what's on your network. The only difference is that we applaud them for it. Does the apple tv do acr? It has to, to do the first party "magic" it does. Again, we just applaud them for it because they "only use it for first party services." Why are you so offended that Apple is just another for profit megacorp.
"Apple will obtain user consent based on the user’s Apple Account before including Your Licensed Application in the TV App Features displayed under that Apple Account. Apple will also provide users with the ability to withdraw such consent at any time thereafter and to delete their TV App Data from Apple’s systems."
> Does the apple tv do acr? It has to, to do the first party "magic" it does.
I'm sorry, you're stating this like some obvious fact. Apple has previously said this is not the case and they do not do ACR. The Apple TV is the only Apple device I have, so you can set aside any reflexive critiques of my brand loyalty. What is your precise claim? Why am I a dullard for reading that Apple TV does not use ACR and believing it?
The entire reason I bought an Apple TV was to reduce the amount of data skimming happening in the background and ads being shoved in front of my face in the foreground, it's not like I'm lousy with options.
I just cant have a rational discussion with apple folks. Not here, not anywhere else. Its emotions and double values all way down.
For profit org that has its personalized ad part of business growing massively, is scanning all your photos, gives all data to NSA like there is no tomorrow is somehow better, becase carefully crafted PR said so.
Especially if one is not US citizen, or multinational, or US citizen not on US soil, and so on.
They make great, hard vendor-locked hardware and mediocre software. Lets keep them at that and not some magical privacy champions when they are not, not where it actually matters.
> I just cant have a rational discussion with apple folks. Not here, not anywhere else. Its emotions and double values all way down.
Your post doesn't sound any different, what with the tarring a group of people with the same brush.
You've decided that your feelings about a type of company trump anybody else's opinions about a particular company. With a fairly derisive tone, at that.
> Apple literally does do the same thing. ... all perform data mining largely akin to how their competitors do it.
Funny how the OP carefully skimmed this part out in their reply, but BINGO, I think this is the attitude we should have towards privacy. Sometimes I just feel like we're talking to a bunch of bots on here when it comes to privacy with their blind support towards for-profit corporations that doesn't give a shit about them.
What is a better solution here? What is something that lets me stream from the major services, has a good-enough remote, and doesn't require any fiddling on my part?
I've always seen Apple TV as the least-bad option compared to Roku/Fire/whatever Google is doing these days/literally any built-in solution.
> I've always seen Apple TV as the least-bad option compared to Roku
If this was your original statement, I think we all would be on your side - I even use an Apple TV 4k personally and love it. It definitely is the best in the market for what it does.
> it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data.
Instead, you framed it as the only privacy-friendly option and that is logically and factually incorrect.
I think you read a bunch into my stuff and then responded to the arguments you thought I was making, then accused me of craftily dodging things, then implied I was a bot.
I believe you could buy a random Android streaming box with an unlocked bootloader, and then install LineageOS on it. Not sure about the “streams from all the major services” part re: LineageOS, but last I heard it’s improving.
(There are also some boxes made specifically for this, usually sold as development platforms for STB products, marketed based on what SoC they contain. Though they’ll tend to be $200, while the random “finished product” streaming box will be more like $30. Both come with decent remotes.)
LineageOS on a cheap box will be L3 widevine, and fail play integrity, which means netflix and a bunch of other streaming apps won't even install. Even if you can get them to install, the L3 will stop you from viewing Prime, Disney+ or other similar services at anything better than SD.
I'm also interested in alternatives, but LineageOS on a cheap box isn't really one.
One of the products you mentioned is named Home View. It's right there. Both new SKUs ship with their voice assistant interface to Google Gemini (and friends) in an environment where memory and storage availability is being monopolized by cloud infrastructure.
Apple routinely recorded their private conversations after they activated Siri unintentionally, and disclosed these conversations to third parties such as advertisers.
"Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose," Apple said on Wednesday.
Unintentionally activating Siri and then recording is very different from the active listening things going on. Shared with advertisers was speculation.
A billion dollar company's public statement defending itself of a crime it was accused of committing and is sued for, is the source of truth now and what it was actually accused of doing is considered speculation? Sure.
Since you clearly know something the rest of the world's regulators do not, you should get an unpaid employee of the year award and get your money.
Again, you don't know they aren't doing any of these privacy violations again right now. You are just vomiting their marketing BS again and again "Apple means privacy". Historically their shady acts weren't discovered until much later - battery gate, siri lawsuit, etc. You're starting on personal attacks and sounding more like a bot, so I'm going to stop here.
This has nothing to do with the specific question I asked, and I'm not sure why you'd think so unless Roku has some kind of Siri-like feature (which wasn't what I was intending when I asked regardless). (also, that's a dead link)
You did mention "monetizing everything you do (on your television)", my answer was for that part. Again, my question to you is - it's closed source, do you have proof they aren't actually doing it? Or are you going to wait for another half a decade for another lawsuit to find out?
My point is, it's a for-profit corporation. And a really efficient one. They don't care about anyone's privacy or anything else. Only profits. History has proof - battery gate, siri lawsuit, etc.
Snowden’s PRISM leak seemed largely to be an overhyped internal PowerPoint. The claim was that they have access to data from Apple, Google, Microsoft, et al. But I’ve never seen any evidence that these companies were giving the government access to their servers or some general data pipe. But rather than they were cooperating with legally served warrants.
Is there some actual evidence of collusion with the big tech companies? Because I haven’t seen it. (Telecoms I’ve heard were and are much more integrated.)
PRISM was FISA, and was overhyped. There's a known (and legal) procedure for law enforcement agencies to go to major tech companies with a warrant and say "We need all the information for the account holder of xyz@gmail.com, because they are the subject of an active investigation." There are some concerns about how FISA courts are just rubber-stamps and don't actually read or challenge the warrants for validity, but at least nominally, the procedure is above-board and legal.
The next Snowden disclosure (MUSCULAR) was significantly more concerning though. It was that the NSA was tapping the internal fiber of Big Tech companies. I was at Google when the Snowden disclosures broke, and read the SRE postmortem. They found 2 fiber cuts underneath the English Channel, an hour apart, lining up with the start of the program as disclosed by Snowden. My inference is that the NSA paid off MI6 to send a submarine commando team to cut and tap the fiber of an American company, without consent, and then all the data was shared through Five-Eyes reciprocal data sharing agreements. Google leadership was hopping mad after this, but it would've been impolitic to bring it to the public. They started encrypting all internal traffic soon after, assuming that their internal network was compromised by various nation-state actors, which had some unfortunate effects on their internal culture of openness.
I have to say your head security guy was way ahead of the curve.
Anywhere I’ve worked it was firewall everything and use VPNs, and most places still do this. SFTP was in the too hard basket. And of course that led to people emailing files around as standard practice (and the only option) and inevitably some got emailed to the wrong recipients.
It's a major selling point, for one. They actively sell their products on privacy to the average person and an exposé would harm their image quite significantly.
That said they are not perfect - e.g their wording in their own tracking consent prompts vs the ones they force on others.
Personally I don't deny those claims. I question their motive. Most people don't care much about anything except camera/microphone/location access, so why invest so much into engineering all of these solutions? Are they just morally superior to others? Or are they using the reputation they created for themselves to justify locking down their platforms? Because there are things only Apple can be trusted with?
It’s paranoid lunacy to ignore the irrefutable, demonstrable work that they’ve done to minimize the data they can ever collect or access while conveniently ignoring the miserable track record of every one of their competitors, and to ascribe intentions to them that are in direct conflict to every intentional action they’ve taken in at least the past decade.
They invited security researchers to inspect their implementation of Private Cloud Compute. I expect there’d be a news story worth a good amount of traffic if they said it and didn’t allow people to do so. That there has been no such story suggests that there hasn’t been scandal.
What's the claim here, that they are doing nefarious things that are undetectable? Because we know that this is probably the most scrutinized tech company on the planet, and we know that they've been caught and penalized for errors in the past.
Do you have any evidence to present, or is this pure FUD?
If you read what I have written, I have not made a single claim. I'm only asking if people put faith in Apples claims because they're, well, Apple, or do we _know_ their claims are valid.
Having spent a lot of time in the open source world, I'm aware of the concept that I can never know for sure if I can't see the code. (And even if I could, that wouldn't tell us with certainly how that the data that code creates/captures is used by the people using it.)
But I do think that, in general, Apple tends to be the least-bad actor among its mainstream competitors: its primary business model does not depend on harvesting and selling data, and it has made this value proposition a part of its marketing, and people high up in the company have spoken about ways that they personally value it. And, for any story about ways in which Apple has failed here, there are certainly twice as many for any other company they compete with.
I mean, step back: Who cares more about my privacy - Apple or Google? Apple or Roku? Can anyone seriously argue the latter for either?
> I'm only asking if people put faith in Apples claims because they're, well, Apple, or do we _know_ their claims are valid.
If we _know_, then there would be no need for faith. Given the lack of options and the lack of certainty, people must place their faith somewhere (or take on a lot of technical burden to roll their own); given everything I've seen, it's more reasonable to place faith in Apple than basically anyone else in "Big Tech" in this regard.
(But again: if there's a product out there that is very similar to Apple TV in every way except that it is more private: please tell me what that product is. I'd be thrilled to consider it.)
HN hates when people are “just asking questions” but haven’t bothered to make any attempt whatsoever to answer those questions.
Yes, Apple has actually put work into designing, building, and shipping secure enclaves. Yes, they have put a gargantuan amount of work into PCC to uphold the claims they make about its privacy. Yes, they employ differential privacy. Yes, they have shipped a feature that enables privacy-conscious users to be the only ones to hold the keys to their iCloud account. And on and on and on. Nothing will ever be enough for you.
You aren’t asking these questions in good faith. If you were, you’d have your answers already.
Yet, most people fall for the E2E-encrypted iMessage story, while the Messages are only encrypted at rest when you have iCloud Backup enabled (I’d guess most people) and ADP disabled (I’d guess most people). The fact that I have ADP enabled doesn’t matter because most people I communicate with don’t have ADP enabled (or know what it is).
This is all only mentioned in the footnote of an iCloud security document [1].
Apple cares about your privacy, so much that they made a backdoor through bad defaults, well in reach of the CLOUD Act.
Apple perceives itself as a prestige brand. That perception depends upon consistently high execution and a perception that they’re trying to create beautiful experiences for users.
They want the device to be a mechanism for you to purchase things. Hence the “Apple card” and all the hullabaloo around that. You’ll only use your phone if you perceive it to be secure. Apple’s investments in Secure Enclave’s, sandboxing are all directly linked to their belief that this will help the consumer perceive the safety of the product- and again, it goes back to the perception of the brand.
Quality craftsmanship has properties that outsiders can perceive- even if they don’t understand it. Apple makes those investments.
Google- well, they just make things and then abandon them. Android’s bizzaro world open source is a chaotic mess that reflects the lack of discipline in Google’s leadership.
My question is what do you connect this TO that doesn't spy. I get you can use a Smart TV and switch to HDMI input but there's no guarantee the TV is not spying on you in some way, if not today then tomorrow these things will come with eSIM support to upload ACR data even when 'disconnected' or connect to your smartphone over some ad tech protocol to do the same.
If you want privacy (or anything for that matter), the only way you're going to get it is by user choice. A device that doesn't let you install your own apps is not going to deliver what you want.
I don’t trust them for privacy. I like them for the lack of annoyance. All their competitors seems to want to hinder any activity I want to do. Ads, nagging, notifications, … It’s basically a mental tax.
Or maybe they are just not caught yet. They are now running ads, where is the data coming for that. They stop others from using the APIs but nothing stop their first party apps to snoop and use the data.
Apple AirTag is the biggest privacy nightmare out there and I am not sure why people keep Apple separate from other data hungry companies
Apple routinely recorded their private conversations after they activated Siri unintentionally, and disclosed these conversations to third parties such as advertisers.
You will never silence the paranoid lunatics who come out in droves whenever Apple is discussed.
The only standard they will accept is absolute perfection. It doesn’t matter all of the drastic steps they’ve taken to ensure that past mistakes are never made again or that their hands are tied when governments make demands of them in the future. It doesn’t matter that they’re demonstrably orders of magnitude better than everyone else.
> The only standard they will accept is absolute perfection.
Only for internet comment purposes. I’ve found that these same jabronis actually tend to run crappy and wildly unsafe home rolled kludges, for themselves.
> It's mind-blowing how one of the most advanced technology forums on the internet can take privacy for granted just because the marketing of a for-profit corporation...
This is a common judgement among the technically literate.
> Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device
On the contrary. This is a place where we don’t have to substitute FUD for facts and analysis.
To me, it doesn’t make sense to rate all levels of imperfection the same. Of course Apple isn’t perfect. But that’s not am important question.
Apple’s the only major purveyor of these kinds of devices whose existential business model is not predicated on privacy violations. Hardly a guarantee of good behavior (and we’ll see what happens in the future). But a lot better than the alternatives.
I purchased the 2021 ATV just before the 2022 was released. It struggles with AV1 and VP9 (Infuse really struggles, VLC is better but still a problem). I just wanted the faster CPU (for software decoding AV1 and VP9). Almost bought the 2022 version in 2024 for that but didn't want to buy a 2 year old product.
Didn't expect to have to wait 4 years, and now the price is more than doubled. I can afford it but refuse to do so, especially since I don't use any of the onboard storage for anything.
I think we’re wanting the same thing/ use here. I agree the price is outrageous but I ended up preordering anyway because at the end it’s still a good deal if you do the math. I’m excited for the AV1 (hardware now) and more horsepower for VP9 (software).
I'm still using the Dev Kit version that was shipped out before the 3rd Gen launched. tvOS26 was the last version supported so I'll be updating finally. I'd consider 14 years a pretty decent run.
The new CPU (A19) should have hardware decoding for both AV1 and VP9. Apple doesn't advertise the latter, but Safari supports VP9 on the A17 Pro and newer. You shouldn't have to rely on software decoding with the new Apple TV, though it might depend on your apps supporting it.
Yes. YouTube still thinks my partner and my accounts are in different countries so we couldn’t get Premium Family (for the past 4 years) and I’m not about to purchase separate subscriptions. So I have a backend that I can send YouTube URLs to running on my Mac Mini that gets the videos with yt-dlp.
> So I have a backend that I can send YouTube URLs to running on my Mac Mini that gets the videos with yt-dlp.
I do this too with a mac mini app that does it on schedules across all the channels I like, dumps them in JellyFin with channel art, culls old videos, and uses the Jellyfin api to reindex that category when done.
I just like the lack of ads and no separate YouTube interface… YouTube is just a category in JellyFin.
yt-dlp has gotten spotty about YouTube blocking it, from time to time, though.
I don't mind at all. So I had ~100 subscriptions as of a few years ago and I tend to just look at the Subscriptions page, view what's been released since the last time I checked, and download those.
I sometimes see the homepage, or see thumbnails when I click to download individual videos. I've previously found interesting channels that way, or recommended by creators in videos I watch, or even on HN.
(I've found their algorithm has gotten worse over time, and nosedived recently with AI slop propagating like crazy in 2026. Even for niche topics it'll recommend channels that are a month old, already have 60 videos (mostly with low views but one video with 100K+ views), and obviously AI generated when closely inspected. It's worse now because half the channels use AI thumbnails for non-AI content.)
So after that long answer, I don't have a great recommendation for discovery if you don't already have an existing list of channels you like and trust.
There's a tool built on top of yt-dlp, ytdl-sub that can automate it for you. It will check if there's new vids in the channels you're interested in and download them and can make metadata for Kodi, Plex, etc. for them too. It can also delete old ones if you want.
Others have already pointed out that your assumption of Apple TV not spying on you is wrong, I’d like to make a meta-comment on that.
Apple regards privacy as a feature, and I mean that precisely: some places they implement it, other places they decide it’s not worth it, and they only ever tell you about the former. A good example is iMessage: everybody in tech knows it’s E2EE, many fewer realize that the other three copies of your iMessage data on Apple’s servers are just, uh, not encrypted.
You can’t have the same intuition for Apple and privacy that you would for a group like Signal. You need to instead ask yourself whether you fully understand what you need, then whether Apple has guaranteed precisely and fully that, without weasel words.
> many fewer realize that the other three copies of your iMessage data on Apple’s servers are just, uh, not encrypted
With Advanced Data Security enabled?
Of course, then there's the persons you're talking to. I figure they are one of your "other three", another is the iCloud copy (deduped from backups) ostensibly resolved by advanced data security, what's the third?
Yeah I think this is the price for my soul, I'll keep using the data mining LG TV. Perhaps I ought to just throw it on a vlan that i turn off whenever i dont watch the tv.
For what it's worth, depending on when you bought it, if $130 was an impulse buy in the year you bought it (and your financial situation is similar), a sizable chunk of that price difference is just inflation.
For example, a $130 impulse buy in 2015 is a ~$184 impulse buy in 2026.
Go back a year and 8GB of RAM would cost around $30. Today, it's going to be $120. Apple really wanted to increase the amount of RAM from 4GB to 8GB to support on-device Siri AI, but RAM isn't cheap at the moment.
The move to the A19 also meant that they couldn't go with LPDDR4X RAM and instead had to use more expensive LPDDR5X (IIRC).
It is crazy. I expect the new Apple TV to be a flop because $300 is just a lot. The problem is that Apple is a little boxed in on this device. Apple wants to re-use the A19, but that locks them into expensive DDR5 RAM. They want to push Siri AI, but that locks them into 8GB RAM. Unlike the iPhone, there aren't as many other opportunities with the App Store, Apple Pay, search engine placement revenue, etc.
Storage has also gone up a lot and Apple is no longer selling a 64GB model. Most streaming sticks have 4-16GB of storage and it's usually really slow/cheap storage. The new Apple TV has 128GB of storage and the price for that has probably gone from around $25 to $50.
You say that it's fine from "$200 to $300", but that's not really true. It's gone from $250 to $300 when you look at the 128GB model. I still think it's crazy that it went from $150 to $300 in the same year, but the outgoing 128GB model was already $250 after the price hikes earlier this year.
The problem is that Apple didn't want to reign in their product for the current market and I somewhat get that. What's the point of a new Apple TV if it's just "we updated the processor." For me, the point would be AV1 and VP9 decoding, but Apple wanted to push Siri AI.
Other high-end TV devices have also seen big increases in price. The Fire TV Cube went from being $110-140 to now $200 - and with the Fire TV Cube you're getting Cortex-A73 processor cores from 2016, 2GB LPDDR4X, and 16GB storage. At least Apple is giving you 8GB LPDDR5X and 128GB of storage and a processor that is way better.
The Google TV Streamer is $150 now with 4GB RAM and 16GB storage, but with LPDDR4 RAM and Cortex-A55 cores - and it's still $150.
A Roku Ultra is 2GB RAM and 4GB storage with Cortex-A55 cores and costs $150.
I think we're seeing that there's still some really old stock out there that's cheap, but we're seeing the prices climb on competitors too. Google raised its price 50%. Amazon has raised its price 40-80%. Apple raised its price 54-67% on the same-model and launched the newer model with double the RAM, more expensive RAM, a processor that's 4 years newer, etc.
I think it's likely that Google, Roku, and Amazon simply don't upgrade their streaming devices during this parts shortage. I think a lot of people will be fine with a 12nm Cortex-A55 based TV streamer with limited RAM and storage (and slow RAM and storage). I love how fast my Apple TV is. It's amazing the difference in UI lag. But I think most companies aren't going to prioritize that premium experience, especially during a parts shortage.
apple probably was losing money on the old Apple TV with old 4gb ram and 64gb storage in low volumes anyway and they probably would have to pay even more going forward. the upgrade seems to make sense from supply chain standpoint to standardise storage and chips across devices.
If anything apple is probably bring value to new buyers of Apple TV in this market. At 299$ you are getting hardware that will last quite some time as opposed to a 200$ device that might cost maybe 250$ in six months and give you lot less hardware capabilities.
If they're selling AppleTV at a loss to stimulate AppleTV+ subscriptions, then they're hemorrhaging money on two fronts. Without their App Store monopoly, Apple's annual service revenue would undoubtedly be a crater.
I was going to say “to be fair”, but it’s still ridiculous but my understanding is that the 130 one was wireless only and the higher one and new one are Ethernet too (not that a NIC adds that cost…)
The person in the other thread is incorrect, an Apple TV connected to HomePods can be configured to advertise HDMI Audio Return Channel so that anything your TV is displaying has its audio routed through it.
Having said that I eventually replaced my pair of HomePod Minis with a Sonos soundbar because I wanted something with a bit more oomph to it, although I'd maybe have considered getting a pair of the big HomePods and using the Minis as rear speakers had this been available at the time.
I can confirm! I have an eARC setup with an AppleTV, 2 big homepods, a gaming PC and a projector.
I had to buy a special HDMI switch because my projector is eARC-naive, but my understanding is that a lot of modern TVs are eARC-aware and a special switch is not required. The one downside to my setup is that I have to press a button on the HDMI switch to toggle between the PC and the AppleTV, no remote control, but hey it's good to stretch your legs now and then right?
Re audio quality, I really like my big HomePods and find they fill the room quite well and have a solid low range to them. I'd also agree that the HomePod Minis are not suitable for a living room entertainment experience.
Dumb q but did you ever have apple tv -> tv -> sonos soundbar set up in a way where you were able to control the sonos soundbar audio from the iphone remote app?
Yes, LC OLED to Sonos Arc. Works a treat. At one point the remote started malfunctioning and I had to cover the IR transmitter with tape, but otherwise extremely reliable. Remote on iPhone works fine to control volume. The only thing is that if you add other Sonos speakers (say, in the kitchen as well as TV room) the mute only mutes the TV.
How is life in the Sonos ecosystem? I vaguely recall there being some controversy around them a few years back, and I'm generally distrustful of third party hardware companies attempting to write software.
It’s ok. Their app isn’t great, but the underlying technology is. Spotify can directly play to one of their speakers. Their local protocol is also well understood and you can do most things with it, so you can vibe code your own replacement app pretty easily. The problem is once you hit their cloud APIs the latency is way too high for something like a speaker.
Yeah, the hardware is great. I honestly couldn't tell you much about the app because I exclusively use the speaker via HDMI-ARC and AirPlay, both of which work really well.
Doesn't seem like it. Siri AI is not even available in all languages yet either. $429 CAD is crazy. You can get a whole mini PC and a Bluetooth remote for less and slap LibreElec on it even at today's crazy prices. And it'll be a better remote too.
Last time I tried the Media PC thing it ended up being somewhat of a nightmare. Had to spend significant amount of time setting up MadVR with my video player and get HDR HDMI passthrough working, but it was always very flaky. Occasionally an Nvidia driver update would break it completely. Dolby Vision wasn't even an option.
I really wanted to make it work, but it ended up being an annoying hassle. I got a Shield TV and it has been a much better solution.
Not sure if things have changed since then (~5 years ago).
The way I use mine is just running a standard desktop (with the scaling turned up so it's a bit more readable) and then browsing for the video files on my NAS in the file explorer. I have one of those Logitech wireless keyboard/trackpad combos for input. Obviously this is pretty clunky, but it's a hell of a lot less flaky than something like Kodi. I use Linux on mine, but you could do the same thing in Windows if you wanted.
$429 CAD is crazy for sure but there's a running joke in my group chats of me sending a link to an Apple TV every time someone posts about their Kodi box breaking. It's not set and forget like an Apple TV at all...
My Apple TVs have not been set and forget. Apple's aggressive storage saving makes it so that it resets storage for, and I get logged out of, apps that I don't use frequently. It'll also randomly need a reboot to solve the problem of some videos not playing correctly.
It's definitely not the most troublesome player I've dealt with, but rebooting and logging back into apps randomly can be frustrating.
I think the only problems I've had on mine were network related and I would have had the same problems with an ATV since it can't magically fix DNS or my NAS being off.
If you want a privacy focused solution it's probably the most private. Yeah, admittedly harder to use but I'm not recommending it to my parents.
I have an Apple TV exactly to not deal with any Smart TV feature and to avoid connecting a TV to the internet, mine is the first gen 4K from 2017 and is still chugging along fine.
I don't plan on upgrading it to this new version yet so I'll probably get 10+ years of use out of it, great value overall.
> Siri AI is not even available in all languages yet either.
Siri AI is increasingly looking like a product that's exclusively for Americans. An unfortunate side effect of the EU attempting to become a regulatory superpower but failing to export its rules to the rest of the world.
- They don’t have to support European languages. Historically, they were horrible in this area, supporting only major languages and ignoring others for years. It’s almost impossible to ask Siri to play a song whose title is in one of these languages. Contact names are pronounced badly, and it’s sometimes tricky to ask Siri to call a person with a non-English name. This way, even though LLMs support these languages quite well, Apple doesn’t have to invest in development and testing.
- They announce the product with US features and keep the EU price the same, but disable features that cost them money, such as those requiring server-side compute.
- Satellite features only work in some EU countries, and there seems to be absolutely no progress in many markets. These markets are simply too small for Apple to care about. Yet the price is the same.
Are they? If I were a gambling man, I'd bet that Siri AI never comes to the EU. I think Apple saw what happened with Google's on-device AI in the EU and noped out.
HomeView, HomePod and AppleTV should be one device. A powerful home server + a bunch of low powered clients and receivers all over the home. No need for 8gb RAM in all of them..
I was watching stuff on my Chromecast 4k or whatever. That occasionally stutters or frameskips, so I moved to my PS5 pro.
The PS5 pro has plenty of horsepower. Fewer problems, but I see it occasionally skip or freeze slightly when playing back from some providers.
I've read Apple TV somehow has this figured out, and since I expected a new model I've been waiting for this one. It's not cheap but I want to be able to stream TV/film without any of those issues. I'm not quite ready to go the super premium route by getting a kaleidescape. I also want to use the bluetooth functionality from time to time.
Yeah it's way too expensive. I would like to upgrade my 4K ATV to a more powerful chip but not for $300. I only use mine for streaming and already have a home theater Atmos setup. Couldn't care less about Siri, AI features, microphones, etc.
> What's crazy is that it's still close to the best device you can get.
Unless you prefer an Android TV device, I don't get the appeal of the Shield Pro. I bought one years ago and resold it a few months later. For me the only things it did better than an Apple TV (playing certain ripped blu-rays) are better done by the Ugoos AM6B+. So those are the two devices I use nowadays.
The appeal of the Shield Pro is you don't have to deal with custom flashing a "no-name" device and you don't have to dual box to keep streaming services happy.
It's frustrating that nobody else seems to care about attempting to be the all-in-one box given how much Shield is showing its age now. It's really sluggish
I don't get why Apple just refuses to allow audio pass through or DV Profile 7. They're clearly on board with DV in general and don't hesitate to play Dolby's branding games, so why not profile 7 support???
It depends on what you're looking for exactly. Some models of FireTV Cube have pretty beefy processors and can handle some things the Shield can't, like Dolby Vision FEL.
Same here. I just ordered a new one because there's basically no better alternative that supports so many formats. My TV, for example, doesn't support TrueHD 7.1, but the Nvidia Shield Pro does. I guess the new Apple TV 4K is also worse in this regard.
Laggy / stuttering interface may well be a unsuitable HDMI cable…
Yes, really - switching cables instantly got rid of any stuttering in the UI no reboot or setting could fix for me - if I wouldn’t have experienced it myself I probably wouldn’t have believed it..
If it has decent RAM and had it been cheaper, OpenAI alone will keep this product out of stock. This is Apple's love for the retail consumers that they were forced to increase the price just so that Sam would think twice before hoarding them.
It’s worth it for me because I’m still using an Apple TV 4K 2017 that I bought in 2019. It struggles with a lot of Plex content. The price tag does feel high, but taking into account post-Covid inflation and component cost increases due to the AI bubble, it makes sense. An Nvidia shield pro cost exactly the same (in Canada, at least).
My home theatre set up is through a Denon receiver. I love my gen1 HomePods for listening to music, but I can’t understand why anyone would buy four HomePods rather than a proper surround setup.
Too pricey, as many others have noted. I was waiting for this model to consider upgrading from the previous generation, but I can’t justify it at this price. I guess this is why recently Apple included the Apple TV service within the lowest/basic iCloud+ plan in most countries. There’s no way to justify the cost of this new device plus the high cost of the Apple TV content subscription, which has its own drawbacks (the catalog is too small in comparison to other services, Apple still releases episodes once a week, and adds annoying ads for its shows and movies at the start of an episode or movie).
I don’t see Siri AI as a big positive differentiator when compared to third generation Apple TV 4K from 2022. Anecdotally, Siri AI has gotten slower and worse from the time the *OS 27.x were released.
Apple TV is the smoothest way to navigate, run apps, etc., without having to use whatever sluggish tracking crap that comes with Smart TVs. I’ve never connected my TV to the internet and Apple TV is the main input source for it. Combined with a couple of HomePods and eARC, it works fine for the most part. Combine with NextDNS (for DNS and system wide tracker blocking) alongside Tailscale, and you’ve got a nice setup.
The biggest downside of Apple TV is tvOS, which doesn’t get much developer time within Apple. This hits harder for Apple’s own apps, which tend to be of poor quality and have no attention paid to bug reports for years.
Hilariously almost all my Apple TV's are mounted to walls behind screens, so as neat as the far-field mics are, I can't see them working terribly well when they're behind the TV.
Anyway I'm happy with my current units. If I was outfitting a new living room I could see this new one, but for the time being I'm not rushing out.
My (single) Homepod Mini reacts to voice commands from any room in my 86 square meter apartment. When the doors are open, I can talk to it basically through the wall, without raising my voice.
I have a $12k Trinnov processor that’s quite good at audio, handles 4k@120 and 8k. $299 Apple TV still can’t pass through audio or do anything better than 4k@60?
I didn’t get to spend $12k on a Trinnov by overpaying for the little things. Apple is high. I don’t know who this is for.
Why would it need gold plated anything? It's all digital, all the way to the speakers. Or was that not a serious question? Perhaps you are thinking I spend $10k on speaker wire or devices to alter my listening rooms "quantum field"? No. I have an expensive digital processor because things like room correction work and the trinnov is the only kit that works with HDCP inputs and produces digital output. It's not that hard to do, it's just hard to do legally.
That's my point. If I'm not willing to spend $299 on a device with the same spec, audio/visual wise, as the previous $149 generation, who would be? Who here needs AI in their streaming services endpoint?
300$ yikes. I'm amazed. And this thing can't even do 120 fps. :-(
Did the old one also not have Dolby vision/HDR10/Atmos? What is this cinematic stuff? What are we missing here?
Why would I need CPU/GPU performance on an Apple TV? I'm genuinely confused. Is it to play video games? If I want to play video games, I can pay a bit more and get a used playstation I suppose. I genuinely don't understand this product anymore.
+1. I was waiting to buy this, but it doesn't really have anything I want over my existing apple tv (which I really like). I was going to add one for a second television, but its just too expensive. I will stick with the Roku there (which I really don't love, at this point, its slow and has lots of ads).
HDR support on Apple TV is fairly hit or miss depending on the player you are using.
HDR10+ is supported in some players (infuse) but not others (plex) and will fallback to HDR10. Profile 7 DV files do not play properly on Apple TV period even though it will display the DV logo (though frankly very few devices can do this). Profile 5 and 8 DV files will play properly depending on the player and the content mapping level in the content (2.9 is well supported but 4.0 causes HDR10 fallback or black screens in some cases). Apple TV also doesn't support HD audio passthrough great.
I've used Steam Link to play games from my Steam library on the Apple TV using a video game controller and it worked surprisingly well. You still might want the Playstation (or Switch or XBox). Just depends on what games you want to play.
Moonlight works really well on the ATV4K too. I stream 4K@60FPS with HDR and surround sound from my PC using the Apollo fork of Sunshine (creates a virtual display since I normally game at 1440p on my attached monitor).
I think this is one of the things that the Apollo fork[1] makes way easier. I'm not sure that I had to do anything Apollo config wise* . I just went through the Windows HDR calibration tool the first time to tune it for my TV and it was good after.
*I do have a once-per-run Moonlight glitch that may even be because I'm on an older version. The first connection just doesn't pick up on the HDR immediately. I just have to reconnect once and it's good after that.
[1]: https://github.com/ClassicOldSong/Apollo ("Built-in Virtual Display with HDR support that matches the resolution/framerate config of your client automatically")
I found the input latency to be much worse than the PC connected to the same TV, for whatever reason.
I thought I surely was imagining it, so I revisited it 6 months or a year later, and, yes, the input latency from the controller is substantially worse on the Apple TV.
It has a powerful CPU/GPU because those chips are what they have on hand and they can control the whole stack. It's likely cheaper for them to just shove their overpowered chips into things that don't need them than setup manufacturing for a net new lower power chip.
Their Studio Displays have an A19 in them too (A19 Pro for the XDR)
I’m been wondering that same thing while developing tvOS app and testing across hardware. What does this new model offer the last 3 didn’t??
Eg Pixel Brite works great on all versions of AppleTV including FEL playback on 1st gen
The only thing I haven’t been able to do with the older models is upscaling content at the same fidelity levels. But the results are very subtle either way and not all that compelling IMO.
I had been holding off on buying an Apple TV in anticipation of this launch, and am a bit underwhelmed. $300 just seems crazy for what is, or I guess, what it's coming from.
Does anyone know why having 128GB of storage is useful? Just for installing more apps? I've had Google TV devices in the past, and don't think I ever came close to the 32GB storage limit. Maybe there's a gap I'm missing...
I’ve been using an Apple TV since ~2014 I think. Upgraded to the 4K version on release (2022 version).
Really nothing beats it, especially if you are in Apple ecosystem but even if you are not, it’s a million times better than the messy android tv with full of ads and bloat.
That being said, I don’t see a reason for us to upgrade to this version.
My Android TV has a non-default launcher with no ads, and I can sideload apps to get things like Youtube with sponsorblock baked in. Going to Apple's locked down system seems like a huge downgrade to me.
The reason will be that the older, less expensive Apple TV 4k will no longer be available. There's really no other reason. This is a price hike, plain and simple.
I need a new ATV to replace the ancient HD one that's dying in our living room. I've been putting it off because of laziness and now I can't get one directly from Apple if I don't want this too expensive, Siri-infested thing with all its microphones that I'll never use. Dammit!
It's really not. It's so reviewers will be able to say "it costs more than the last version, but you also get much more storage" and the average consumer is happy. If there were a practical reason for it Apple would put it front and center.
They support it for games, I wouldn't really say they've been pushing it though.
That said, I'd love it if Plex or Jellyfin were able to use that storage to cache files locally (eg. stream the data as fast as possible and play from the local copy) to smooth out some flakiness with the wifi between the tv and my home server.
They did push it for gaming at one time, but it fizzled out since then. At one point Arcade was pushed pretty hard, and they presented Apple TV as the premier place to play it.
I've used it for a total of a few hours in many years, almost exclusively for mini motorways. It never made sense to play over the Switch or PS5. I'm not sure who's using it.
Eh Apple halfheartedly pretends like they're a gaming platform every couple years for a WWDC and then never gives any indication they're actually trying the other 364 days of the year. I'd be shocked if gaming was an influence in the storage at all.
I'd guess it's room for the AI model and future versions of it that could grow.
Having 128GB of storage really does shape what kind of games are going to be played though. For a modern PS5/XSX/PC AAA game you can expect ~100 GB per install, and indie games really run the gamut depending on genre and scope.
I would expect only mobile developers to actually bother porting games natively to Apple TV, with larger titles opting for game streaming.
The lack of audio passthrough has been so frustrating. Apple TV would be an instant buy for me if it did. I have a pretty good 5.1 setup at home. I've been watching the LoTR trilogy with my kids and there is a big difference between DD 5.1 vs the higher quality audio streams. I use a Shield for this reason, but it's clunky and I'd much rather have something that just works. Shame that Apple has no interest in supporting audio passthrough for their devices.
Yeah, exactly. I've looked into those boxes but have steered clear for the same reasons. For now I use ProjectIvy launcher for a very clean launcher experience and I used a custom Shield script someone had posted on Reddit a while back to remove a lot of Google bloat and the Google launcher. Works well enough, but frame-rate matching still requires manual intervention (I have a button mapped to forcing it) and the Apple TV app isn't quite as smooth in playback as it should be on the Shield.
It has the ability to decode the audio on the device and output LPCM if the playback app used supports it. The only thing you can't get is the spatial height channels from formats other than DD+ w/Atmos.
This Apple TV doesn’t support 8K display output. That’s what it’s called the “Apple TV 4K.”
Gigabit Ethernet has 7x the bandwidth of a 4K UHD Blu-ray.
If an 8K Blu-ray standard were to ever exist, in what universe would it somehow 7x the bitrate to increase the pixel count by 4x? And of course that math is assuming that this new hypothetical new standard that does not exist wouldn’t use newer compression standard.
In what universe will 8K content be streamed at greater than 3x the bitrate of the average US home broadband speed? (300Mbps) 8K streamed content will almost certainly top out at 100Mbps.
The current bandwidth cost math at major CDNs for consumer use cases at that bitrate is hundreds of dollars per month, before you even pay for content.
The idea that any streamer will be bandwidth-limited by a 1Gbps network link anytime soon is absurd.
I'm not sure what bit rate and what CDN prices you used, but at these data levels I think you'd definitely want to get your own bandwidth. So even ignoring the free colocation and peering a big streaming provider can get, I see a bunch of offerings for $30-50/Gbps in the US and EU. And what percent of 8k tier users are going to be watching 8k simultaneously, maybe 10% peak? A service could use 1-2Gbps if it wanted to. There's no reason for it, but it could.
8K is dead, nobody was buying 8K tvs. There will almost certainly be under a million 8K tvs sold in the next decade. There's also absolutely no content for it while not even 4K content is mainstream.
8k blu-rays aren't and if they were, I don't think they would 4x the bandwidth... and even if they did, 4k blu-ray peaks at 150mbps (or so), so 4x would be 600mbps, which gigabit is still plenty for.
Commercial streamimg platforms are probably gonna allocate like 2mbps more for 8k streaming and call it a day.
I tend to have at least one of the latest AppleTVs around, but I find myself without access to my best AppleTV 4k and am stuck using a 1st gen in my current home.
I was surprised to learn my 1st gen doesn't have a thread radio which caused some minor homekit compatability issues. I actually bought a new AppleTV 4k a couple months ago but it didn't really solve my problem, so I returned it with the reasoning that it was long in the tooth and a new model was coming out soon.
I just preordered this one but I sort of wonder if I should just go buy the last gen one for half the money or whatever. Seems like the actual buy. At the old price point, they were impulse buys. At this price point, well, it's enough to get me to stop and think about it.
Does every refresh need to make a case for why existing owners of the last model need to upgrade?
Most of the purchases will be from people who do have an older model that's actually getting outdated, people who want another Apple TV for another room in their house, or people who don't own one at all. You buy this one now, it'll probably be good for the better part of a decade and you won't need to think about the next refresh.
I have an AppleTV because I never want to plug my TV into the internet. I just need a box that can stream videos. Does it need to have AI? No. It really doesn’t. I wish Apple just dropped all this junk and figured out what they want that TV app to do.
> I have an AppleTV because I never want to plug my TV into the internet. I just need a box that can stream videos.
One annoyance is that the Netflix app stopped being able/allowed to stream to any device that has some kind of remote (or where you can enter a username/password in some way):
Netflix works fine with the device directly connected to the TV. With a long hdmi-cable (5m+) + an usbc-to-hdmi converter you can keep de phone/pad in your hands. Using a short (≤2m) hdmi-usbc cable you probably need to put the device next to the TV. I bring either when traveling to watch TV in hotels rooms.
FWIW, a Nintendo Switch USB-C to HDMI cable with power input travels well for this, albeit a bit bulky.
This one puts the charger input at the HDMI end where the TV and presumably outlets are, so power comes to your video playing device over the USB-C at your device end.
In 1955, Zenith introduced the Flash-matic: world's first wireless remote control, so people wouldnt need to have a really long wire connecting their remote to their television.
It's been doing the same thing forever. A bunch of squares on a screen and you select one to go into whatever app. The core experience has not changed in living memory.
Dont want to plug your TV in to the internet but happy to plug in an Apple TV?
I still never understand people who are dead against giving all their personal info and data to one company but are fine with giving it to another.
Yes this is an apple thread on HN and so I am expecting to be downvoted into oblivion by the Apple fans who believe Apple is better than any other company with data and security, when they have been proved multiple times to be just as bad.
Different companies have different track records and incentives with regard to privacy. There may be companies more trustworthy than Apple, but there aren't many companies less worthy than most TV manufacturers.
Right but if you are streaming then you are happy to give all your personal info and viewing habit data to Netflix, Disney, Amazon etc to build ad profiles on you, as well as Apple who own the hardware and are feeding telemetry data into your ad profile on their system.
But for some reason Sony or Samsung doing the same on your TV is too far?
> But for some reason Sony or Samsung doing the same on your TV is too far?
The content streamers get your viewing habits by virtue of you viewing their content (like Youtube, or any web site, getting information on what you're looking at by simply logging HTTP GET requests).
There is no reason why television OEMs need to do screen captures and send them to the mothership.
It's the first- and second-party interaction: you gave money to Sony/Samsung/etc for a product, and after the exchange there is no reason for any further interaction.
You have a regular/monthly interaction with content providers: there is at least a valid reason for the content providers to have that information in the first place, and none for the TV OEMs to collect it.
You can reason it all you want, but regardless of the product type the fact remains you are happy to give your data to one billion dollar company but not another.
That is absolutely fine, but IMO it is hypocritical. That is all I am arguing.
> That is absolutely fine, but IMO it is hypocritical. That is all I am arguing.
I am okay "giving my data" to the billion dollar company of (say) Netflix of Disney+ because I need to be able to log into the service and get the video streams. It is a necessary part of getting the service to provide (e.g.) billing information like a credit card.
I am not okay with giving my data to the billion dollar company of Sony or Samsung because having a display take in HDMI bits and produce photons on a screen does not necessitate any phone home functionality.
I am not okay with Netflix or Disney+ giving data to third parties because doing so is not necessary to provide the service.
I don't want random people listening in on me, but I don't mind the person I choose to speak to listening to me.
Does that qualify as hypocrisy too?
You can argue against dealing with any billion dollar company. But drop the hypocrisy framing, it is nonsensical and your point will be stronger without it.
Do you think all the apps on your phone that you give permission to use the microphone are only using it when you choose to speak into it?
You obviously havent read my posts very well. I have repeatedly said that the hypocrisy is subjective, my opinion only, and I am not trying to convince anyone otherwise. You are entitles to think whatever you want, trust whoever you want, and believe what ever you want. I am entitled to consider it hypocrisy if you are turning a blind eye to tracking from one side but happy allowing it from another.
> Do you think all the apps on your phone that you give permission to use the microphone are only using it when you choose to speak into it?
Given that my iPhone has a little LED that lights up when the the microphone (or camera) are active, it is fairly easy to confirm that that the mic is not being used.
> as well as Apple who own the hardware and are feeding telemetry data into your ad profile on their system.
Are they, though? Is Apple snooping into the Netflix app’s data to track what you’re watching and phone home with that info? Are there studies showing that happening? Are they selling that data to third parties like the TV manufacturers are?
You seem to be missing a major point. You have signed up to streaming services and they are 100% selling your data and viewing habits to 3rd parties to build ad and tracking profiles. How come you are happy for Disney and Netflix to do this but not Samsung or Sony?
As far is Apple is concerned, they have been caught lying about this many times before. I jujst cant get my head around why any person can trust a billion dollar corporation to be 'good'.
It's possible this is a distinction without a difference, but Disney and Netflix provide a service and the data they are selling is integral* to providing that service, meaning they're going to have that data regardless. If you're okay with anyone selling any of your data, it probably makes sense for Netflix to sell data about what you watch on Netflix.
Samsung or Sony sell a physical product that does not need internet connectivity, or microphones, or telemetry, or any of that. They jam that stuff in there to increase profits and make it economically infeasible to sell what I think 80% of people on HN would buy if given the opportunity - a large flatscreen TV with no built-in connectivity whatsoever. So anything I can do to make me less profitable to them, I will do.
This is obviously the line where we disagree, and thats fine. You are arguing that you are happy to give your data to a company if its integral to the service they provide. My opinion is that if you are giving your data to one billion dollar company that is building an ad profile and selling it to 3rd parties, then why have scruples about giving it to another? The ad companies are getting your data one way or another, cherry picking a single device on your home network to ringfence against that seems crazy in my opinion.
I also dislike that my data is being transacted willy-nilly by content providers, it's a very different ballpark when TVs have hidden microphones recording my house, screen capturing if I'm showing personal photos on the screen, and sending that data to the manufacturer. That's a much worse privacy invasion.
This is the problem. You've read the headlines but havent examined the evidence. Go watch the Gamers Nexus documentary on it, and bring yourself up to speed on exactly what tracking the TVs are doing.
I got an AppleTV because the modal experience of using webOS on my TV was having my toddler scream "WATCH TRASH TRUCK" while watching a loading spinner. Garbage computer experience. I never disconnected it from the network though. I was watching the NBA Playoffs on broadcast (so no internet involved in the content delivery) and I got an overlay in webOS system fonts suggesting I order delivery food through my TV. I saw it again when watching the World Cup through the Peacock app on the Apple TV.
So I watch like a total of 2 hours of sports in Summer 2026 and my kid gets an hour of TV while he eats lunch and webOS works its hardest to make those both suck ass, and the Apple TV Just WorksTM and we can put our weekly Facetime with Grandma and Grandpa on there. Absolute no brainer better experience.
They didn’t not respond. They unambiguously said they are not participating or even aware of the existence of such a program. That goes a hell of a lot further, and would have opened them up to a hell of a lot of issues if it was false.
I would invite you to read all the investigations that have been done on how much various smart TVs surveil households and exfiltrate all kinds of personal data.
Then find investigations where Apple TVs are proven to do the same, of which there are none.
You’re chalking this up to fanboyism but this is just people making informed choices. In today’s streaming era “just don’t connect anything to the internet” isn’t possible.
A practically e-waste mini-PC running an ordinary Linux distro paired with an airmouse remote is a much better TV box. You don't need streaming apps when you are free to use a Web browser, something Apple won't allow for obvious reasons. No surveillance, no crapware, no ads. It can even double as a console for GOG/Steam.
> The Washington Post indicated that "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft"
> Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM" "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."
Yeah, they said the same thing about giving out all your push notifications to the government, before they were caught and admitted they had to keep it secret due to NDAs. Seriously, why do people trust billion dollar corporations to look after the little guy?
"In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."
To whatever extent they’ve been required to comply by the legal authority of the government they operate under, it’s also abundantly clear that they’ve repeatedly gone above and beyond in removing their own ability to comply with such things in the future.
Yes they are happy to make a song and dance about not letting authorities into individual phones, the publicity definitely helps them out on that front. However none of it matters because the government already have probes in all their servers, as proved by Edward Snowden, so its game over before you start.
Do you understand what NDAs are? It doesnt seem so because you keep quoting Apple while they have been proven to be under NDAs in the past, so how can you trust anything they say in the future?
Its ok, you carry on trusting old Uncle Apple to look after you. I am not trying to convince you of anything. However I am entitled to have my opinion that it is hypocritical to criticise tracking from one company but turn a blind eye to the same thing from another.
I have clarified my opinion many times now, feel free to have the last word.
If you presume that we have a technologically omnipotent government that can defeat secure enclaves, secure exclaves, private cloud compute, e2e encryption, etc., then there’s no point in even pretending to play the game you’re trying to. Even open source software has to run on chips that you have to trust haven’t been backdoored by Uncle Sam. Even open source chips have to be trusted to have been manufactured faithfully.
If you presume the government isn’t technologically all-capable, then technical measures can limit and even defeat the observability that even a wildly tyrannical government has into your computing devices. This mindset is both infinitely more useful than yours and more reflective of the world we actually live in. The government now mostly has to rely on 0-day exploits that they hold close to their chest until a target sufficiently warrants burning it.
Your paranoia is beyond hysterical and it presumes that these companies are gleefully giving out our data when it is extremely clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Again, Apple has more than any company proven a track record of tying their own hands when it comes to complying to these kinds of requests. In the absence of perfect options, I’ll happily go with the good ones.
Im really not chalking this up to Fanboyism. The same can be said for anyone using a streaming device to avoid plugging their TV into the internet, be it Nvidia or google etc.
I am well aware of the recent LG controversy. However In my opinion if you are happy to sign up to Netflix and Disney+ and use a streaming box to give them all your personal data and viewing habits to allow tracking and ad profiles then its pretty hypocritical to target a single company in the chain and call them out for it.
You really don’t think there’s a difference between a company collecting data about the usage of their own video library and another company tracking audio with microphones, sniffing local network devices, monitoring all video output and selling all of the above to third parties?
Genuinely curious: is there any company caught “tracking audio with microphones”?
And what does it mean? Is it about eavesdropping on users or identifying the content being watched?
> is there any company caught “tracking audio with microphones”?
I think it's become an internet meme because it's hard for the average person to understand the more creepy thing that's happening. All the data points being captured as one goes around the internet allows rich profiles to be built without something as complicated as recording and transcribing audio.
LG TVs transcribe conversations you’re having in the room and store them locally. While they haven’t been caught sending that data anywhere AFAIK, there are known vulnerabilities that lets attackers read these transcriptions.
Personally I think when you sign up to Disney+ and you give them things like your DOB, bank details, address, phone number, IP address, its a much bigger base for those companies to start building your ad profile much more accurately. If you have kids you then make a family profile to protect them, but in reality all you are doing is feeding the streaming company information about your kids viewing habits to ad to the ad profiles. All of this is being sold to 3rd parties all over the world, for each streaming service you use.
This is without even looking at Apple, who own the hardware you are streaming on and have been caught lying multiple times in the past about data harvesting.
After all that, I feel that unplugging the cord on your TV is completely pointless, and it is frustrating how people gloat about it like they are getting around the system. In reality, you are only giving your data to 4 companies in the chain now, instead of 5.
You’re talking about “fans” and “gloating” and I really can’t understand why you see things that way. Like I said, people accept that streaming services are an inevitable part of their lives and they’re making informed choices to minimise their exposure. 4 companies is indeed better than 5.
Im pretty sure I never used the word "Fans" anywhere? If I did please point it out as it wasnt intentional.
If you think giving data to 4 companies instead of 5 is fine then thats fair enough, its your own data. In my opinion if you happy to give your data to one billion dollar ad profile selling company, then why squabble about another? However I understand this is subjective, and I am not trying to tell anyone they are wrong. I just dont understand it thats all!
I really don't think it's fair to chalk this up to fanboyism. It's really hard to argue that a majority of the platforms natively available on smart TVs are pretty bad, and that they have made a habit of using software updates to cram in more ads. I used a TCL roku TV 10 years and recommended them to everyone looking for a decent budget TV with a good minimal interface. That same exact TV is still used on occasion; the interface has gotten awful and interactions are sluggish.
Many platforms have gone the same way: Google TV boxes are known to be broadly awful at this point, my samsung TV's built-in apps got progressively less responsive with more ads on my homescreen over the last few years. I haven't experienced it but I hear complaints about the performance and intrusiveness of LG TVs now as well.
After cycling through my options, the Apple TV is the only one that doesn't exhibit the same behavior: It is responsive, has a good interface that looks nice, has a very nice minimal remote, and it works the same today as it did yesterday (and basically as it did 2 years ago). I'm not trying to claim allegiance to any brand, it just seems that somehow Apple is the only one not participating in enshittification, at least not to the same degree. If that changes the Apple TV will be out the door and I'll probably need to roll my own out of some sort of mini PC on an open-source platform.
And as one last note, for the time being Apple still has some credibility in terms of privacy. They have revenue streams that work for them without completely ruining their product, and it's my hope they continue with that because as far as I can tell they are the only ones left among the big players.
Relax. Apple's AI is basically GPT-2 duct-taped to a voice model, at best. Even if they tried to collect your data, it couldn't do it reliably. They're so incompetent on this that their AI isn't actually worrying.
Gemini is basically GPT-2 duc... Ok, ok leaving the snark aside, I know that but the local model probably delegates to remote when it decides it needs that and the local model is not good.
Also, the tooling they provided to the model is not good either. The 3rd party AI apps by OpenAI or Anthropic can do much more than the system assistant.
There is a weird chain of wondering what is going to answer my response with Siri AI considering it could be Old Siri, New Siri (local), New Siri (PCC), or ChatGPT...
Seems like it's an advertised feature that I assume is opt-out, and has a clear user benefit, from a company with an above average reputation for handling user data. Funny.
When LG does it its illegal, secret, denied, and for use in selling actual data to others. When Apple does it, it's announced along with many promises of privacy and as a feature you buy.
Yes at the end of the day it's a microphone in your home, but each has a very different stated (or unstated, in LG's case) purpose.
Wow. The price went from 129 to 199 to 299. That's nuts. Also, I find it pretty hilarious because for a couple years people have been speculating that Apple would release a low cost version to compete with the sticks.
Anyway, it's now too much money for something that is just going to open Jellyfin.
Credit where credit is due, critics claiming "[Apple device] is too expensive for something that just does [basic function]" have been proven wrong for decades. Why buy an iPod when a Creative MP3 player is cheaper? Why buy an iPhone when a Motorola Q is cheaper? Why buy a MacBook Air when an HP Omnibook is cheaper?
It seems like Apple is perfectly happy to send low spend customers to their Roku to install the Apple TV app from there.
With the way the smart TV market is playing out, the type of customer who actually wants to add a streaming box to a TV that already comes with all the apps they need to play back content is already a premium value proposition.
i.e., if your TV already comes with all the apps: Netflix, Paramount+, HBO Max, Disney+, etc, why are you buying a streaming box at all? Presumably because you want a more premium experience than your TV currently offers. That means that compromising on price isn't the right move from a product perspective.
I’d argue Apple TVs were one of the few cost subsidized items they sell, as when people could get 15$ Fire TV sticks anywhere they had to at least look competitive. Now that costs have gone up significantly and it’s basically an iPhone 17 without a screen it’s tough to keep the costs down.
an iPhone 17 without a screen, with half the storage, without a battery, without FaceID, without cameras, without cellular modem, without Taptic Engine, without…
The only part that “deserves” a price increase is the storage starting at 128GB now instead of 32GB, but it’s completely out of touch to get rid of the base model when nobody has any use for all that storage (even the 32GB) for what is basically a streaming box.
Hell, even their new HomeView device, which does have a screen and FaceID, starts at same price.
Apple TV can double as Home Hub device in which it records/routes to/ cloud from your cameras. Combined with high-res content, e.g. when streaming games, it can saturate the 1GbE.
Also, just learned it's still 4k 60Hz. So forget 120Hz gaming. Game streaming is likely to become a default in near future at the hardware proces we see, so limiting to 60Hz is really cheap of them at this point.
I’m not a gamer so I had to look this up. The Google AI answer for cloud gaming stated a stable 15-20Mbps connection as a requirement. Obviously latency matters in many scenarios but raw bandwidth might be overstated?
Any use for a faster port in this device? I use gig-e on my current 4K and it’s really nice to reduce latency (compared to WiFi) but I doubt 2.5G or 10G would be that useful… unless there were an SFP+ port where I could run fiber instead.
I own 4 ATVs, the OG 1080p one, then a 1st, 2nd and 3rd gen. I plan on replacing the oldest of those two with 2 4th gen ATVs. AppleTV is just so much better than any other option out there and I especially like the AV1 hardware decoding here. So, yes, totally worth it.
I was interested in it, since I do need a certain amount of oomph out of the SoC to watch all of my videos on my Apple TV 4K (libass in case someone asks), but man that sticker shock is harsh. I don't think I can stomach it.
Nowadays with ~100 bucks you can an amd64 box and a CEC adapter, which allows to use the default remote of your tv. Then you can install on it whatever you want, customize it however you prefer and have all the privacy you decide. No lock-in. As much AI as you like, zero is a valid option.
Current rumor is Apple (Beats) may be releasing a controller soon, and with that I’d assume that + price they are testing the waters with bringing AAA to the Apple TV.
If they put Steam on it with your whole existing library we'd be talking.
"We have tomb raider and death stranding 2 for $69.99" is not an interesting proposition except for Apple fanboy dads who hope that will placate their gamer child (it won't).
The bizarre thing to me is that it doesn't really feel like they need to do much other than cut deals with developers. This latest atv can't be much slower than a switch 2 (I wouldn't be shocked if it's faster) and could certainly run a giant back catalog of games if publishers were willing to launch them on it. It seems like such an obvious thing that I must be missing something crucial about it.
It would really help me stomach a $300 dedicated box for my TV if it could do more than look at pictures and stream netflix. Games are the absolute obvious thing to do, especially since Microsoft and Sony are seemingly struggling.
Just ship a controller and cut some deals apple, it isn't that hard...
Anecdotally, the AppleTV app on smartTVs won't remember what I was watching. Not the show, the episode or the timestamp into the episode.
This has led me to passionately start my own media server again.
Anywhere between $100-$200 will get you a mini PC that you can use to host movies, series, music, audiobooks and ebooks. If you don't transcode the content then there's no need to worry about a GPU. Set it up headless in a closet.
From there you can use a mobile app to connect your phone/tv/any device to it and enjoy an ad free experience without streaming data over the internet.
My TV is a 15in CRT that I connect with a laptop.
My phone is a 1st gen iphone se, with apps to stream.
I've found this setup less frustrating (and wildly cheaper) than spotify, appleTV/netflix/hulu, kindle and etc.
The current state of computing is such that I can't justify buying hardware that requires an app to use. If I want cameras, I buy the camera and connect then to my backend. If I want a thermostat, I do the same.
I've been running the Apple TV app on a Shield and it's got a lot of other bugs. Lately it's been showing shows in the totally wrong aspect ratio unless I restart the app. I do think they consider it a second class citizen.
It's genuinely one of the few apple products I've had interest in but it seems like I'm in a minority. Maybe people just haven't bought a new TV recently.
TVs are getting worse not better. Except for the display. Which should be the only real concern. But the built in software is just going down hill universally.
I would love to have something that can have a snappy UI. I don't even care about resolution, I'd happily keep everything at 720p as long as the UI didn't take seconds to react.
I really like my 2022 Apple TV, I just use it for Plex and YouTube and it works great. People complain about the remote but I don't mind it, works fine. I bought it to replace having to use the slow and clunky Plex/Youtube apps on my LG TV and it's more than fulfilled that purpose.
Great little device, I think I paid £130 for it a few years ago.
There is no reason for me to upgrade to this device, but that £299 price tag really stinks, there is no way I'd buy it at that price if I didn't have the older model already.
Any note on specs? Do we still have ethernet? Which ethernet we get (is it 2.5GBps?)? How much storage? And what about RAM? I couldn’t easily grasp this information after skimming the text.
Also, any change to the output ports, or are we still restricted to one hdmi as the single output?
I understood what it was after a moment of looking at it, but had to sit and wonder why they thought it was a good idea. What am I missing here? This looks weird.
$300 is absurd. I’ve been waiting for this for a while, but it looks like I’ll have to settle for the older model at a lower price. I wonder if the high price is due to storage costs.
What I want to know is how good is it for moonlight streaming? The prev versions had odd latency issues.
EDIT: Brutal! Apparently it doesn’t support VRR or 120 hz at 4K. Surprising miss to not support HDMI 2.1 properly.
Further EDIT: Basically we are entering 2027 with no way to get a tv add on box that can stream 4K apps (Disney+ etc. need Widevine L1), 4K at 120hz (i.e. support HDMI 2.1 properly) and decode AV1. Just a bizarre gap in the market.
anyone else been trying the new Siri AI intelligence on their phone and been underwhelmed? It's really slow, no longer gets adding grocery items to the right lists, etc. Did I mention how slow it is to inject an LLM turn on everything? Hopefully they'll fix all that by the time it's out of beta... But it's so rough to me that it's really ruined the experience of the device. Apples voice-to-text still isn't good compared the what I used to have on my Android phone pre-2024, when I switched to Apple ecosystem....
I guess I'll be using my shield till it dies. It works for the most part and has 4K/DV/Atmos for Jellyfin. Was just hoping to upgrade into an apple device to line up with phones/tablet etc for convenience but not at $429CDN+tax!
I don't see the appeal unless you're already balls deep into the subscription ecosystem. $300 minipc will get you much further than this thing will. There used to be an argument at $130, but now I just don't see a reason on why one would want to be subject to paying so much across so many services that don't even benefit the original creators most of the time. There's some exceptions where netflix, etc bankrolls entire shows, but they've plumetted in quality and I haven't watched one since two years ago.
Old chips cost Apple more money now not less. The A15 and 64GB NAND probably have low volumes and cost Apple more money going forward. So apple likely just upgraded to what the supply chain can reliably do for a while. Prices might go up even in six months to a year. So instead of buying a 200$ bumped to 250$ A15 Apple TV in six months they are probably upgrading it to make sure future price bumps remain relatively low and justifiable for upgraded hardware.
Very interested to know what TV manufacturers are doing who have heavily advertised their Android UIs which are bread and butter of collecting data. TV panels themselves have no reason to have price increases in memory shortage.
Roku 4K with HDR10 and Dolby Vision is going for $53 on Amazon. A tough sell for Apple, to say the least. I use Roku for Apple TV (the streaming service) and works great.
Does anyone else force their Apple TV into 1080p mode because they don’t like soap opera mode? I hope this unit lets me do that. I have no need to upgrade but eventually my current Apple TV will die and I’d hate to lose the ability to downgrade.
yea, this is a non-starter for me, and that is not even considering the price bump which is too much. I do not want ANY internet connected devices in my machine with far field microphones just listening. There needs to be a hardware switch disabling them. I would settle for software settings that completely disables them though as I almost trust Apple. almost... I likely will just look for yesterdays version.
Play the next unwatched episode of X.
What is new this week? (across all the services I'm subscribed to)
What service is show X on? (localized to my country)
When will the next season of X be released?
I'd pay for that (grudgingly, given the big hike). Otherwise don't see much reason to replace my 2021 model.
I run Jellyfin on my Windows tower with my 4K Linux ISOs streaming from a NAS. I had to fine-tune the files to direct stream to my Google TV box. I don't remember all the details but it involved lots of ffmpeg commands and downloading external subtitle files. Worth it to see every pore in Linus's face
The only time plex has been slow is right after one of their updates before they fix the bugs they always introduce. Faster hardware won’t fix that. Also apps need better preloading when scrolling. But again faster hardware isn’t the solution to sloppy devs.
I’m not actually complaining but I’m seeing an increasing number of family oriented gaming consoles. They seem like something eared towards gamer parents who don’t wan their kids going all in on a console yet.
This positions them to compete directly against those
The previous model doesn’t support 6-channel 48kHz bitstream audio, which prevents it from advertising full Atmos support over eARC. It also is clearly hitting CPU limits given occasional hiccups in audio processing, that are worst in the N-2 edition but still present in N-1.
If the new one fixes this, $300 for an eArc-to-HomePod HDMI receiver that can run streaming apps and set up room-measured Atmos is rather cheap.
I used to love my apple tv, but now I have a tv and a projector at home that both come with a good enough TV OS that has all the streaming apps I need (Netflix, HBO, etc), so I no longer find myself using my apple tv. My LGTV even supports airplay from my mac/iphone, which was maybe the only feature I thought would be unique to the apple tv.
The fact that you cannot easily listen on headphones through you phone is a dealbreaker. With Roku you can connect your headphones to you phone, and then just start streaming the audio directly to your headphones.
With Apple TV it sounds like you need to use the remote to connect headphones directly to the Apple TV.
That's such a pain. Why can't they just make an app.
Does anyone wink wink know when SiriAi (this improved version) hits iPhones? I currently have a laptop acting as an always listening personal assistant but it would be nice to have my iPhone be able to tell me anything but, “I’ve found this on the web for you - check it out”.
It struggles with 4K h264 video files easily played by Infuse player because Plex inefficiently processes video files without web optimization enabled.
Other than Siri AI upgrades, I wonder how much different this is compared to the previous Apple TV 4K with usage primarily being connecting to Jellyfin.
I was hoping they would finally add a camera or just let me plug in a webcam into it for facetime. Continuity camera doesn't work super well and the set up each time sucks.
I actually waited for it. My years old Apple TV died some time ago so I had a chance to use the Android TV that comes with the TV itself. And it's so terrible. I don't understand why even YouTube app is much better on Apple TV than the Android TV one
So NVidia Shield Pro has been sold out everywhere for months and now used ones are selling for $500.
The price was $200, now there was news of a price increase to $300. This does seem to be the case, but does a price increase of something that's sold out even mean anything? Not sure if NVidia even confirmed they're still producing it.
The NVidia Shield Pro was the go-to device which supported all the codecs. Notably the ones that Apple TV didn't support was uncompressed Dolby Atmos if I remember correctly.
Any idea if this new Apple TV 4K supports uncompressed audio for 4k Blu-Ray rips (i.e. remux's) for Plex or JellyFin?
No audio passthrough is obviously a huge miss and price isn't great either, but 60 Hz is super disappointing too. My Steam Machine is doing 120 Hz at 4K and it's great.
I still don't get how Apple can claim to have a "TV" product without actually making a TV. I always expected Apple to build the entire TV, not just a box.
But people don't pay for Apple just to save some bucks. People pay for Apple products to get the best of the best. I bet if Apple did a true Smart TV, people would just buy it eyes closed. Same happened back then with mobile phones, the market was flooded with options, look how successful they were with the iPhone.
Seems AI focused, not what I would buy it for. My LG TV has plenty of that and I'm trying to avoid it. Glad that I bought a used Apple TV 4K 3rd Gen now!
I have a pre-4K Apple TV, and I have the latest version of Apple TV 4K. I cannot at all tell the difference between the two at all. I think one even has 32 GB and I've never run out of space. That's about 10 years of "advancement" in Apple TV where it doesn't amount to anything.
And yet I have 4 of them in total because they are much better than the built in apps and I don't trust the TVs to connect them to the internet. It's basically CarPlay for my TV but does an excellent job because of the consistent interface and good apps.
I love my Apple TV, but this is nothing but a price hike. The older model already does 4k. What's the added benefit here? Siri? Give me a break. Apple Intelligence is the least capable AI of any of the big tech companies. The fact that they don't mine data like the others is a moot point when Siri isn't even good enough to answer basic queries in the first place. There's no data to mine when you end up not using it for anything.
I really hope this time its different and siri doesn't suck ... but then at the end of the day when i am watching tv I don't really need a llm to assist me.
As far as I can tell its a hardware bump and some supercharging price bump.
"Turn on/off subtitles" is the primary use case for me. "Rewind a minute" is a good one as well. If it got more seamless at something like "watch Community on Peacock" that'd be on the list as well.
$299, ouch. And a heavy emphasis on voice capabilities, which my kids love but I generally hate. I don't want to have a conversation with my media.
I have had many Apple TV generations and want to love it, but I really don't get where Apple is trying to go with it. The whole "Apple TV" app really confused the hell out of me, and I wonder if this is continuing that trend. Or maybe it won't matter because this is just ridiculously expensive.
Is there a better experience out there? There are lots of cheaper sticks, but even high end TVs have crappy app launchers, the apps are usually janky, and the vendors are spying on your usage.
Yes, a vanilla Android TV with a semi powerful SoC.
I have the 4K and MiBox next to each other, the Apple TV is cool for a UI showcase, but beyond the oohs and aahs the MiBox is a more useful entertainment device.
Honestly? A 2nd-hand Apple TV. That’s the competitor for this. I’ve had mine for what feels like it must be >5 years, they survived two years in a suitcase as a digital nomad, as far as I can tell they’re indestructible. My local 2nd hand site is full of them, too.
Yes, this is what happens with market leaders - their biggest competitor is the previous version of their own product. Hence silly vanity features to drive the upgrade treadmill.
Has anyone used Siri AI? I upgraded to iOS 27, which is fine I guess. Tried a couple siri prompts and decided it is horseshit as it always has been. Never touched it again.
Guys maybe just let others register themselves as system agents since you are obviously not capable of creating anything related to AI. Provide the absolutely minimum effort Siri as default and be done with it.
It's comparable to the free-tier AIs from the other providers but with a decent index of your personal data in a relatively secure and private fashion. It's not completely useless is the nicest thing I can say at this time. I hope it will become good.
I was in the car the other day and asked about details of a meeting I was driving to. It wasn’t a meeting in my calendar, just some emails that mentioned it. The response was genuinely good.
Then I asked it about the status of some packages that were already being tracked in wallet and it was a dumpster fire.
You're asking the company which is famously working their hardest to lock in their users completely to their services and platforms, to "just let others"? Maybe understand what ecosystem you buy into, and agree with their approach they've had for decades now, or let the ones who like that stuff continue to enjoy it. Seems kind of self-defeatists to ask them to change ways now...
Apple trying so hard to make Siri relevant. I don’t think it’s worth a $299 premium (up $170 from previous gen).
I would skip this generation of Apple TV and buy previous generation on a third party marketplace when people inevitably offload the current generation.
> Siri AI is available in beta in tvOS 27.2 and requires the owner of the home in the Home app to have an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone or iPad running the latest software version and have Siri AI turned on and set to a supported language.
> Certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits. Expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future.
Not only will the TV not be "supercharged by Siri AI" on its own, as it requires some other device to actually run Siri AI (?!), you also might end up relying on it and suddenly be blocked from using it if you use it too much (?!?!). But fear not, they'll ask you to pay up, to continue to use this feature they advertise as the main feature of this new device.
When compared to $150 (occasionally as cheap as $99 for the high end model) that you could have paid 3 months ago for the previous generation, $300 seems nuts. I put off buying last gen because this gen was perpetually “coming soon”, and now I’m priced out, even out of last gen!
Thanks, I hate the microphones. Not for privacy reasons, but because I already have problems with HomePods answering when I want my phone to do so, or vice versa, or the one in a different room all together answering when I tell it to set a timer and then I have to go down the stairs and shout at it. And now they want me to hook up two or four HomePods with microphones up to an Apple TV with a microphone and trust that it won't be a giant pain in the ass every time I say 'Siri'?
I love this product: it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data. I have two older ones and was looking to get something that supported 4K but waited for this to come out.
$300 might be a decent price if you use it for all of the things that it can do, but if all you're doing is launching streaming apps, $200 was already on the high end for that. $300 seems...a bit much.
Anything I'm missing here? The silver lining is that this product is almost certainly still in the "pay money then forget about it for a decade" tier, which is nice.
I'm also wondering if/how the "add up to four homepods" feature compares to "getting a soundbar". In the other thread for this someone noted that the HomePods only work with this box; so if you're running a game console that's no bueno. But apart from that, if $600 on an Apple TV + two HomePods mini delivers something comparable to a ~$500 soundbar, that's a decent value proposition.
apple tv isn't private, apple does mine your viewing habits, read their eula.
You should also know that all non-apple apps like netflix have unrestricted network access and can/will do the same.
It is too bad that people accept apple's marketing about privacy, because they have dark patterns, they collect telemetry, they don't let you block it, and they help apps do the same things.
A privacy policy is not the same as being able to firewall your device, but apple doesn't allow firewalls.
I'm not comfortable with my TV or streaming stick manufacturer collecting and mining data about everything that appears on the screen.
> Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
1) By default, every word (each character, actually) you input into Spotlight/Siri gets time-stamped and sent to `smoot.apple.com`
2) Even with a Pi-Hole blocking *.apple.com (i.e. using MacOS >> Networking >> DNS Server), on boot all modern Apple Silicon reaches out to security.apple.com (i.e. bypassing the user's manual-input DNS setting), using the DHCP-issued DNS IP [0]
pro-tip: use your router's DHCP to auto-issue your local Pi-Hole's IP address [as DNS] with your IP-leases; then you'll actually be able to block all *.apple.com traffic (using the PiHole which your DHCP issues to, by default)
[0] this is for security chip "lockout" detection (e.g.) and it is pervasive across NICs (i.e. it REALLY seeks any attempt for DNS resolution to security.apple.com)
Thank you for the detailed suggestion. I use LittleSnitch. pi-hole previously, I must take another look. Did you catch LG spying posts?
Huh? How do you expect Apple to show live search results if they don't send what you're typing to their servers?
> 2) Even with a Pi-Hole blocking *.apple.com (i.e. using MacOS >> Networking >> DNS Server), on boot all modern Apple Silicon reaches out to security.apple.com (i.e. bypassing the user's manual-input DNS setting), using the DHCP-issued DNS IP [0]
From a quick google search, it seems to be if you enable "Find my" or pass word recovery with an Apple account. I think that's reasonable to expect if you enable these features.
It's mind-blowing how one of the most advanced technology forums on the internet can take privacy for granted just because the marketing of a for-profit corporation with previous histories of privacy violations (there's even lawsuits) claims their closed source device connected 24/7 to the internet, is private.
that's not what I did
> just because the marketing
not just because of the marketing
> of a for-profit corporation with previous histories of privacy violations (there's even lawsuits) claims their closed source device connected 24/7 to the internet, is private.
in other words, they are being watched and held accountable when they do screw up, which obviates a lot of the "well maybe they're stealing your data and we don't know about it" nonsense elsewhere in the replies.
I'll ask something specific: We know that Rokus and built-in smart TVs are actively tracking and monetizing everything you do on your television. People can prove this by looking at what calls are made on your network.
Does Apple do the same thing?
Does Apple TV even do ACR in any form? Is it scanning my network and phoning home about it?
You're just making stuff up. Apple TV does not do ACR.
Apple does provide a TV App API that allows select app developers to get a special entitlement allowing them to contribute viewing data. Read this carefully: https://developer.apple.com/support/terms/apple-developer-pr...
"Apple will obtain user consent based on the user’s Apple Account before including Your Licensed Application in the TV App Features displayed under that Apple Account. Apple will also provide users with the ability to withdraw such consent at any time thereafter and to delete their TV App Data from Apple’s systems."
I'm sorry, you're stating this like some obvious fact. Apple has previously said this is not the case and they do not do ACR. The Apple TV is the only Apple device I have, so you can set aside any reflexive critiques of my brand loyalty. What is your precise claim? Why am I a dullard for reading that Apple TV does not use ACR and believing it?
The entire reason I bought an Apple TV was to reduce the amount of data skimming happening in the background and ads being shoved in front of my face in the foreground, it's not like I'm lousy with options.
For profit org that has its personalized ad part of business growing massively, is scanning all your photos, gives all data to NSA like there is no tomorrow is somehow better, becase carefully crafted PR said so.
Especially if one is not US citizen, or multinational, or US citizen not on US soil, and so on.
They make great, hard vendor-locked hardware and mediocre software. Lets keep them at that and not some magical privacy champions when they are not, not where it actually matters.
Your post doesn't sound any different, what with the tarring a group of people with the same brush.
You've decided that your feelings about a type of company trump anybody else's opinions about a particular company. With a fairly derisive tone, at that.
Funny how the OP carefully skimmed this part out in their reply, but BINGO, I think this is the attitude we should have towards privacy. Sometimes I just feel like we're talking to a bunch of bots on here when it comes to privacy with their blind support towards for-profit corporations that doesn't give a shit about them.
lol
>we're talking to a bunch of bots on here
Ah. Okay. In a different tenor of conversation I'd be happy to clarify but...not when I'm up against this.
Keep the firewall of skepticism high.
I've always seen Apple TV as the least-bad option compared to Roku/Fire/whatever Google is doing these days/literally any built-in solution.
If this was your original statement, I think we all would be on your side - I even use an Apple TV 4k personally and love it. It definitely is the best in the market for what it does.
> it's the one box I can (reasonably) trust to not be mining my viewing habits for data.
Instead, you framed it as the only privacy-friendly option and that is logically and factually incorrect.
They come with different tradeoffs wrt price, A/V quality, user interface, privacy, etc.
For me, the #1 thing is A/V quality. I don’t care about price, but most people do.
(There are also some boxes made specifically for this, usually sold as development platforms for STB products, marketed based on what SoC they contain. Though they’ll tend to be $200, while the random “finished product” streaming box will be more like $30. Both come with decent remotes.)
I'm also interested in alternatives, but LineageOS on a cheap box isn't really one.
That's precisely what you did.
Yes, they did:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
Can you prove they aren't actively doing it now?edit: link
"Apple has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, never made it available for advertising, and never sold it to anyone for any purpose," Apple said on Wednesday.
Unintentionally activating Siri and then recording is very different from the active listening things going on. Shared with advertisers was speculation.
Again, you don't know they aren't doing any of these privacy violations again right now. You are just vomiting their marketing BS again and again "Apple means privacy". Historically their shady acts weren't discovered until much later - battery gate, siri lawsuit, etc. You're starting on personal attacks and sounding more like a bot, so I'm going to stop here.
and then
> and sounding more like a bot
Pot, kettle, etc.
Per HN guidelines: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
This has nothing to do with the specific question I asked, and I'm not sure why you'd think so unless Roku has some kind of Siri-like feature (which wasn't what I was intending when I asked regardless). (also, that's a dead link)
My point is, it's a for-profit corporation. And a really efficient one. They don't care about anyone's privacy or anything else. Only profits. History has proof - battery gate, siri lawsuit, etc.
Is there some actual evidence of collusion with the big tech companies? Because I haven’t seen it. (Telecoms I’ve heard were and are much more integrated.)
The next Snowden disclosure (MUSCULAR) was significantly more concerning though. It was that the NSA was tapping the internal fiber of Big Tech companies. I was at Google when the Snowden disclosures broke, and read the SRE postmortem. They found 2 fiber cuts underneath the English Channel, an hour apart, lining up with the start of the program as disclosed by Snowden. My inference is that the NSA paid off MI6 to send a submarine commando team to cut and tap the fiber of an American company, without consent, and then all the data was shared through Five-Eyes reciprocal data sharing agreements. Google leadership was hopping mad after this, but it would've been impolitic to bring it to the public. They started encrypting all internal traffic soon after, assuming that their internal network was compromised by various nation-state actors, which had some unfortunate effects on their internal culture of openness.
The head security guy where I worked 20 years ago was already saying this.
Anywhere I’ve worked it was firewall everything and use VPNs, and most places still do this. SFTP was in the too hard basket. And of course that led to people emailing files around as standard practice (and the only option) and inevitably some got emailed to the wrong recipients.
Honestly, based on what? That they haven't been caught?
That said they are not perfect - e.g their wording in their own tracking consent prompts vs the ones they force on others.
That's marketing. Do you always trust everything in marketing material?
Always missing from the paranoid lunatic side of this discussion: what devices do you use? I presume you do all your computing on an abacus?
I presume truth and facts are important, no?
I mean, it's what they _say_ they do. Do we know?
Do you have any evidence to present, or is this pure FUD?
But I do think that, in general, Apple tends to be the least-bad actor among its mainstream competitors: its primary business model does not depend on harvesting and selling data, and it has made this value proposition a part of its marketing, and people high up in the company have spoken about ways that they personally value it. And, for any story about ways in which Apple has failed here, there are certainly twice as many for any other company they compete with.
I mean, step back: Who cares more about my privacy - Apple or Google? Apple or Roku? Can anyone seriously argue the latter for either?
> I'm only asking if people put faith in Apples claims because they're, well, Apple, or do we _know_ their claims are valid.
If we _know_, then there would be no need for faith. Given the lack of options and the lack of certainty, people must place their faith somewhere (or take on a lot of technical burden to roll their own); given everything I've seen, it's more reasonable to place faith in Apple than basically anyone else in "Big Tech" in this regard.
(But again: if there's a product out there that is very similar to Apple TV in every way except that it is more private: please tell me what that product is. I'd be thrilled to consider it.)
I don't know. But I don't care about Google or Roku. I'm simply asking, are we sure Apple keeps things as private as they say.
HN apparently hates to question Apple...
Yes, Apple has actually put work into designing, building, and shipping secure enclaves. Yes, they have put a gargantuan amount of work into PCC to uphold the claims they make about its privacy. Yes, they employ differential privacy. Yes, they have shipped a feature that enables privacy-conscious users to be the only ones to hold the keys to their iCloud account. And on and on and on. Nothing will ever be enough for you.
You aren’t asking these questions in good faith. If you were, you’d have your answers already.
…while running far worse stuff themselves, the whole time.
This is all only mentioned in the footnote of an iCloud security document [1].
Apple cares about your privacy, so much that they made a backdoor through bad defaults, well in reach of the CLOUD Act.
[1] Footnote 9 in https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
Most people don't even understand that when their favorite app that says E2E that that app still has access to the clear text before it's encrypted...
They want the device to be a mechanism for you to purchase things. Hence the “Apple card” and all the hullabaloo around that. You’ll only use your phone if you perceive it to be secure. Apple’s investments in Secure Enclave’s, sandboxing are all directly linked to their belief that this will help the consumer perceive the safety of the product- and again, it goes back to the perception of the brand.
Quality craftsmanship has properties that outsiders can perceive- even if they don’t understand it. Apple makes those investments.
Google- well, they just make things and then abandon them. Android’s bizzaro world open source is a chaotic mess that reflects the lack of discipline in Google’s leadership.
And I don't know what Google has to do with this.
I trust Apple for a number of reasons, but I really had to be really aggressive about the TV it’s connected to.
But also, a smaller footprint is a smaller footprint. I’ll take “better” where I can get it.
If it does then don’t buy it?
For privacy, I'd recommend hardware with as few blobs as possible and of course an unlocked bootloader.
Or maybe they are just not caught yet. They are now running ads, where is the data coming for that. They stop others from using the APIs but nothing stop their first party apps to snoop and use the data.
Apple AirTag is the biggest privacy nightmare out there and I am not sure why people keep Apple separate from other data hungry companies
https://www.reuters.com/legal/apple-pay-95-million-settle-si...
Yeah, great track record there.The only standard they will accept is absolute perfection. It doesn’t matter all of the drastic steps they’ve taken to ensure that past mistakes are never made again or that their hands are tied when governments make demands of them in the future. It doesn’t matter that they’re demonstrably orders of magnitude better than everyone else.
Only for internet comment purposes. I’ve found that these same jabronis actually tend to run crappy and wildly unsafe home rolled kludges, for themselves.
This is a common judgement among the technically literate.
> Breaking down why Apple TVs are privacy advocates’ go-to streaming device
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/06/all-the-ways-apple-t...
To me, it doesn’t make sense to rate all levels of imperfection the same. Of course Apple isn’t perfect. But that’s not am important question.
Apple’s the only major purveyor of these kinds of devices whose existential business model is not predicated on privacy violations. Hardly a guarantee of good behavior (and we’ll see what happens in the future). But a lot better than the alternatives.
I purchased the 2021 ATV just before the 2022 was released. It struggles with AV1 and VP9 (Infuse really struggles, VLC is better but still a problem). I just wanted the faster CPU (for software decoding AV1 and VP9). Almost bought the 2022 version in 2024 for that but didn't want to buy a 2 year old product.
Didn't expect to have to wait 4 years, and now the price is more than doubled. I can afford it but refuse to do so, especially since I don't use any of the onboard storage for anything.
VP9 support is just as promiment as AV1 support in the specs. https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-4k/specs/
I do this too with a mac mini app that does it on schedules across all the channels I like, dumps them in JellyFin with channel art, culls old videos, and uses the Jellyfin api to reindex that category when done.
I just like the lack of ads and no separate YouTube interface… YouTube is just a category in JellyFin.
yt-dlp has gotten spotty about YouTube blocking it, from time to time, though.
I sometimes see the homepage, or see thumbnails when I click to download individual videos. I've previously found interesting channels that way, or recommended by creators in videos I watch, or even on HN.
(I've found their algorithm has gotten worse over time, and nosedived recently with AI slop propagating like crazy in 2026. Even for niche topics it'll recommend channels that are a month old, already have 60 videos (mostly with low views but one video with 100K+ views), and obviously AI generated when closely inspected. It's worse now because half the channels use AI thumbnails for non-AI content.)
So after that long answer, I don't have a great recommendation for discovery if you don't already have an existing list of channels you like and trust.
Apple regards privacy as a feature, and I mean that precisely: some places they implement it, other places they decide it’s not worth it, and they only ever tell you about the former. A good example is iMessage: everybody in tech knows it’s E2EE, many fewer realize that the other three copies of your iMessage data on Apple’s servers are just, uh, not encrypted.
You can’t have the same intuition for Apple and privacy that you would for a group like Signal. You need to instead ask yourself whether you fully understand what you need, then whether Apple has guaranteed precisely and fully that, without weasel words.
With Advanced Data Security enabled?
Of course, then there's the persons you're talking to. I figure they are one of your "other three", another is the iCloud copy (deduped from backups) ostensibly resolved by advanced data security, what's the third?
Avanced Data Security keeps your copy in iCloud safe, but doesn't help with the people you are messaging's copy.
For example, a $130 impulse buy in 2015 is a ~$184 impulse buy in 2026.
The move to the A19 also meant that they couldn't go with LPDDR4X RAM and instead had to use more expensive LPDDR5X (IIRC).
It is crazy. I expect the new Apple TV to be a flop because $300 is just a lot. The problem is that Apple is a little boxed in on this device. Apple wants to re-use the A19, but that locks them into expensive DDR5 RAM. They want to push Siri AI, but that locks them into 8GB RAM. Unlike the iPhone, there aren't as many other opportunities with the App Store, Apple Pay, search engine placement revenue, etc.
Storage has also gone up a lot and Apple is no longer selling a 64GB model. Most streaming sticks have 4-16GB of storage and it's usually really slow/cheap storage. The new Apple TV has 128GB of storage and the price for that has probably gone from around $25 to $50.
You say that it's fine from "$200 to $300", but that's not really true. It's gone from $250 to $300 when you look at the 128GB model. I still think it's crazy that it went from $150 to $300 in the same year, but the outgoing 128GB model was already $250 after the price hikes earlier this year.
The problem is that Apple didn't want to reign in their product for the current market and I somewhat get that. What's the point of a new Apple TV if it's just "we updated the processor." For me, the point would be AV1 and VP9 decoding, but Apple wanted to push Siri AI.
Other high-end TV devices have also seen big increases in price. The Fire TV Cube went from being $110-140 to now $200 - and with the Fire TV Cube you're getting Cortex-A73 processor cores from 2016, 2GB LPDDR4X, and 16GB storage. At least Apple is giving you 8GB LPDDR5X and 128GB of storage and a processor that is way better.
The Google TV Streamer is $150 now with 4GB RAM and 16GB storage, but with LPDDR4 RAM and Cortex-A55 cores - and it's still $150.
A Roku Ultra is 2GB RAM and 4GB storage with Cortex-A55 cores and costs $150.
I think we're seeing that there's still some really old stock out there that's cheap, but we're seeing the prices climb on competitors too. Google raised its price 50%. Amazon has raised its price 40-80%. Apple raised its price 54-67% on the same-model and launched the newer model with double the RAM, more expensive RAM, a processor that's 4 years newer, etc.
I think it's likely that Google, Roku, and Amazon simply don't upgrade their streaming devices during this parts shortage. I think a lot of people will be fine with a 12nm Cortex-A55 based TV streamer with limited RAM and storage (and slow RAM and storage). I love how fast my Apple TV is. It's amazing the difference in UI lag. But I think most companies aren't going to prioritize that premium experience, especially during a parts shortage.
This is a great point, a lot of the press coverage missed this.
Not having a cheaper alternative (eg a stick) was curious though. The baseline price of $300 might cause sticker shock.
I still don’t quite know why i actually got a 64GB 4K first gen ATV when, in practice, a 32GB would’ve sufficed?
Do people really play games on these? Install that many apps on them?
If anything apple is probably bring value to new buyers of Apple TV in this market. At 299$ you are getting hardware that will last quite some time as opposed to a 200$ device that might cost maybe 250$ in six months and give you lot less hardware capabilities.
But everything is way more expensive than it was a year ago. Nothing escapes this inflation we are going through
If they're selling AppleTV at a loss to stimulate AppleTV+ subscriptions, then they're hemorrhaging money on two fronts. Without their App Store monopoly, Apple's annual service revenue would undoubtedly be a crater.
Having said that I eventually replaced my pair of HomePod Minis with a Sonos soundbar because I wanted something with a bit more oomph to it, although I'd maybe have considered getting a pair of the big HomePods and using the Minis as rear speakers had this been available at the time.
I had to buy a special HDMI switch because my projector is eARC-naive, but my understanding is that a lot of modern TVs are eARC-aware and a special switch is not required. The one downside to my setup is that I have to press a button on the HDMI switch to toggle between the PC and the AppleTV, no remote control, but hey it's good to stretch your legs now and then right?
Re audio quality, I really like my big HomePods and find they fill the room quite well and have a solid low range to them. I'd also agree that the HomePod Minis are not suitable for a living room entertainment experience.
No issue whatsoever, latency is fine, but a little too high for shooters and the like—but I use headphones then anyway.
How is life in the Sonos ecosystem? I vaguely recall there being some controversy around them a few years back, and I'm generally distrustful of third party hardware companies attempting to write software.
I really wanted to make it work, but it ended up being an annoying hassle. I got a Shield TV and it has been a much better solution.
Not sure if things have changed since then (~5 years ago).
It's definitely not the most troublesome player I've dealt with, but rebooting and logging back into apps randomly can be frustrating.
If you want a privacy focused solution it's probably the most private. Yeah, admittedly harder to use but I'm not recommending it to my parents.
I don't plan on upgrading it to this new version yet so I'll probably get 10+ years of use out of it, great value overall.
Siri AI is increasingly looking like a product that's exclusively for Americans. An unfortunate side effect of the EU attempting to become a regulatory superpower but failing to export its rules to the rest of the world.
- They don’t have to support European languages. Historically, they were horrible in this area, supporting only major languages and ignoring others for years. It’s almost impossible to ask Siri to play a song whose title is in one of these languages. Contact names are pronounced badly, and it’s sometimes tricky to ask Siri to call a person with a non-English name. This way, even though LLMs support these languages quite well, Apple doesn’t have to invest in development and testing.
- They announce the product with US features and keep the EU price the same, but disable features that cost them money, such as those requiring server-side compute.
- Satellite features only work in some EU countries, and there seems to be absolutely no progress in many markets. These markets are simply too small for Apple to care about. Yet the price is the same.
- They blame the EU for this.
The PS5 pro has plenty of horsepower. Fewer problems, but I see it occasionally skip or freeze slightly when playing back from some providers.
I've read Apple TV somehow has this figured out, and since I expected a new model I've been waiting for this one. It's not cheap but I want to be able to stream TV/film without any of those issues. I'm not quite ready to go the super premium route by getting a kaleidescape. I also want to use the bluetooth functionality from time to time.
I'd upgrade my Shield Pro to something else but there's nothing to upgrade to that doesn't have some compromise on formats or capabilities.
Unless you prefer an Android TV device, I don't get the appeal of the Shield Pro. I bought one years ago and resold it a few months later. For me the only things it did better than an Apple TV (playing certain ripped blu-rays) are better done by the Ugoos AM6B+. So those are the two devices I use nowadays.
It's frustrating that nobody else seems to care about attempting to be the all-in-one box given how much Shield is showing its age now. It's really sluggish
I don't get why Apple just refuses to allow audio pass through or DV Profile 7. They're clearly on board with DV in general and don't hesitate to play Dolby's branding games, so why not profile 7 support???
Yes, really - switching cables instantly got rid of any stuttering in the UI no reboot or setting could fix for me - if I wouldn’t have experienced it myself I probably wouldn’t have believed it..
My home theatre set up is through a Denon receiver. I love my gen1 HomePods for listening to music, but I can’t understand why anyone would buy four HomePods rather than a proper surround setup.
What exactly can it do besides launching streaming apps?
Thread border router is nice I guess.
Integration with HomePods is ... well, if you have HomePods.
So... No real functionality to justify the price.
$300 for a streaming box is insane price.
I don’t see Siri AI as a big positive differentiator when compared to third generation Apple TV 4K from 2022. Anecdotally, Siri AI has gotten slower and worse from the time the *OS 27.x were released.
Apple TV is the smoothest way to navigate, run apps, etc., without having to use whatever sluggish tracking crap that comes with Smart TVs. I’ve never connected my TV to the internet and Apple TV is the main input source for it. Combined with a couple of HomePods and eARC, it works fine for the most part. Combine with NextDNS (for DNS and system wide tracker blocking) alongside Tailscale, and you’ve got a nice setup.
The biggest downside of Apple TV is tvOS, which doesn’t get much developer time within Apple. This hits harder for Apple’s own apps, which tend to be of poor quality and have no attention paid to bug reports for years.
Anyway I'm happy with my current units. If I was outfitting a new living room I could see this new one, but for the time being I'm not rushing out.
Do not underestimate modern audio technology.
I have a $12k Trinnov processor that’s quite good at audio, handles 4k@120 and 8k. $299 Apple TV still can’t pass through audio or do anything better than 4k@60?
I didn’t get to spend $12k on a Trinnov by overpaying for the little things. Apple is high. I don’t know who this is for.
Did the old one also not have Dolby vision/HDR10/Atmos? What is this cinematic stuff? What are we missing here?
Why would I need CPU/GPU performance on an Apple TV? I'm genuinely confused. Is it to play video games? If I want to play video games, I can pay a bit more and get a used playstation I suppose. I genuinely don't understand this product anymore.
HDR10+ is supported in some players (infuse) but not others (plex) and will fallback to HDR10. Profile 7 DV files do not play properly on Apple TV period even though it will display the DV logo (though frankly very few devices can do this). Profile 5 and 8 DV files will play properly depending on the player and the content mapping level in the content (2.9 is well supported but 4.0 causes HDR10 fallback or black screens in some cases). Apple TV also doesn't support HD audio passthrough great.
*I do have a once-per-run Moonlight glitch that may even be because I'm on an older version. The first connection just doesn't pick up on the HDR immediately. I just have to reconnect once and it's good after that.
[1]: https://github.com/ClassicOldSong/Apollo ("Built-in Virtual Display with HDR support that matches the resolution/framerate config of your client automatically")
I thought I surely was imagining it, so I revisited it 6 months or a year later, and, yes, the input latency from the controller is substantially worse on the Apple TV.
Their Studio Displays have an A19 in them too (A19 Pro for the XDR)
Eg Pixel Brite works great on all versions of AppleTV including FEL playback on 1st gen
The only thing I haven’t been able to do with the older models is upscaling content at the same fidelity levels. But the results are very subtle either way and not all that compelling IMO.
[0] https://pixelbrite.site
That's crazy
Does anyone know why having 128GB of storage is useful? Just for installing more apps? I've had Google TV devices in the past, and don't think I ever came close to the 32GB storage limit. Maybe there's a gap I'm missing...
Really nothing beats it, especially if you are in Apple ecosystem but even if you are not, it’s a million times better than the messy android tv with full of ads and bloat.
That being said, I don’t see a reason for us to upgrade to this version.
Also running side-loaded Stremio with torrenting enabled so I can stream Big Buck Bunny.
The only thing I could think of using this for is syncthing, but I'm not sure if there's an Apple TV app
It's really not. It's so reviewers will be able to say "it costs more than the last version, but you also get much more storage" and the average consumer is happy. If there were a practical reason for it Apple would put it front and center.
That said, I'd love it if Plex or Jellyfin were able to use that storage to cache files locally (eg. stream the data as fast as possible and play from the local copy) to smooth out some flakiness with the wifi between the tv and my home server.
I've used it for a total of a few hours in many years, almost exclusively for mini motorways. It never made sense to play over the Switch or PS5. I'm not sure who's using it.
I'd guess it's room for the AI model and future versions of it that could grow.
I would expect only mobile developers to actually bother porting games natively to Apple TV, with larger titles opting for game streaming.
* Siri - no thanks
* Far field microphones - no thanks
* Faster performance - unnecessary for me (I watch TV, movies and YouTube - it's never not smooth)
* Home theatre with homepods - I already have Sonos surround
* Even smarter home hub - I have a non-Apple smart home
* Facetime, Fitness+, Apple TV app - just not for me
The one thing I feel like I'm missing (and would be missing even if I upgraded) is audio passthrough, but DD 5.1 is _fine_.
There are comparable devices like Ugoos (am6b+ with coreelec) and Zidoo but they're a little sketch compared to the aforementioned...
Still no 2.5Gbps port in 2026 is disappointing.
Gigabit Ethernet has 7x the bandwidth of a 4K UHD Blu-ray.
If an 8K Blu-ray standard were to ever exist, in what universe would it somehow 7x the bitrate to increase the pixel count by 4x? And of course that math is assuming that this new hypothetical new standard that does not exist wouldn’t use newer compression standard.
In what universe will 8K content be streamed at greater than 3x the bitrate of the average US home broadband speed? (300Mbps) 8K streamed content will almost certainly top out at 100Mbps.
The current bandwidth cost math at major CDNs for consumer use cases at that bitrate is hundreds of dollars per month, before you even pay for content.
The idea that any streamer will be bandwidth-limited by a 1Gbps network link anytime soon is absurd.
Commercial streamimg platforms are probably gonna allocate like 2mbps more for 8k streaming and call it a day.
But seriously, 1Gbps is plenty for any video content.
Don't worry, the next tvOS update may fix that.
I was surprised to learn my 1st gen doesn't have a thread radio which caused some minor homekit compatability issues. I actually bought a new AppleTV 4k a couple months ago but it didn't really solve my problem, so I returned it with the reasoning that it was long in the tooth and a new model was coming out soon.
I just preordered this one but I sort of wonder if I should just go buy the last gen one for half the money or whatever. Seems like the actual buy. At the old price point, they were impulse buys. At this price point, well, it's enough to get me to stop and think about it.
AV1 decoding is also a good feature to have.
Most of the purchases will be from people who do have an older model that's actually getting outdated, people who want another Apple TV for another room in their house, or people who don't own one at all. You buy this one now, it'll probably be good for the better part of a decade and you won't need to think about the next refresh.
For me, I’m hopeful to get a good deal on the previous gen to replace my parents ATV HD.
It will be my first used ATV purchase, but $299 isn’t worth it to consider buying new in my opinion.
wait, the new 4K has passthrough finally? I did not see it mentioned.
I meant the one thing I'm missing from my current setup, not something that would be fixed by upgrading.
One annoyance is that the Netflix app stopped being able/allowed to stream to any device that has some kind of remote (or where you can enter a username/password in some way):
* https://lifehacker.com/tech/netflix-is-killing-casting-from-...
* https://help.netflix.com/en/node/100131
It'd be nice to be able to plug in an AppleTV and use it 'just' as a dumb streaming pipe, but at least for Netflix you have to use the app on it.
> Using AirPlay with iPhone and iPad is not supported with Netflix.
* https://help.netflix.com/en/node/49
This one puts the charger input at the HDMI end where the TV and presumably outlets are, so power comes to your video playing device over the USB-C at your device end.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/USB-C-HDMI-Cable-Adapter-Nintendo...
It's been doing the same thing forever. A bunch of squares on a screen and you select one to go into whatever app. The core experience has not changed in living memory.
I still never understand people who are dead against giving all their personal info and data to one company but are fine with giving it to another.
Yes this is an apple thread on HN and so I am expecting to be downvoted into oblivion by the Apple fans who believe Apple is better than any other company with data and security, when they have been proved multiple times to be just as bad.
But for some reason Sony or Samsung doing the same on your TV is too far?
The content streamers get your viewing habits by virtue of you viewing their content (like Youtube, or any web site, getting information on what you're looking at by simply logging HTTP GET requests).
There is no reason why television OEMs need to do screen captures and send them to the mothership.
It's the first- and second-party interaction: you gave money to Sony/Samsung/etc for a product, and after the exchange there is no reason for any further interaction.
You have a regular/monthly interaction with content providers: there is at least a valid reason for the content providers to have that information in the first place, and none for the TV OEMs to collect it.
That is absolutely fine, but IMO it is hypocritical. That is all I am arguing.
I am okay "giving my data" to the billion dollar company of (say) Netflix of Disney+ because I need to be able to log into the service and get the video streams. It is a necessary part of getting the service to provide (e.g.) billing information like a credit card.
I am not okay with giving my data to the billion dollar company of Sony or Samsung because having a display take in HDMI bits and produce photons on a screen does not necessitate any phone home functionality.
I am not okay with Netflix or Disney+ giving data to third parties because doing so is not necessary to provide the service.
Does that qualify as hypocrisy too?
You can argue against dealing with any billion dollar company. But drop the hypocrisy framing, it is nonsensical and your point will be stronger without it.
You obviously havent read my posts very well. I have repeatedly said that the hypocrisy is subjective, my opinion only, and I am not trying to convince anyone otherwise. You are entitles to think whatever you want, trust whoever you want, and believe what ever you want. I am entitled to consider it hypocrisy if you are turning a blind eye to tracking from one side but happy allowing it from another.
Given that my iPhone has a little LED that lights up when the the microphone (or camera) are active, it is fairly easy to confirm that that the mic is not being used.
Are they, though? Is Apple snooping into the Netflix app’s data to track what you’re watching and phone home with that info? Are there studies showing that happening? Are they selling that data to third parties like the TV manufacturers are?
As far is Apple is concerned, they have been caught lying about this many times before. I jujst cant get my head around why any person can trust a billion dollar corporation to be 'good'.
Here have a few links:
https://www.bgr.com/2107512/how-to-prevent-apple-tv-spying-a...
https://gizmodo.com/apple-iphone-analytics-tracking-even-whe...
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1467686-apple-caught-ignorin...
https://medium.com/@michaelswengel/yes-your-mac-is-watching-...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/11/12/apple-getting-sue...
Samsung or Sony sell a physical product that does not need internet connectivity, or microphones, or telemetry, or any of that. They jam that stuff in there to increase profits and make it economically infeasible to sell what I think 80% of people on HN would buy if given the opportunity - a large flatscreen TV with no built-in connectivity whatsoever. So anything I can do to make me less profitable to them, I will do.
* For certain definitions, anyway.
I also dislike that my data is being transacted willy-nilly by content providers, it's a very different ballpark when TVs have hidden microphones recording my house, screen capturing if I'm showing personal photos on the screen, and sending that data to the manufacturer. That's a much worse privacy invasion.
Yes.
So I watch like a total of 2 hours of sports in Summer 2026 and my kid gets an hour of TV while he eats lunch and webOS works its hardest to make those both suck ass, and the Apple TV Just WorksTM and we can put our weekly Facetime with Grandma and Grandpa on there. Absolute no brainer better experience.
For privacy specifically, I'll refer you to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
Then find investigations where Apple TVs are proven to do the same, of which there are none.
You’re chalking this up to fanboyism but this is just people making informed choices. In today’s streaming era “just don’t connect anything to the internet” isn’t possible.
Instead, Apple sends that straight to the NSA.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
> just don’t connect anything to the internet
A practically e-waste mini-PC running an ordinary Linux distro paired with an airmouse remote is a much better TV box. You don't need streaming apps when you are free to use a Web browser, something Apple won't allow for obvious reasons. No surveillance, no crapware, no ads. It can even double as a console for GOG/Steam.
> Apple: "We have never heard of PRISM" "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order."
"In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information," the company said in a statement. "Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests."
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
Yes they are happy to make a song and dance about not letting authorities into individual phones, the publicity definitely helps them out on that front. However none of it matters because the government already have probes in all their servers, as proved by Edward Snowden, so its game over before you start. Do you understand what NDAs are? It doesnt seem so because you keep quoting Apple while they have been proven to be under NDAs in the past, so how can you trust anything they say in the future?
Its ok, you carry on trusting old Uncle Apple to look after you. I am not trying to convince you of anything. However I am entitled to have my opinion that it is hypocritical to criticise tracking from one company but turn a blind eye to the same thing from another.
I have clarified my opinion many times now, feel free to have the last word.
If you presume the government isn’t technologically all-capable, then technical measures can limit and even defeat the observability that even a wildly tyrannical government has into your computing devices. This mindset is both infinitely more useful than yours and more reflective of the world we actually live in. The government now mostly has to rely on 0-day exploits that they hold close to their chest until a target sufficiently warrants burning it.
Your paranoia is beyond hysterical and it presumes that these companies are gleefully giving out our data when it is extremely clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Again, Apple has more than any company proven a track record of tying their own hands when it comes to complying to these kinds of requests. In the absence of perfect options, I’ll happily go with the good ones.
I am well aware of the recent LG controversy. However In my opinion if you are happy to sign up to Netflix and Disney+ and use a streaming box to give them all your personal data and viewing habits to allow tracking and ad profiles then its pretty hypocritical to target a single company in the chain and call them out for it.
I think it's become an internet meme because it's hard for the average person to understand the more creepy thing that's happening. All the data points being captured as one goes around the internet allows rich profiles to be built without something as complicated as recording and transcribing audio.
Gamers Nexus had a viral video about them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA
This is without even looking at Apple, who own the hardware you are streaming on and have been caught lying multiple times in the past about data harvesting. After all that, I feel that unplugging the cord on your TV is completely pointless, and it is frustrating how people gloat about it like they are getting around the system. In reality, you are only giving your data to 4 companies in the chain now, instead of 5.
If you think giving data to 4 companies instead of 5 is fine then thats fair enough, its your own data. In my opinion if you happy to give your data to one billion dollar ad profile selling company, then why squabble about another? However I understand this is subjective, and I am not trying to tell anyone they are wrong. I just dont understand it thats all!
Many platforms have gone the same way: Google TV boxes are known to be broadly awful at this point, my samsung TV's built-in apps got progressively less responsive with more ads on my homescreen over the last few years. I haven't experienced it but I hear complaints about the performance and intrusiveness of LG TVs now as well.
After cycling through my options, the Apple TV is the only one that doesn't exhibit the same behavior: It is responsive, has a good interface that looks nice, has a very nice minimal remote, and it works the same today as it did yesterday (and basically as it did 2 years ago). I'm not trying to claim allegiance to any brand, it just seems that somehow Apple is the only one not participating in enshittification, at least not to the same degree. If that changes the Apple TV will be out the door and I'll probably need to roll my own out of some sort of mini PC on an open-source platform.
And as one last note, for the time being Apple still has some credibility in terms of privacy. They have revenue streams that work for them without completely ruining their product, and it's my hope they continue with that because as far as I can tell they are the only ones left among the big players.
Also, the tooling they provided to the model is not good either. The 3rd party AI apps by OpenAI or Anthropic can do much more than the system assistant.
Is no one concerned about an always-on, internet connected microphone being in their living room or bedroom? This needs a physical shut off switch.
Funny how when LG does it [1] it’s a privacy nightmare but when Apple does it it’s a cool new feature.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592375
Consumers do not care
Like most people's cell phone that also ends up in many more places?
Yes at the end of the day it's a microphone in your home, but each has a very different stated (or unstated, in LG's case) purpose.
Anyway, it's now too much money for something that is just going to open Jellyfin.
It seems like Apple is perfectly happy to send low spend customers to their Roku to install the Apple TV app from there.
With the way the smart TV market is playing out, the type of customer who actually wants to add a streaming box to a TV that already comes with all the apps they need to play back content is already a premium value proposition.
i.e., if your TV already comes with all the apps: Netflix, Paramount+, HBO Max, Disney+, etc, why are you buying a streaming box at all? Presumably because you want a more premium experience than your TV currently offers. That means that compromising on price isn't the right move from a product perspective.
The only part that “deserves” a price increase is the storage starting at 128GB now instead of 32GB, but it’s completely out of touch to get rid of the base model when nobody has any use for all that storage (even the 32GB) for what is basically a streaming box.
Hell, even their new HomeView device, which does have a screen and FaceID, starts at same price.
Obviously some cache for local playback, photos, screensavers, etc.
AFAIK you’d be hard pressed to hit 150mbps with your own local media.
And any streaming services will use way less - Netflix and Hulu recommend a mere 16Mbps at 4k for example.
Also, just learned it's still 4k 60Hz. So forget 120Hz gaming. Game streaming is likely to become a default in near future at the hardware proces we see, so limiting to 60Hz is really cheap of them at this point.
Personally I didn't expect a new generation to be a full $100 more though...
Nowadays with ~100 bucks you can an amd64 box and a CEC adapter, which allows to use the default remote of your tv. Then you can install on it whatever you want, customize it however you prefer and have all the privacy you decide. No lock-in. As much AI as you like, zero is a valid option.
You can also probably maybe do terrible things like CEC on one port and signal on another, it's mostly a bus.
A different company could turn this hardware into a pretty serious gaming machine or a zero config NAS or something but Apple is not that company.
They couldn't think of any compelling Siri AI use cases to put in the advertising and neither can I.
"We have tomb raider and death stranding 2 for $69.99" is not an interesting proposition except for Apple fanboy dads who hope that will placate their gamer child (it won't).
That said, Apple has been attempting for years to make Apple Arcade a hit.
It would really help me stomach a $300 dedicated box for my TV if it could do more than look at pictures and stream netflix. Games are the absolute obvious thing to do, especially since Microsoft and Sony are seemingly struggling.
Just ship a controller and cut some deals apple, it isn't that hard...
This has led me to passionately start my own media server again.
Anywhere between $100-$200 will get you a mini PC that you can use to host movies, series, music, audiobooks and ebooks. If you don't transcode the content then there's no need to worry about a GPU. Set it up headless in a closet.
From there you can use a mobile app to connect your phone/tv/any device to it and enjoy an ad free experience without streaming data over the internet.
My TV is a 15in CRT that I connect with a laptop. My phone is a 1st gen iphone se, with apps to stream.
I've found this setup less frustrating (and wildly cheaper) than spotify, appleTV/netflix/hulu, kindle and etc.
The current state of computing is such that I can't justify buying hardware that requires an app to use. If I want cameras, I buy the camera and connect then to my backend. If I want a thermostat, I do the same.
Great little device, I think I paid £130 for it a few years ago.
There is no reason for me to upgrade to this device, but that £299 price tag really stinks, there is no way I'd buy it at that price if I didn't have the older model already.
Also, any change to the output ports, or are we still restricted to one hdmi as the single output?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/images/2026/10/apple-unveils-...
It's so un-Apple to be stretched and in weird perspective that way
Also not supporting the original, completely fine and working HomePod for this is another.
Though first place here is dropping raw photo support for the $2k iPhone duo.
—
(All these are software features which hardware supports.)
EDIT: Brutal! Apparently it doesn’t support VRR or 120 hz at 4K. Surprising miss to not support HDMI 2.1 properly.
Further EDIT: Basically we are entering 2027 with no way to get a tv add on box that can stream 4K apps (Disney+ etc. need Widevine L1), 4K at 120hz (i.e. support HDMI 2.1 properly) and decode AV1. Just a bizarre gap in the market.
Siri in CarPlay just swallows the name. “New text message from [pause]. Would you like to…”
Unless your goal is to comfortably watch TV using a TV remote.
and yes I am assuming that HN crowd can program a remote.
The Beelink mini PC I bought as my router cost me $229 in 2024. The most equivalent model on sale I can find is now $349.
If you don't care about Dolby Vision or HDR.
Instead we got a ton of useless stuff.
Very interested to know what TV manufacturers are doing who have heavily advertised their Android UIs which are bread and butter of collecting data. TV panels themselves have no reason to have price increases in memory shortage.
New Apple TV seems to make sense if you're installing a lot of new sound equipment, and love Siri.
If neither of those are true, not sure what's on offer.
Resolution has nothing to do with dejudder and what have you: these are TV settings.
You should however has match framerate and hdr modes to content in apple tv settings on (unless you have a really old TV).
It doesn't even look like this supports 120hz, which would've been nice since my OLED TV does.
Play the next unwatched episode of X. What is new this week? (across all the services I'm subscribed to) What service is show X on? (localized to my country) When will the next season of X be released?
I'd pay for that (grudgingly, given the big hike). Otherwise don't see much reason to replace my 2021 model.
I wonder what model wrote that lol
Maybe more memory could improve this, although surely there's a software issue somewhere that causes this.
Also I play back full 4k BR disk rips.
This positions them to compete directly against those
If the new one fixes this, $300 for an eArc-to-HomePod HDMI receiver that can run streaming apps and set up room-measured Atmos is rather cheap.
If you're using wired headphones then a $20 Bluetooth dongle will do the same.
>Access to Siri AI is also available on Apple TV 4K (2nd generation) or later.
Yesterday I was watching Dark Matter on my Plex server. I asked Siri to turn on English subtitles which are there:
> I'm afraid I'm having trouble getting the available languages.
This is after Plex's big update recently...
I read reports that it handles video much better, but that wasn’t an issue I regularly faced.
The price was $200, now there was news of a price increase to $300. This does seem to be the case, but does a price increase of something that's sold out even mean anything? Not sure if NVidia even confirmed they're still producing it.
The NVidia Shield Pro was the go-to device which supported all the codecs. Notably the ones that Apple TV didn't support was uncompressed Dolby Atmos if I remember correctly.
Any idea if this new Apple TV 4K supports uncompressed audio for 4k Blu-Ray rips (i.e. remux's) for Plex or JellyFin?
But I might be in the minority of people who don’t talk much to their TV.
Otherwise, there's not a thing that this offers, that's worth shelling out another 300 bucks.
I have the original 4K, and watch it all the time. I'm glad it has the double-tap Home button (swipe up to kill the app). I use that feature a lot.
And yet I have 4 of them in total because they are much better than the built in apps and I don't trust the TVs to connect them to the internet. It's basically CarPlay for my TV but does an excellent job because of the consistent interface and good apps.
I am in no hurry to get this latest version.
As far as I can tell its a hardware bump and some supercharging price bump.
I’d like Plex to integrate this.
I have had many Apple TV generations and want to love it, but I really don't get where Apple is trying to go with it. The whole "Apple TV" app really confused the hell out of me, and I wonder if this is continuing that trend. Or maybe it won't matter because this is just ridiculously expensive.
It’s expensive, but is there a better option?
I have the 4K and MiBox next to each other, the Apple TV is cool for a UI showcase, but beyond the oohs and aahs the MiBox is a more useful entertainment device.
Honestly? A 2nd-hand Apple TV. That’s the competitor for this. I’ve had mine for what feels like it must be >5 years, they survived two years in a suitcase as a digital nomad, as far as I can tell they’re indestructible. My local 2nd hand site is full of them, too.
Guys maybe just let others register themselves as system agents since you are obviously not capable of creating anything related to AI. Provide the absolutely minimum effort Siri as default and be done with it.
I don’t think it would have been easily done on non-AI spotlight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50077296
I am so done.
Then I asked it about the status of some packages that were already being tracked in wallet and it was a dumpster fire.
You're asking the company which is famously working their hardest to lock in their users completely to their services and platforms, to "just let others"? Maybe understand what ecosystem you buy into, and agree with their approach they've had for decades now, or let the ones who like that stuff continue to enjoy it. Seems kind of self-defeatists to ask them to change ways now...
I would skip this generation of Apple TV and buy previous generation on a third party marketplace when people inevitably offload the current generation.
> Certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits. Expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future.
Not only will the TV not be "supercharged by Siri AI" on its own, as it requires some other device to actually run Siri AI (?!), you also might end up relying on it and suddenly be blocked from using it if you use it too much (?!?!). But fear not, they'll ask you to pay up, to continue to use this feature they advertise as the main feature of this new device.
At least according to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV_(device)#Technical_sp...
"Sure, I can call 911 for you"