Apple is introducing a refreshed Apple TV 4K today with a pair of exciting new hardware features: far-field microphones for talking to Siri hands-free and Find My built into the remote. The fourth-generation Apple TV 4K, announced at Apple’s Welcome Home event in New York, is the first model to support the Siri AI voice assistant and has a new home theater feature that lets you pair up to four second-generation HomePods or HomePod Mini 2s for surround sound.
The new Apple TV 4K costs $299, more than twice the price the previous generation Apple TV 4K debuted for and $50 more than the current top-of-the-line model (which is being discontinued). The fourth-generation model matches that version’s specs with 128GB of storage, an Ethernet port, and Thread and Matter support, but it upgrades to Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. It will be available on November 13, with pre-orders opening today, October 13.
The new Apple TV comes with an A19 chip, first seen on last year’s iPhone 17, which adds Siri AI support out of the box. It will launch in beta and will be available in English in eight countries: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa and India. Apple says Siri AI lets you use natural language to talk to the voice assistant through the remote or the new microphones and ask for recommendations, such as “What are the best nature documents on Apple TV right now?”
Unlike HomePod or HomeView, Siri doesn’t speak her responses out loud on Apple TV; they appear either in full screen when you search for content, or in a text bubble when you ask general knowledge questions. In the demo I saw, someone asked if the football team we were watching in an episode of Ted Lasso was real, and Siri displayed a few sentences answering the query (no, it’s fictional) that covered the upper right corner of the screen.
We’ve already seen AI-powered search features on Google’s TV Streamer with Gemini and Amazon’s Fire TV with Alexa Plus, but Apple is taking its streaming box’s AI capabilities a step further by adding personal context. Personal Context uses information from your Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone, so you can say “Play this show my friend texted me,” and it will pull from your text messages and find what was sent to you.
The design of the streaming box and its remote hasn’t changed, but the fourth-generation Apple TV 4K now supports an expanded surround sound setup. You can use four compatible HomePod speakers in pairs, compared to two you can use with current Apple TV models. Compatible speakers include the second-generation HomePod and HomePod Mini 2, also announced today for $149.
There are three configurations available: four second-generation HomePods, four HomePod Mini 2s, or a pair of second-generation HomePods and a pair of HomePod Mini 2s. This feature is exclusive to the new Apple TV 4K, and Apple says the speakers automatically calibrate with the device to understand where they are in the room and in relation to each other, then adjust audio levels based on the space.
I’m very excited to be able to say “Hey Siri, can you find the remote?” » Apple has finally added Find My to the Siri remote. It can now make that familiar ringtone so you can find which cushion it fell under. If for some reason you can’t hear it, you can now use the Find My app on your iPhone to track its precise location, thanks to Apple’s addition of support for Bluetooth channel audio, a location technology similar to ultra-wideband, but without the need for a UWB chip.
Gn tech
