-
Black box and silver remote control on the table
-
Power adapter port, Ethernet port, and HDMI port
Samuel Axon
The new Apple TV 4K is pretty much the same as the last one for most people.
More importantly, a significant price cut helps make it more attractive. However, that cut is still not enough to make it the best deal in town.
When first introduced in 2017, Apple TV 4K was positioned to rethink how we approach television. As I wrote at the time, Apple fell far short of those ambitions as it faced the entrenched and disparate interests of various players in the TV industry. Nevertheless, the Apple TV 4K has a great interface, great picture quality, a strong feature stack, and impeccable app support.
We’ve covered the previous model in detail before, so this review will mainly focus on what’s new this time around. It starts with new pricing and configuration options.
Pricing and configuration
Let’s tackle the most important things first. This new Apple TV 4K is a better value than its predecessor. Its base configuration has 64GB of storage, up from 32GB on the second-generation Apple TV 4K. Even better, its 64GB model starts at $129 and the older 32GB model starts at $179.
For $149, you can double the storage to 128 GB for another $20. The 128GB model also features a physical Ethernet port (the base configuration relies entirely on Wi-Fi) and support for the Thread smart home networking standard.
Threads support is pretty niche and most people don’t even need ethernet. Also, the Apple TV 4K doesn’t download videos (just stream them), so unless you plan to download dozens of games, you don’t need 128GB of storage. So his $129 64GB model is the right choice for most people.
This price reduction is the biggest point of the third generation model. The Apple TV 4K has been the best streaming box you can buy for at least the last two years, but it’s significantly more expensive than nearly comparable streaming boxes from Google, Amazon, or Roku, and the value proposition is questionable. is still more expensive than competitors who do a great job streaming video in 4K and HDR, so cost-conscious people want to avoid this one. We’ll get to why the extra charge is still worth it in a moment.
By the way, please note that the box does not include an HDMI cable.
