Apple today introduces an updated Apple TV 4K with a couple of interesting new hardware features: far-field microphones for hands-free talking to Siri and Find My built into the remote. The fourth-generation Apple TV 4K, announced at Apple’s Welcome Home event in New York City, 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 2 for surround sound. The new Apple TV 4K costs $299, more than double the price at which the previous-generation Apple TV 4K debuted and $50 more than the current top-of-the-line model (which is shipping). discontinued). The fourth-generation model matches that version’s specs with 128GB of storage, an Ethernet port, and support for Thread and Matter, but it’s getting a bump 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 in last year’s iPhone 17, which adds support for Siri AI out of the box. It will be launched in beta and will be available in English in eight countries: US, UK, 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 new microphones and ask for recommendations, like “What are the best nature docs on Apple TV right now?” Unlike the HomePod or HomeView, Siri doesn’t speak its responses out loud on Apple TV; They appear 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 on an episode of Ted Lasso was real, and Siri displayed a few sentences answering the query (no, it’s fictional) covering the top right corner of the screen. We’ve already seen AI-powered search features in Google’s TV Streamer with Gemini and Amazon’s Fire TV with Alexa Plus, but Apple is taking its streaming box’s AI capabilities further with the addition of personal context. Personal context uses information from your Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone, so you can say, “Play that show my friend texted me,” and it will pull through your text messages and find what they sent you. The design of the streaming box and its remote control 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 the 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. Three configurations are available: four second-generation HomePods, four HomePod Mini 2s, or a pair of second-generation HomePods and a pair of HomePod Mini 2. The 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 to fit the space. What I’m most excited about is being able to say, “Hey Siri, can you find the remote?” Apple finally added Find My to the Siri remote. Now it can play that familiar sound so you can tell which cushion it fell on. 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 adding support for Bluetooth channel sound, a location technology similar to Ultra Wideband, but without the need for a UWB chip.
