Apple TV (4th generation)
Apple has had three years to come up with a new model and says its fourth-generation Apple TV is the future of television. It’s all about apps. Unlike previous models, you can now browse an app store and install whichever apps and games you like. Of course, this isn’t revolutionary as other streamers and, indeed, TVs have had apps for years. Gaming on a media streamer isn’t new either. Amazon’s Fire TV streamers let you play casual games, as does Google’s Nexus Player.
Price
Previous models have managed to stay under the magic £100 barrier, but the latest Apple TV costs £129 for the 32GB model and a whopping £169 for the 64GB model.
That’s a lot compared to the competition, which is generally under £80. Amazon’s 4K-capable Fire TV is £79.99, for example, while the Roku 4 – not yet officially available in the UK, but also toting 4K support – costs $129, and assuming it does launch this side of the pond, should be under or near to £100. If you don’t need 4K, the Fire TV stick is a snip at £35, while the Roku 3 box costs under £60.
Design
The new box looks a lot like the previous two models, albeit a third taller. You still don’t get an HDMI or ethernet cable in the box. You probably won’t need the latter as your Wi-Fi may well be quicker – the wired port is limited to 100Mbit/s.
Dropping the optical S/PDIF port will be a source of annoyance for some and in its place is a USB C socket, which is for restoring the box’s software should the need arise. If you were relying on an optical audio output for connecting headphones, then note that this new Apple TV allows you to connect Bluetooth headphones. The remaining port is an HDMI 1.4 for hooking up to your TV or A/V receiver.
The biggest design change is the new Siri Remote. Surprisingly, it’s not all that obvious how to use it, until you figure out – or explain to family and friends – that the top section is a touchpad and giant button, the Menu button acts as a ‘back’ button and the one with a TV icon is the home button.
It communicates via Bluetooth, but can also use infrared. It should automatically learn to control your TV’s volume – it did with our Panasonic TV – but you can ‘teach’ it if that fails. As long as your TV uses the HDMI-CEC standard, it should all work fine, and you can power on your TV when you wake up the Apple TV using the remote.
The Siri part is possibly the best feature. It takes what Amazon does with voice search and takes it further. You can look for TV shows and programmes, but you can also bark more generic commands such as “show me action movies” and then refine the results by saying “just the ones with George Clooney” or “only the good ones”.
And while you’re watching a video, you can say “rewind 30 seconds” or “what did she just say”. The latter is clever as it skips back 10 seconds and turns on subtitles, so you’re left in no doubt what you missed the first time.
You can also say the name of an app or game to launch it, the name of an artist or album to play music without swiping through menus. You can ask for a weather forecast too, though there are no web searches as you get on an iOS device.
The internal battery is said to last a couple of months – longer than we’ve been testing out the Apple TV – and it charges using a standard