Despite this, I still recommended that version wholeheartedly to people buying for the first time, for the same reason that home theater enthusiasts online have recommended it. Its picture quality is best-in-class, its format support is excellent, and it offers more privacy protection (and an ad-free home screen) than its rivals from the likes of Roku, Amazon and Google — even though it’s more expensive than those models. The premium was worth paying.

But the premium has changed. The 2022 model launched at $129 / £149 / AU$219 as the starting price. In the middle of 2026, the price rose to $199 / £249 / AU$399. Now the new model is $299 / £299 / AU$449.

This is compared to $84.99 / £99.99 / AU$149 for the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, which has also had a price rise this year. The two products have basically the same format support, too.

We didn’t mind this too much when Apple released the last version, but cloud gaming has only grown in that time — and with the price of consoles and PCs spiking too, it’s becoming an increasingly tempting option.

It’s one of the slicker bits of streaming software in terms of performance, opening apps super-quickly and generally feeling perfectly smooth to move around. It does have its foibles — rearranging apps is theoretically an intuitive process, and yet suddenly this is where performance became less predictable. But I would say it’s generally the least annoying of the streaming systems.

That’s partly because it doesn’t have the same aggressive advertising right on the home screen that all the other platforms do. When you highlight a particular app, it might show recommendations from the app at the top of the screen, but you never have shows pushed on the home screen unless you’re already hovering over the app.

And the reason Apple has included these new mics is because Siri has now been upgraded to Siri AI, and the company is surely hoping you’ll want to use Siri way more now that it’s smart. The problem is that while Siri itself may have become smart, its implementation often still isn’t.

The most obvious gripe for me was the information presentation, and the density of that information. Sometimes it’s too crowded, packing paragraphs of information with no formatting to aid readability into a small window on the side of the screen. At other times, it’s too simple, taking over the full screen yet displaying text so large that only a few words fit in before the cut off (and if you click the remote hoping it will open the rest of the text, it doesn’t — a different part of the screen is selected by default). It’s always too much or not enough, and it’s somehow never just right.

How smart Siri is at recognizing things within a movie/show is really variable. This might be tied to whether the default tvOS player is used by the app, because in some of them I’d ask Siri a question about what I’m looking at, and it would claim there’s a blank screen.

Watching Netflix, it told me it couldn’t see what I was viewing, and asked me to just tell it the name of the movie — but if I paused it, causing the name to appear on screen, and asked the same question, it was now able to see the title. A system that responds so differently per-app is not really a reliable system.

I asked it to identify the music playing in the background of a scene of on Prime Video, and it claimed the song was… the movie on Prime Video. I asked it who the guy on the screen was, and it recognized Dominic Sessa, bringing up info about his work. Then I asked the same question when Stavros Halkia was on screen, and it brought up info about Dominic Sessa again.

It worked better when I watched a documentary about chefs, and the system was able to identify Marco Pierre White instantly when I asked — but that was on a service that used the native player, so I don’t know if that helps Siri have better visibility of what’s on-screen.

Later, I asked the system to show me some good Jason Statham movies available on the streaming services I have. It was able to suggest some movies on the services I have, but there was no visible info on how they were rated, even though the results took up the whole screen. So I asked a follow up question about whether any of them were actually worth watching, and then it showed movies it considered to be good, but whether they’re available on my services. So I asked a third time if any of these good movies were available on my services, and it finally narrowed down to a list of what I originally asked… except the first movie on the list wasn’t accessible on any of my streaming apps.

Instead, it gave me an OK text-based answer about what people generally think of the movie, presented in the dullest way possible as just a column of text. I really hoped it might do something clever here, because not only do I own movies like the ones mentioned above, but I also own The Pelican Brief. So it was a trick question, but I really thought a smarter system would be able to spot that I might like a movie that I went to the trouble to buy already.

Incidentally, it offers source citations for answers, but you can’t open them to check if it’s actually pulled information from the pages. It’s an attempt at being reassuring, but I have witnessed LLM answers cite a source where the source says something totally different to the answer, so I personally see little use in citing a source I can’t click to verify.

Another challenge: I asked Siri which episode of has Ed Gamble melting down over transporting some ducks in the garden. It identified the episode. It didn’t offer to play it, so I prostrated myself and asked if we could watch it, please. It fired up the relevant app and played… the most recent episode, not the correct one. That could be an issue with the app rather than Siri AI, but the result is a failure either way.

I know that the mics that are always listening will be contentious with people. And while it’s possible to turn this functionality off in the settings, there’s nothing like the switch Sonos has on its products that electronically disconnects the mics so they literally cannot hear any more — it’s just a software change, which won’t reassure everyone.

It can also change formats on the fly, including switching to 24fps output for movies, so that you get more natural movie motion, especially if you have a 120Hz TV.

So let’s talk about whether there’s really anything here for upgraders. I already said I think there basically isn’t, but I should at least show my working. When it comes to picture and sound performance, there are no meaningful changes.

The new model does have faster Wi-Fi. Again that doesn’t mean much in itself, but it appears to have enabled this version to support a full surround system using HomePods for the first time (seemingly due to lower latency in the wireless tech, based on what Apple's said about it).

The price of getting a setup like these used to be highly competitive too, though after HomePod price rises they’re a little more middle of the pack compared to wireless home theater speaker options from the likes of Hisense and Sonos.

If the money is no problem to you, I strong recommend it. But compared to the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, is the extra privacy and slick Apple integration worth an extra

• Released on November 13th, 2026
• Priced at $299 / £299 / AU$449

• Tested at home for 10 days

I have a primarily Apple-device household, so I was able to test the integration with other Apple products easily.