Apple TV 4K 2026

I agree with you about the poor search and obscured content. I'm startled to see the complaints about reliability, though; our 3rd generation Apple TV 4K has been the most reliable device in our household of many Apple devices. Certainly we've almost never had playback problems or interruptions. (Your mentioning "commercial breaks" is interesting — we must be using Apple TV in different ways. We pay extra when necessary so that we see as few ads as possible. We never let them interrupt programs.)

We have gigabyte service, and our Apple TV is one floor straight up and maybe twenty feet over from our Comcast router. The Apple TV is configured to turn on when we turn on our LG (smart) TV, and we never watch through the LG interface except for the one or two times a year we watch an event through the antenna input. I'm not planning to upgrade soon, because our Apple TV is the one Apple device that comes closest to "it just works," and Apple hasn't yet convinced us to use Siri for anything more complex than setting a timer.

I agree with some of your take. I bought the original *hardware* Apple TV (emphasizing that so as not to be confused with... Apple TV the app, Apple TV+ the content, etc.)... and rarely used it when I still had cable. But nowadays my household has 3 TV without cable and each has it's own *hardware* Apple TV. I'm too old, but I think it's called "cutting the cable"?

If I wanted a "smart TV" - that apparently does it own tracking - I could. In fact, two years ago I did because there seems to nothing like a "dumb TV". But my TV sets (like my thermostat, doorbells, garage door, lights, etc.)? They will never be attached to my internet connection. In this configuration, it's the Apple TV apps that matter most to me. All three of them... almost... have the same remote. The difference is power on/off. But again, it's the apps that matter. I use a handful... Fubo, Prime, Sling (occasionally like this month when they are the only way to watch AL baseball playoffs). I tried a few others (including my ISP's app) but settled on this.

Siri? What, if I'm in the kitchen, I'll just either bring my laptop in or even more the remote. And please note: while there are alternatives to watching Apple TV+ (I think I'm using the correct name), the only thing I'll do (and have done) is subscribe for a month when Friday Night Baseball has content I care about. As for surround sound, there are better (possibly cheaper) ways than buying this new piece of hardware along with 4 HomePods.

(1) Make sure your ISP provides fiber. Without that, well, you probably are forced with using your cable provider. (2) After cutting the cable, figure out what you watch. You'll probably love what subscription TV saves in cost. For me it's *at least* $100.00 monthly. Remember, you can always change. (3) If you choose to go with Apple TV hardware, try to adjust to having no actual channel numbers, standardize on a single type of remote that uses bluetooth, and keep the TV remote and Apple remote (ignore the battery low popup it may show.

Where I disagree with your take @Michael_Tsai, is Fire sticks. While a much smaller footprint (and definitely cost), I tried it (and Roku) and found both to be... worse than my oldest hardware Apple TV that I bought about 12 years ago. So maybe I do agree with one last thing you said... the hardware doesn't get upgraded often. But that's because it doesn't need to be!

At one point I tried all of the different streaming stick/box options and they were all worse than Apple for my use case.

Anything that features ads or other content that I can't control is a no go for us. Too many ads feature stuff completely inappropriate for children and on all of the non-Apple boxes ads pop up all over the place and can't be removed. I've demoted the Apple TV app off the top row because it insists on displaying ads for stuff when you hover over it.

Opening any streaming app is playing Russian Roulette with what is going to pop up randomly which is why 99% of our viewing is through Plex or Channels DVR.

Why you've soured on Apple TV is how I feel about the Apple ecosystem. Premium prices for bad software that interrupts me to push mediocre or irrelevant Apple services or products.

I have an older Apple TV 4K. It's never felt fast. I use it for HomeKit and basic streaming for services that offer deals. The Apple TV software experience is not optimized for this. Siri has never worked (maybe that's different now). Apps like Amazon Prime frequently get "stuck" between Apple TV sleep where I have to force quit them. The big streaming apps I use are terrible at restoring their state when evicted, but maybe that's an app problem? You'd think Apple would either fix this or reach out and help the big streaming companies fix their basic crap, but they don't care about the user experience. The only software update that improved my basic usage was when they finally fixed HomeKit devices suddenly disconnecting/timing out.

I have a 1st-gen ATV 4K, which has now been dropped from OS support. While the A10X in it is clearly old, dropping compatibility feels much worse than for a similarly-aged phone. The job and performance requirements haven't changed since it was new: steam video and show UI in grids at 4K resolution.

At a certain point I'll be unable to download a new streaming service app onto it, or backend API changes will break existing ones, and I'll be paying more than double what I originally did, to get a box that doesn't do anything meaningfully new or different.

If Apple thinks a $300 ($430 Canadian!) box has a market, go for it, but they should be able to hit a value price point, at least by keeping the old ones around for those of us that just want to watch TV with a reasonable experience. At this point it seems like they're just charging more because they know they're the least bad option for those that care.

Followup to my rather lengthy comment....

@John_Cooper:

(1) Comcast. Not sure, but I was Spectrum. (Ouch! It took 30 minutes to stop service with them. Seems they couldn't believe I could save $$$ by cancelling. They argued with me, tried giving me a plan that probably meant an annual call to keep the "special", and worse, my ISP installer, on learning I didn't want any new holes drilled, already cut that cable. You know what? My house (build in 2013) no longer uses any wall connections - it's all WiFi. But again, make it fiber. You'll never look back. Not even if you should decide to move like I plan to in 2 years. Move with your WiFI network and *hardware* Apple TV (or anything else) and you are done.

(2) I did have some habits to change. Oddly enough, the largest wasn't TV. It was email. My personal email addresses were with... Adelphia (1998) then Time-Warner (2005?) and finally Spectrum. When cutting the cable I realized virtually everything I do via email was "roadrunner.com) or nowadays Spectrum. It took a few months of keeping a log to be confident I had everything covered. Fortunately Spectrum didn't shut things down for about 11 months. I kept those emails disabled but checked every week. wow. Some weeks they totaled around 150 emails - all spam.

(3) The other adjustments were things I mentioned like the remotes have no numbers (fortunately at least Fubo allows for favorite channels), and commercials. But IIRC your DVR can probably record and playback, but not skip over the OTC commercials. But that only means you need to find what "apps" or "streaming providers"(?) you want.

(3) Agree COMPLETELY with your comment about (lack of) using Siri. Apple can improve it until perfection, but really, they still haven't convinced me to use it for anything. The closest they have is to use it while driving, and I just can't see me needing it for that. (Hopefully I won't ever literally run into a driver that does - it's a distraction!) So really, if I'm in the kitchen (where no TV is but it's open to my main TV) and need to use a remote, I'll simply bring the remote in.

Last comment, I promise. (Unless a thank you.)

@Hammer: "Apps like Amazon Prime frequently get "stuck" between Apple TV sleep where I have to force quit them. The big streaming apps I use are terrible at restoring their state when evicted, but maybe that's an app problem?"

I've never experienced this. How do you force-quit an app installed on Apple TV. The things I have experienced are a power failure where it didn't reboot fully, and something definitely app-specific, where moving between apps the "former" app didn't show things live. On the former, I needed to literally unplug the device (it happened once over the years) and the latter I needed to simply reboot the hardware.

@Dave Well, I’m casting about, not recommending Fire Stick, specifically. I’ve heard that it’s not great but works.

@Hammer Yes, I’ve had to force-quit apps, too, but sometimes it needs to reboot.

@Dave

Double-press TV/Home on the remote, switch to the app, then swipe up.

The biggest offender (but not the only) is the Amazon Prime app. Frequently, I watch an episode, turn off my TV, come back the next night, and the app is frozen. It only an image of whatever was last shown. No inputs work and it requires a force quit. Sometimes, I notice there's an app update pending.

The other problem: I'm trying to decide what to watch so I have a few apps open (say Amazon, Paramount, Max). As I switch between them, their state gets lost. Any searches clear or selections clear. I don't know if they're being evicted in the background as I switch between them and they all suck at state restoration, but it's been like this forever.

My impression is that most devs working on TV apps suck at their jobs, including Apple. Basic features like state restoration and core workflow (deciding what to watch) are awful. A laptop in a browser with a few tabs open (for each service) is an infinitely better experience.

> I would miss the screensaver, though.

@Michael No, you wouldn’t. There are plenty of screensaver apps on the Google Play Store that stream the videos from Apple’s servers directly.

@Hammer Yep, state restoration is a big issue, and because of the way search works I run into it a lot.