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2021 Apple TV 4K vs. 2017 Apple TV 4K: Is It Worth Upgrading?
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Maybe only if you really want the new remote? 2017 Apple TV 4K is still faster than most of the competitors.
Hi, does this also work with ARC or does it specifically require eARC on the TV? I have an SK8500 (UK equivalent of the sk9000 in the US)
2021 Apple TV 4K has 4GB RAM (vs. 3GB on 2017 Apple TV). Along with faster storage, should noticeably improve multitasking and other operations. I am miffed that Apple didn't push further with A13 or A14 processor, but considering how infrequent Apple TV is updated, I am glad that it's updated at all.
Apple TV 4K, even the 2017 model, is dramatically faster than A8-equipped Apple TV HD. The difference is a night and day.
It wasn't worth upgrading from my ATV3(s) to the ATV 4k. I bought Roku.
I pass my old ones down the chain to "upgrade" older aTV boxes in the house on infrequently used televisions. I like having the fastest/smoothest operation in my living room on my OLED. It will be nice to finally have the third gen out of my workshop and have all my TVs on 4 or newer. As a bonus it seems like I can reliably get a Dolby Vision signal to my TV at all times now, so that's good. And yes, I was using a very high end cable that is supposed to be able to work with it. This new box just fixed those pain points and feels smoother and more polished with the new remote. Worth it for me.
Don't have a 4k TV but I wouldn't buy the Apple TV without 4K...don't know when my TV will give in and the next one will be a 4K TV. Would feel cheap to have the HD Apple TV then.
That's the wrong takeaway.
The real issue is
(a) are you upgrading from an HD rather than a 4K?
(b) what sort of TV do you have (or plan to get soon)?
If you have an HD, then the new 4K just feels faster. You may think the old HD was fast enough, and sure it mostly is. The the new one just feels faster in ways you can't really articulate, the same way your iPhone from two years ago feels fast enough, but you try the newest one and it's just smoother and there's fractionally less waiting.
I never owned the old 4K, so all I can discuss is the new 4K, in the context of an LG C1, which is an OLED Dolby Vision 120fps device. (I upgraded my 15 yr old TV along with the Apple TV!)
Obviously the Dolby Vision/HDR stuff is spectacular, but the old 4K had that.
What's not clear to me is the amount of "massaging" that's happening within the atV -- and if this differs in the new 4K.
We all know that when you buy a new TV, the TV company makes a big deal of all their various modes and supposed AI -- technology that's supposed to upscale an HD or SD signal to 4K, that's supposed to motion interpolate out 24fps judder, that's supposed to automatically detect the type of content and optimally video process it, etc etc. The LG TV has plenty of that -- and it's exactly as haphazard, disorganized, and spread all over the menu system as you would expect.
HOWEVER (and this is the important part) when you connect up your new aTV in default mode (which is what I did) it feeds the TV nothing but a 120Hz 4K Dolby Vision signal; and the TV responds by making almost all that image massaging stuff either impossible to get to or much more difficult to get to. The TV seems willing to admit that, yeah, if you're sending me a signal that's optimized along every dimension, I can't do much to "improve" it.
OK, so now suppose you're watching content that's substantially lesser than 120Hz 4K Dolby Vision, eg something that began life as a DVD. How EXACTLY does Apple convert that up from 24fps to 120fps? From 720p to 4K? From SDR to HDR? Obviously they can do the bare minimum like replicate each frame 5 times (24->120Hz) and apply a superbasic bilinear scalar to get from 720p to 4K. But I've got to say the images I saw looked pretty good!
And when I tried LG's solution to these problems they did not (to my quick eye) look any better. (You can tell the aTV to use "content matching" in which case it will feed the signal as originally encoded to the TV, so it will send a 24fps 720p SDR to the TV as a 24fps 720p SDR signal. I tried this to see what it was like.
As I say, I didn't see LG as doing a better job than Apple of "upsampling" the signal AND if you use content matching then there's a noticeable delay whenever you switch from one mode of content to another as the TV adjusts itself -- it's not nearly as slow and irritating as my old TV, which looked like it was having a seizure every time this happened, but it's a noticeable second or two of black screen.)
So the point of this long excursion is that
- Apple seems to be doing more than just the bare minimum when it upsamples older content
- this means you don't have to rely on your TV to do this (and Apple seems to do as good a job as the best TVs)
- AND it means that the new 4K might be doing a better job given that it has a lot more oomph (more CPU, more GPU, an NPU) to throw at the task.
Like trying to see if this year's TV (LG C1) does a better job than last year's TV (LG CX) or the year before's TV (LG C9) in upsampling, quality of upsampling is a hard thing to measure -- even apart from the religious wars and snobbery that surround the whole issue...
All I can say is that I watch a variety of content, some of it the newest bestest stuff that's created from the start in Dolby Vision 4K (Apple TV+ has lots of this, though I don't think I've seen any of it at 120Hz), some of it captured off broadcast TV via Channels DVR, some of it old movies at about DVD-level. And it *all* looks a lot better on the new TV than the old. I'm very happy with the upscaling (resolution, dynamic range, and fps) being done by the Apple TV, and have seen no glitches that irritated me and ruined the illusion. (I don't game, or watch sports, so I can't comment on those. But I do watch action movies, and those seem smoother without the panning glitches I seem to be very sensitive to -- I notice them in movie theaters, not just on 3:2 pullup TVs).
So before you assume that the old and new Apple TV 4K deliver essentially the same signal, test out the quality of upscaling DVD-level content to a 120Hz 4K Dolby Vision screen. The difference in upscaling quality may be more than you expected...
(I assume the eARC stuff works, but can't comment on that because I got a soundbar with the new TV so I use that rather than HomePods)
Seems like from reading about the issue, if you reprogram another remote the Siri remote will the learn the codes
Doesn’t hdmi 2.1 support 24-bit/192 kHz audio? Wonder why Apple is saying the new Apple TV isn’t compatible with hi-res lossless music then? Just curious. Would love to be able to hook my Apple TV directly into receiver or sound bar that can also handle 192 kHz and be done ha. Hopefully they put hdmi 2.1 on this supposed new M1X Mac mini at least.
I have the 2017 Apple TV 4K and have had all sorts of issues with Home Sharing my photos from my computer to the Computers app... Got the new Apple TV 4K and the problems have pretty much gone away.
There’s a scene in the Apple TV+ series Servant where the characters appear to be using FaceTime on their AppleTV. I guess you can cast from another device? But I agree it would be cool to have it built in if they can figure it out.
I had a 3rd-gen Apple TV, so upgrading to this new one was a no-brainer. It still feeds an old 1080p Panasonic plasma set, though, but that’ll change soon. 
I have read others having this problem with the new Siri remote IR not working for volume whereas the old black Siri remote did in the Apple communities too. I would report it to the Apple TV team so they fix it.
The new Siri remote Power button is also broken for IR.
Apple promised IR support for the Power button, but it is still missing as of tvOS14.6.
Apple advertises IR support for Power On/Off:
On the Apple TV 4K Tech Specs page it states “Control your TV or receiver via IR or CEC”. With footnote (3): "Powering on and off, switching input to Apple TV, controlling volume, and mute.
Check Power button and IR status
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I’m stuck in a dilemma…
Having recently purchased a Sony x900h which has the Android TV version of the Apple TV app which has support for Dolby Vision/Atmos and has a somewhat decent UX (nowhere comparable to the Apple TV however), I’m questioning the need to upgrade from my old Apple TV HD.
Most every app I use can be downloaded and installed on the TV now. The only thing I’d miss is a native client for Apple Music should I decide to retire it.
What would a new Apple TV 4K offer that I don’t already have access to on Android TV? 🤷🏻♂️
Makes me wish Apple would incorporate their hardware into a full OS that not only would be the UX but have control of the SoC as well. 🤔
Having recently purchased a Sony x900h which has the Android TV version of the Apple TV app which has support for Dolby Vision/Atmos and has a somewhat decent UX (nowhere comparable to the Apple TV however), I’m questioning the need to upgrade from my old Apple TV HD.
Most every app I use can be downloaded and installed on the TV now. The only thing I’d miss is a native client for Apple Music should I decide to retire it.
What would a new Apple TV 4K offer that I don’t already have access to on Android TV? 🤷🏻♂️
Makes me wish Apple would incorporate their hardware into a full OS that not only would be the UX but have control of the SoC as well. 🤔
The fix right now is using another remote to program the new remote
[pedantry]
Actually it’s still called the Apple TV 4K, as you can see by looking at the Apple sales site or technical specs site. The proper identification of the devices are:
Apple TV 4K (2nd generation).
Apple TV 4K (1st generation).
Apple TV HD, which was formerly Apple TV (4th generation).
For some reason MacRumors avoids calling them what they are. For a while they incorrectly called the Apple TV 4K (1st generation) the “Apple TV (5th generation)”.
[/pedantry]