I love my Apple TV. In fact, I love my Apple TVs, because my house has more than one. Those little black boxes are small and silent, and they make it a cinch to access the latest telly and music without wrestling with an interface so appalling you want to hurl the device into a ravine. Low bar, sure, but that’s the market. Still, there are now 299 reasons not to buy a new one, because the Apple TV 4K now costs a whopping $299/£299.
Yes, you read that right. Apple’s streaming box now more or less sits in territory once occupied by an iPad before AI broke the tech world and inflated the price of, well, everything. And when you see Apple TV pricing history laid out, it’ll raise your eyebrows so high they’ll whack the ceiling.
Back in the halcyon days of mid-June 2026, an Apple TV 4K started at $129/£149, with the pricier model (double the storage and an Ethernet port) at $149/£169. That was already pushing it next to rivals. But, well, ravine. Then prices shot up: $199/£199 for the entry-level model and $249/£249 for the other one. Now the cheaper option’s vanished, leaving a solitary $299/£299 Apple TV 4K in its wake.
Box of tricks
Apple would doubtless argue the new device is more capable – and it is. There are new far-field mics and a revamped Siri, which Apple says will transform how you search for, discover and enjoy your favourite shows. The conversational interface works hands free, which I presume means lots of fun vocal arguments with Siri and fellow viewers about what to watch. And I love that the remote now supports Find My, so you can bellow “Siri, where’s my remote?” and be exasperated when it fires up arthouse cinema flick Hairs In My Coat, which I totally didn’t just make up.
Really, the new Apple TV 4K is best thought of as a headless iPhone 17, which accounts for the price hike. Apple says the A19 chip bumps the CPU up 50% over the previous Apple TV 4K and the GPU by 2x. This, apparently, makes for “greater responsiveness, faster navigation, and smoother animations”. And there’s a “new, dedicated AV1 decoder” for more efficient streaming that eats less bandwidth. Games don’t get a mention, although that’s perhaps just as well, given how many times Apple has dropped that particular ball.
Fringe benefits
All that tech is nice. But if you’ve lived with an Apple TV, it’s arguably the smaller details you’d be loathe to give up. The smart interface, relatively (although not entirely) devoid of upsell. Family photos on the big screen that beat any screen saver. And third-party apps that are actually good, like Streaks Workout when I’m feeling energetic and masochistic in roughly equal measure, and Infuse for pulling video from local drives without needing a server.
That I’m on board for all this stuff surely makes me the ideal customer for an upgrade. But that price has punted the Apple TV from reassuringly expensive to a nice-to-have that’s really tricky to justify – not least when you multiply up that $299/£299 across a household, end up close to four figures, and watch your wallet run screaming from the room.
My fear is what was already a niche product will become more so as fewer and fewer opt to buy one. Yet I’d hate to see Apple TV hardware go away. Apple has never made the most of it, but it’s still a great piece of gear. However, it’s not great enough for me to part with so much cash in the current economic climate, even if my own remote that doesn’t support Find My is currently missing in action.
