The Apple TV 4K is one of the best streaming boxes you can buy, even if your other products are outside the Apple ecosystem. The hardware is fantastic compared to the competition, featuring the same A-series chips powering older iPhones. Amazon, Google, and Roku offer compelling alternatives to the Apple TV 4K, but it’s hard to accept the additional bloat and ads that come with them.
An underrated perk of the Apple TV 4K is its onboard storage — the latest model comes with either 64GB or 128GB of space. Somehow, Amazon’s $200 Fire TV Cube still comes with just 16GB of storage. Google’s TV Streamer, while half the price, isn’t much better with only 32GB of storage. While the Apple TV 4K glistens on the spec sheet with lots of flash storage, it’s not as useful as it should be.
The Apple TV 4K is loaded with storage
You can get it with up to 128GB of flash storage
A new Apple TV appears to be imminent, but for now, there are two Apple TV 4K models to choose from. One is a standard Wi-Fi model with only a figure-eight power port and an HDMI 2.0 output on the back. There’s another configuration with both Wi-Fi and Ethernet support. This is ideal for those who want to connect their Apple TV 4K to their home network over a cable for stable streaming. I own an Apple TV 4K with an Ethernet jack, and I wouldn’t buy one without it.
Ethernet is far from the only difference between these two Apple TV 4K models. The Ethernet version is a handful of grams heavier, not that weight matters much for a streaming box. More importantly, the Ethernet model also supports Thread networking for local smart home connectivity. And it has double the storage. You get 64GB for the Wi-Fi model, and 128GB for the Ethernet model.
The Wi-Fi model costs $199, whereas the Wi-Fi and Ethernet version costs $249. For some users, the Ethernet connectivity will be worth the $50 price premium. I can’t say the same about the extra flash storage, though. I own an older Apple TV 4K model with Ethernet and 64GB of storage, and I couldn’t fill it up with apps and games if I tried. A limitation holds the Apple TV 4K back, and it’s a regression compared to an older generation.
Want to get around streaming’s bitrate limits? Look elsewhere
Despite the Apple TV 4K’s ample amount of onboard storage, it can’t be used to download media. I have a large iTunes library of music, movies, and TV shows, but they must be streamed using the Apple TV 4K. Even using the official Apple TV app, there’s no way to download content directly to the Apple TV 4K’s local storage.
You’re probably wondering why you’d even want to download movies and TV shows locally to an Apple TV 4K. The driving factor is simple: streaming has a bitrate problem. Regardless of whether you have multi-Gigabit internet or an Ethernet connection, streaming services are limited in the bitrates they can deliver. Bitrate is a number that tells you how many bits of digital data can be shared in a single second, and it directly correlates to picture quality.
The driving factor is simple: streaming has a bitrate problem.
Many streaming services offer 4K video with Dolby Vision or HDR10 color, but the source quality is irrelevant if the bitrate isn’t high enough to deliver it without compression and quality loss. For example, streaming services like Netflix cap bitrates as low as 15Mbps. On the high end, Apple TV can hit 40Mbps while streaming. Compare that to the 144Mbps bitrates you can achieve with the best 66GB/100GB 4K UHD Blu-ray discs, and streaming looks paltry.
If you want to enjoy movies and TV shows at their highest possible quality, you don’t need to invest in a physical media collection (though I highly recommend it). Downloading movies and TV shows onto your device completely avoids the pitfalls of adaptive bitrate streaming. It’s advantageous to download videos locally, so you can view them without extra compression or buffering, rather than stream them in real time over the internet.
The highest-capacity Apple TV 4K would likely only be able to fit a few movies or a season of a TV show on its 128GB of local storage. After all, some of that space is used up by apps, games, and system files. However, even being able to download one movie or episode would help Apple TV 4K owners dodge the quality problems that come with adaptive bitrate streaming. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible.
The first-gen Apple TV had the right idea
It was a full-blown media server with up to a 160GB hard drive
The idea of using an Apple TV 4K as a home media server with local storage isn’t an outlandish one. That’s exactly what the first-generation Apple TV box, released in 2007, was designed to do. It was essentially a Mac computer, complete with an Intel processor and a spinning hard drive. In fact, you could install Mac OS X versions onto the original Apple TV, turning it into a Mac Mini alternative.
The first-gen Apple TV shipped with a 40GB hard drive, and was later made available with a 160GB hard drive. It could stream content, but you could also sync movies and TV shows to the Apple TV’s on-device storage. The product transitioned into a streaming-only device starting with the second generation, because it swapped the Intel chip and spinning hard drive for an Apple A4 processor and 8GB of flash storage.
Fast-forward to today, is it time for the Apple TV 4K to return to its media server roots? The hardware limitations that restricted the second-generation Apple TV and newer models to streaming no longer apply. Apple’s chips are capable enough to power desktop workstations, and flash storage is available in large quantities.
The rumored next-generation Apple TV 4K might have even more storage than the current model. If that’s the case, should Apple let owners make better use of the Apple TV 4K’s storage by allowing media downloads? As an Apple TV owner, I vote yes.