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The Apple TV 4K is often recommended as one of the best streaming devices, and for good reason. It offers an ad-free, clean and easy-to-use interface and is one of the most powerful media streamers on the market. You also get apps for major streaming services, official apps for local media servers, and seamless integration with the rest of the Apple ecosystem. Additionally, the Apple streamer is also being praised for its better privacy management in a world where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to prevent smart TVs and streaming devices from spying on user activity and collecting a ton of user data.
However, the Apple TV 4K is not without its drawbacks, especially when you compare it to other streaming devices, such as offerings from Amazon, Roku, and Google, which don’t cost as much and give you a similar feature set. Therefore, it is important to consider these drawbacks before shelling out a lot of money to buy an Apple TV 4K.
It’s quite expensive
One of the biggest downsides to buying an Apple TV 4K is the hole it will leave in your wallet. It was already expensive enough; However, Apple’s latest price hike, an unfortunate result of rising component costs, has made it the most expensive media streamer on the market. While the base 64GB variant of the Apple TV 4K matches the $200 price of the Nvidia Shield TV Pro, its 128GB model costs $249. For the same price, you can buy two Google TV Streamers or two Roku Ultras and still have money left for at least a few months of your streaming subscriptions. Amazon’s Fire TV 4K Max is significantly more affordable.
Additionally, Apple doesn’t provide an HDMI cable to connect the Apple TV 4K to your TV or a USB-C cable to charge the included Siri Remote. Both of these will further increase your cost of ownership if you don’t already have these cables in your home.
No raw audio passthrough or DTS audio format support
If you own a soundbar or AV receiver and want one of these devices to handle the raw audio coming from the content you play on Apple TV, you’re out of luck. Apple TV 4K does not support raw audio passthrough, which means it processes all the audio data it gets, including Dolby Atmos, converts it to uncompressed LPCM with Dolby MAT metadata (if applicable), then sends it to your soundbar or receiver. Therefore, you are essentially dependent on Apple processing for audio quality. Apple was supposed to add passthrough support with tvOS 26, but that didn’t come to fruition. Although few mainstream streaming services currently use DTS audio, you can get DTS audio if you use a local media server for your own ripped discs.
Additionally, the Apple TV 4K does not support any of the DTS audio formats, which means that when it encounters DTS audio, it reverts to uncompressed multi-channel PCM audio for playback. Many of the Apple TV 4K’s competitors support Dolby Audio passthrough. However, support for the DTS audio format and its passthrough is less common.
You must be in the Apple ecosystem for the best experience
Apple TV 4K offers many great features and services; however, for many of them, you need to be part of the company’s ecosystem to get the best experience. For example, if you don’t want to enter a password or username on a login page one character at a time, you need to have an iPhone or iPad to use the built-in remote feature to enter anything seamlessly on your Apple TV. There is no app that you can download on your Android phone for this. The streaming media player lets you calibrate its color output for more accurate visuals, which again requires having an iPhone.
Likewise, if you want to enjoy spatial audio or share audio with another person without disturbing others in your household, you need AirPods or Beats headphones. Streaming content from your phone is limited to AirPlay, and you can’t easily do it from your Android phone.
Access to services like Apple Fitness+, Arcade, and FaceTime also immerses you deep into the company’s ecosystem. Additionally, popular cloud gaming services are not present on the platform, which is a big miss since almost every other major smart TV platform supports one or more cloud gaming services, such as Nvidia GeForce Now, Amazon Luna, or Xbox Cloud Gaming.
