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Kicking off this streaming box double-header is the fifth-generation Apple TV. And for the first time in any of those generations, the new box gets a small but significant name change: The addition to the end of "4K". And for those still looking for a new 4K TV, take a look at our guide to the best 4K TVs.
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If you’ve had your head in the AV game even slightly over the past few years you’ll know that 4K refers to the new ultra-high-definition picture format that offers 3840x2160 pixels of detail versus high-definition’s 1920x1080.
Frankly, Apple’s decision to offer a 4K box is long overdue considering that TVs and video-streaming platforms have been delivering 4K for years now. But actually Apple might as well have also stuck "HDR" at the end of the new Apple TV’s name, since the latest box’s new 4K skills is joined by support for the latest big thing in home-video technology: high dynamic range.
The idea behind HDR is that it provides images with a much wider brightness range, usually partnered by a wider colour spectrum. Done well, HDR really can take your viewing experience to another level, especially when partnered - as it usually is - with 4K.
In fact, the new Apple TV doesn’t just support the industry standard version of HDR, it also supports a premium quality format called Dolby Vision. This adds a layer of extra scene-by-scene information to the HDR picture stream to help TVs render the HDR picture better. It really works, and Apple’s inclusion of it sets it apart from many streaming box rivals - as well as raising expectations that Apple really has got serious about picture quality this time round.
Read more: Buying a 4K TV? Here's what all the high-definition jargon means
The Apple TV’s design is drab by Apple standards. It’s just a small glossy black box with rounded corners and a subtle Apple TV logo embossed on side. At least it’s just about small enough to be tucked out of sight somewhere, I guess.
Connections are limited to a power jack, an HDMI output and a USB service port, while its remote is almost identical to the one shipped with the fourth-generation Apple TV. The only difference is that the Menu button is now circled in white, to make it easier to find in a dark room.
In some ways the remote staying broadly the same is a good thing. The small form factor and limited button count is still appreciated, and it still supports some motion sensitivity controls to make it a fairly innovative gaming "stick". On the downside, though, the touch pad at the top remains a frequently frustrating way of navigating the menus and shuttling forward and backwards through films. The diminutive size may be tricky to manage, too, if, like me, your fingers are of the big and clumsy variety.
Setting the new Apple TV up is also as straightforward as previous generations, especially if you’ve already got another iPad or iPhone from which the Apple TV 4K can automatically grab your Wi-Fi network set-up information.
The Apple TV 4K’s menus follow the same look and structure as the previous iteration, and again this is mostly good news. There’s something likably clean, straightforward and clear about Apple’s rows of colourful, high-resolution icons. The section at the top where content related to the app you’ve got highlighted in the menus below remains a nifty (and now much copied) idea.
You can end up with a rather long, straggly set of icons to scroll through once you’ve downloaded a few extra apps. Also, the way Apple (unsurprisingly) prioritises all of its own services in the initial layout might annoy some. However, Apple provides a folder system for tidying up your apps if you wish, and you can easily replace Apple’s services at the top of the interface with ones of your own choice.
You can actually keep the time you spend interacting with the menus to a minimum, too, thanks to the Apple TV 4K’s support for Apple’s Siri voice control system. This lets you search for content effectively by simply telling the remote what you want the box to find for you.
Apple has thankfully taken big strides forward for the latest Apple TV 4K with the amount of video content it supports. The Amazon Video app is finally confirmed as arriving in the next few weeks, while Apple’s own iTunes library has gone from AV zero to hero overnight with the addition of a startling amount of movies available in 4K and high dynamic range.
Many of the 100-plus 4K HDR titles on offer in the UK are available - at no extra charge - in the premium Dolby Vision format, too. This is great news for people with TVs capable of handling the format.
Netflix is also supported in its 4K and HDR incarnation, too, and our American cousins can rejoice at the recent addition of the HDR/4K-toting Vudu video streaming platform to Apple’s supported services. Sadly, Vudu is not available in the UK.
One limitation of Apple’s video support, though, finds its YouTube app unable to stream the platform’s growing 4K and HDR library. Everything tops out at HD standard dynamic range, thanks to Apple refusing to support the so-called VP9 compression format YouTube uses.
Getting back to the good news, Apple has decided to make all of iTunes 4K and HDR titles available to buy or rent for the same prices as their HD versions. What’s more, if you’ve previously bought an HD version of a film on iTunes, it will automatically update to the 4K HDR version at no extra charge. Excellent. Rival platforms have tended to charge double or more for 4K HDR movies, so Apple’s move is a genuine boon. In fact, a number of rival 4K movie providers - including Amazon - have already had to follow suit and cut their own prices.
The Apple TV 4K seals what gets frustratingly close to being a genuinely impressive deal with its picture quality. Provided you’ve got the 15Mbps or more of broadband speed needed to enjoy them, its 4K HDR movie streams look very good by streaming standards. There’s more than enough detail to leave you in no doubt you’re witnessing better-than-HD pictures, and this sharpness is delivered with a clean, noiseless look that suggests Apple may be using superior HDMI software to anything seen on previous Apple TVs.
The addition of HDR adds a gorgeously expanded light range to films, too (if your TV supports it), making daylight scenes look brighter, artificial light sources look more intense, and colours look richer and more natural. This is especially true if you have a TV able to handle Dolby Vision, which adds even more intensity to the colours and bright image highlights.
Unfortunately, though, while the Apple TV 4K rocks it with the right sort of content, it also falls victim to a single catastrophic error of judgment.
The thing is, for the sake, apparently, of a fluid operating system, Apple has decided to output every video source, game or app to your TV in whatever format you’ve got selected in its video output menu. Unlike other streaming platforms, it won’t automatically adjust its output to match the video format of the particular show, film or app you’re watching.
This means that unless you know the native format of everything you watch and can be bothered to go into the video output menu and set the output to match the content, you’ll end up having to watch content that’s been converted by Apple software into a whole different format.
As well as being flat-out offensive to AV purists, this approach leads to the insane situation of you potentially watching The Great British Bake Off on the All 4 catch-up TV app in 4K HDR. Even though it is only made in HD SDR. As a result colours look weird, the brightness looks forced, and the image sometimes looks noisy or processed.
Rumour has it that Apple may fix this crazy situation by introducing automatic content switching with the tvOS 11.2 software update at some as yet undetermined future date. But I can only talk about what’s in front of me right now - and that, I’m afraid, just doesn’t make sense at all.
One final performance issue to mention is that while the Apple TV 4K’s sound is perfectly decent up to its 5.1-channel limit, there’s no support for the outstanding Dolby Atmos sound format. This adds a height channel and brilliant "object-based" precision to movie or TV show soundtracks, and is now available on some streaming services - including Netflix and, in the US, Vudu.
Apple has rather vaguely suggested it will support Atmos in the future, but it’s not clear yet if it was talking about adding the feature to the Apple TV 4K, or just some future Apple TV generation.
Score: 8/10
Pros: Supports 4K and HDR video, including the premium Dolby Vision format; decent amount of built-in storage; lots of 4K HDR content, especially on iTunes; attractive onscreen menus; Siri
**Cons:**The remote is a faff; forced video conversion; it’s expensive
£179 for the 32GB version, £199 for the 64GB version, from the Apple store.
The latest Amazon Fire TV box seems designed right from the off to wave two fingers in the direction of its Apple rival.
For starters, while the Apple TV 4K remains something of a brick in design terms, the latest Amazon Fire TV has shrunk down so far that you can now hang it out of one of your TV’s HDMI sockets. This will make it invisible in most living room set ups.
It also hits Apple where it hurts by only costing £70. That’s well under half the price demanded by even the cheapest Apple TV 4K option.
Even better, it delivers its cut-throat price and diminutive form while also (nearly) matching the Apple TV 4K’s key 4K and HDR picture quality ambitions. The only difference is that it supports just the industry standard HDR10 HDR platform, not also the superior Dolby Vision one. While this could be a deal-breaker for people with Dolby Vision-capable TVs, it probably won’t matter one bit to people with TVs that only support HDR10.
Unlike the latest Apple TV 4K, the latest Amazon Fire TV boasts a newly designed onscreen interface. Unfortunately, though, I’d argue this is worse than its predecessor. Its biggest issue is that it looks cluttered. It puts full-screen graphics behind all of its many themed rows of content icons, denying it the clean, clear look of Apple’s interface.
It also eats up more of its homescreen space than I liked with "pushed" content. For starters, there’s a large section at the top devoted to trailers of upcoming Amazon shows - including stuff on the Amazon Channels secondary subscription "TV" service even if you don’t subscribe to it.
There’s also a content row near the top of the library devoted to sponsored content, and a further "Featured shows" row just below that. None of this would be so bad if the recommended content felt tailored to your individual tastes. But I’ve so far seen no sign that this is the case.
This sense of having content dictated to you joins with the cluttered, row-on-row look to bring up uncomfortable comparisons with Google’s easy-to-hate Android TV smart platform.
The new Fire TV’s operating system is saved, though, by the box’s integration of Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition platform. As with Siri on the Apple TV, this provides a great way to shortcut your access to not just films, TV shows and apps, but also information services and music.
For me, Siri seemed slightly less prone to misunderstanding my dulcet Derbyshire tones than Alexa, but it’s a close-run thing. The bottom line is that both play an invaluable role in making their respective video streaming boxes infinitely more fun to use.
The Amazon Fire TV performs well enough in picture and sound terms to be considered a worthy challenger for the Apple TV 4K. Its 4K HDR images look slightly less noisy than they do on Amazon Video streaming apps on smart TVs, and are only marginally less crisp and sharp than those delivered by Apple TV 4K. Or at least that’s the case until you find some Dolby Vision content on the Apple TV, at which point that format’s extra picture information yields a clearer advantage to people with TVs able to exploit it.
Also, critically, the Amazon Fire TV automatically adjusts its output to (almost) correspond with the video format of the particular content its playing. If something is in HDR it is sent out as HDR. But if it’s in standard dynamic range, it’s mercifully sent out to your TV as standard dynamic range. There’s no ill-conceived attempt to convert SDR to HDR.
The box does automatically upscale HD to 4K, though, and doesn’t provide any way of playing films out of it in their original 24 frames a second refresh rate; everything is converted to 50 or 60Hz. To be fair, it makes these frame rate and resolution changes pretty tidily, but the Apple TV 4K nonetheless claws a little ground back here by at least offering 24p video output options, even if for now you have to choose them manually.
When it comes to sound, the Amazon Fire TV has a massive potential advantage: support for Dolby Atmos. Unfortunately, at the time of writing I couldn’t find any Dolby Atmos-carrying streamed content with which to try out the Atmos support. Even Netflix’s Dolby Atmos shows are only currently available through the Netflix apps built into LG TVs or the Xbox One S. But it’s good to know the feature is there for when Atmos-enabled content inevitably rolls into town.
As with the Apple TV 4K, though, we have to wrap up our look at the Amazon Fire TV with a list of niggles. Kicking off with the crazy way Amazon’s own Video app carries separate 4K HDR and HD SDR "files" of the same TV shows and movies.
This makes it possible, probable even, that many users will accidentally play the HD SDR version of a TV show or film that they could have enjoyed in 4K HDR if only they hadn’t first stumbled on the lower-quality version.
Why Amazon can’t do as other services do and simply have a single "file" for each title that automatically adapts its quality to the maximum video quality supported by your TV and broadband speed is anyone’s guess.
Another playback frustration is how slow the Amazon Fire TV is at optimising its playback quality. It routinely takes between 25 and 50 seconds to finally hit its 4K stride when playing 4K content, versus as little as 5-15 seconds on most other Amazon Video apps I tried on other platforms.
The final limitation of the latest Amazon Fire TV box is its lack of video content versus the Apple TV 4K (especially when the Amazon Video app finally arrives on Apple’s platform). There’s obviously no sign of iTunes, with its large movie collection. Nor can US buyers of the Amazon Fire TV enjoy all the HDR, 4K and Atmos content from Vudu.
To make matters worse, at the time of writing the selection of 4K movies on Amazon Video in the UK is only just over half the size of what you get with iTunes on the Apple TV 4K. Furthermore, I couldn’t see a single film available to buy and rent through Amazon Video that was available in HDR.
So while it’s good to see Amazon Video broadly matching iTunes with the price of its premium 4K Movie selection, the iTunes options still look like better value as you’re getting much better video quality for the same per-title cost.
One saving grace for Amazon on the content side is that its YouTube app outguns the Apple TV 4K one by supporting both 4K and HDR video playback.
My final moan about the Amazon Fire TV is that it currently feels a bit buggy. In particular, it sometimes seems to lock into HDR mode for everything, including its menus - a problem only fixed by toggling the picture’s bit-rate output in the video setup menus.
£69.99 from amazon.co.uk
Score: 7/10
Pros: Tiny, hang-from-your-TV design; it’s cheap; it switches its video output to match content; Alexa works a treat
Cons: Some content limitations; cluttered, pushy interface; feels buggy; the system for distinguishing between HD and 4K content is a mess
As things stand right now, choosing between the Apple TV 4K and Amazon Fire TV is a tough call. Apple’s box wins the day on content - especially 4K HDR content - and the friendliness of its operating system, while Dolby Vision support gives it a performance advantage, too, if you have a TV capable of making the most out of it.
However, Amazon’s box is smaller, much cheaper to buy, and most crucially of all sensibly automatically adjusts its video output to match the content you’re playing.
If Apple lives up to predictions that it’s going to fix its video output mistake, then I’d say it would then justify its extra up-front cost - especially as it offers more reasons for adding it to your system if you already have a smart TV than the Amazon Fire TV box does.
That doesn’t mean, though, that the Amazon Fire TV isn’t still a strong budget option for people looking to make a relatively dumb telly a whole lot smarter.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
