Apple launched the fourth generation of the Apple TV 4K earlier this week, with the A19 chip, support for Siri AI, and the ability to pair up to four HomePods for surround sound. The A19 chip on the new Apple TV 4K is the same one that is found on the base iPhone 17, which is a very powerful smartphone chip. The new chip offers up to 50% faster CPU performance and 2x faster GPU performance when compared with the A15 chip from the third generation. Even though the chip in the previous Apple TV is five years old and borrowed from the iPhone 13, Apple says that it will be compatible with the new Siri AI starting with tvOS 27.2.

That’s not it; the Apple TV 4K (2nd generation) from 2021, featuring the A12 Bionic chip from 2018, will also support it, which is a bit odd considering Apple had a strict limit of a minimum of 8GB of RAM for Apple Intelligence and Siri AI on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. This could have been made possible due to the fact that the Apple TV is an entertainment device and is not as personal as an iPhone, which carries more data for personal context. It is possible that Siri AI on older Apple TVs might mostly be running on Private Cloud Compute.

If you were planning to upgrade your Apple TV for Siri AI but hesitating because of the $299 price tag, this could be workable, but the same Siri response speed as the new fourth-generation models cannot be expected from the older-gen models.