Don’t expect the Google TV Streamer to be a true Apple TV 4K competitor – its chip isn’t really up to that
As more details emerge, Google’s new box won’t be as powerful as what the Apple TV 4K can do
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The newGoogle TV Streameris a lot more powerful than theChromecast with Google TV– but it reportedly has the same chipset as theAmazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. That confirms what we already suspected: it’s a powerful enough streaming device, but in terms of sheer horsepower, theApple TV 4K (2022)leaves it in the dust.
The chipset has been revealed toAndroid Authority, who reports that the chipset inside the newGoogledevice is the MediaTek MT8696. That’s quite old in chip terms:Amazonused it in the 2021 version of its Fire TV Stick4KMax, although Google’s streamer has twice the RAM of that device.
There are some interesting differences between the Amazon Fire TV Stick and the much newer Google product, not all of them good. Android Authority reports that where the first-gen Amazon device had Wi-Fi 6, Google only offers Wi-Fi 5. And the Amazon device was half the price of the Google one.
The Google TV Streamer isn’t an Apple TV killer
As we noted in ourGoogle TV Streamer vs Apple TV 4Kcomparison, theAppleTV 4K is a much more powerful device: it has the A15 Bionic chip, the same chip that powered the iPhone 13 Pro Max and the iPhone 14. It’s a six-core CPU with two high performance and two energy efficient cores, with the former clocked at up to 3.23GHz; it also has a dedicated 16-core Neural Engine and a five-core GPU. By comparison the MediaTek chip is a quad-core clocked at up to 2.0GHz and the GPU is believed to be Imagine Technologies' four-core PowerVR GE9215.
Does that matter? For smart home control and smart TV watching, nope: the MediaTek chip is perfectly capable of doing everything you’d want for home entertainment from decoding high quality video to delivering a smooth user experience. By comparison the Apple TV 4K hardware is overkill. But maybe that’s the point.
There are things the Apple TV 4K can do that the Google TV Streamer can’t. When tvOS 18 launches next month (or in October; tvOS updates sometimes lag behind iOS), it’ll bring machine learning-powered dialog enhancement for movies and vocal clarity enhancement for music; live captions and Continuity Camera enhancements for FaceTime calls; an enhanced Apple Fitness+ experience; and Spatial Audio streaming over AirPlay. Both the Google TV Streamer and the Apple TV 4K are in disguise: the former’s really a streaming stick, and the latter’s a smartphone.
And that’s just the current model.
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A newer, even more powerful Apple TV has beenrumoredfor a few years now, and while experience makes me curb my enthusiasm somewhat it’s possible that the next Apple TV could be part of Apple’sunified gaming push. While the current Apple TV’s gaming focus is on Apple’s own Arcade and its fun but hardly hardware-intensive titles, the next one could be a powerful gaming console in its own right.
That would require some changes to tvOS – for example, it currently has pretty severe limits on how much space apps are allowed to take up – but it could finally deliver the Apple gaming experience some of us have longed for since the days of theApple Pippin.
The Google TV Streamer looks great for TV and smart home, but the Apple TV 4K is designed to be able to do basically anything. Now, whether that’s what youwantis a different matter, but based on the chip, don’t expect Google to reveal advanced new apps that weren’t possible on the Chromecast with Google TV.
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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir,Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock bandUnquiet Mind.
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