Apple just updated the Apple TV 4K, and the 4th-gen model has us scratching our heads.

With a price bump on top of an earlier price bump, it’s now $299, which puts it way out of the realm of “streaming box for normal people” and into high-priced enthusiast territory. However, despite the somewhat unecessary upgrade to an A19 and a couple of built-in microphones so you can trigger Siri hands-free, it’s missing some really obvious enthusiast features such as 120Hz output, variable refresh rate, or bitstream audio passthrough for formats like DTS or Dolby TrueHD.

There are only two real upgrades that are meaningful for someone willing to spend $299 on a new Apple TV 4K: Support for Siri AI, and an upgraded Siri Remote that supports Precision Finding with Find My and has a speaker to chirp at you.

The Siri AI thing isn’t really a big deal, because it’s coming to the 2nd- and 3rd-generation Apple TV 4K as well, using your iPhone 15 Pro or later on the same network. And as it turns out, that remote (which you can just buy on its own for $59 to use with your existing Apple TV 4K) may not be that big a deal, either.

It turns out that Precision Finding doesn’t work unless you have an iPhone 17, 17 Pro/Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max, or iPhone Duo. In other words, if your iPhone is more than a year old (or if you have an iPhone 17e), you just get regular ‘ol standard Find My just like you get with the older Siri Remote. The only difference is that it will play a chime, which is admittedly very useful, but probablty not worth $299.

So why does the new Apple TV remote require a very recent iPhone for Precision Finding when that has been a feature supported since the iPhone 11? It’s all about Apple’s new Bluetooth chip.

Earlier implementations of Precision Finding used Ultra Wideband (UWB)—in the device and in your iPhone—to pinpoint the direction and range to your device. That worked great, but it requires a dedicated chip, which means it costs more and takes up space. A new feature of the Bluetooth 6 specification is something called Bluetooth Channel Sounding. We wrote about this when Bluetooth 6 was introduced two years ago.

This feature lets compatible Bluetooth devices use the Bluetooth LE radio to perform range and direction calculations much like UWB does. That’s generally a good thing, as it gives you this feature without requiring dedicated hardware. But it also means that it only works if your iPhone has Bluetooth 6. And that means iPhones with the N1 chip: the iPhone Air and 17 or later, excluding the iPhone 17e.

So if you don’t have a very recent iPhone, that new Siri Remote gets you nothing more than a speaker to play the Find My chime. As if you needed another reason not to spend $299 on a new Apple TV 4K.