I’ll be connecting over wifi. Currently live in an apartment without the best coverage - should be okay at the tv but our current Xiaomi streamer gets awful speeds (phone does better) and our Samsung TV doesn’t do much better. 4K netflix and Youtube is fine but Plex streaming high bitrate 4K files is a gamble. In general there’s a lot of wifi congestion in our area.
I don’t have the option of running an ethernet cable. I was thinking of grabbing some 6e routers (I’d assumed the Apple TV supported 6e) but have discovered since that it doesn’t. I assume that the 4th gen Apple TV will support 6e - is it worth waiting? Will it actually make a difference? I saw some speed tests with wifi 6 vs 6e on the firestick 4k Max but they didn’t really show a difference in speeds.
As a side question, has anyone with a purely wifi Apple TV faced problems with connectivity?
Edit to add: aside from Plex, I also want to use the Apple TV for Steam Link gaming… I hear that both Plex and Steam have stutter issues for some, which is worrying. How big of a deal is this really?
The Apple TV wouldn’t benefit from any further 802.11 upgrades. WiFi 6 is already too fast for what the device is for… streaming. Media streaming averages are 5-15Mbps for your typical apps (Netflix, Hulu, etc). TV+ streams higher than all other providers… around 25-35Mbps. That being said, the Ookla Speedtest app on my Apple TV shows I get nearly 500Mbps over WiFi. So I literally always have a minimum of 400Mbps to spare… upgrading to WiFi 6e, 7, or hell, 10 will yield absolutely no performance benefits for a streaming device.
For anyone who does experience buffering on their Apple TV… buy a decent router and don’t set it up in the closet on the opposite side of the house.
It hasn’t peaked. The next frontier is old m# chips and expanding the gaming ecosystem. Maybe a split, appletv streamer and appletv gamer.
OP’s issue is he is in a dense apartment building with a lot of other hotspots competing for the same radio channels. WiFi 6 has a lot of tech to minimize the cross interference, but that will absolutely impact his performance and it will be nowhere near theoretical peak speeds. I used to have a corporate office WiFi network on WiFi 5 that would occasionally see a burst of noise that would basically offline our WiFi. No idea the source, but we were 1 floor away from rooftop antennas and could see a radar dome out the window. Never did figure out the cause.