Your 2017 Apple TV 4K Just Hit the End of the Road After 9 Years, Even Though the Box Under Your Television May Still Work Fine

Apple has finally published the release notes for tvOS 27, nearly two weeks after the update arrived on September 14.

That’s more useful than it sounds because Apple TV doesn’t show release notes when you install an update.

Unlike iPhone and Mac, there’s no screen explaining what’s new, so many smaller changes are easy to miss until Apple updates its support documentation.

Now we have the complete list, and tvOS 27 includes several additions Apple TV owners may not have noticed.

The update is available on the second-generation Apple TV 4K and newer. The original Apple TV 4K from 2017 is no longer supported.

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Apple Music gets two big upgrades

Apple Music now supports Hi-Res Lossless playback on Apple TV, bringing higher-resolution audio to compatible home theater setups.

AutoMix also makes the jump to the TV. Instead of simply ending one song and starting another, it uses beatmatching and time stretching to create smoother transitions between tracks.

The Podcasts app gets a more visible change with support for video podcasts. Shows that offer video can now be watched directly on your television through the redesigned Podcasts interface.

AirPlay should feel better as well. Apple says tvOS 27 improves the speed and responsiveness of connections when sending photos, videos and music from an iPhone, iPad or Mac to an Apple TV.

That improvement doesn’t add anything new to AirPlay, but it could be one of the changes you notice most often if you regularly send content from another Apple device to your television.

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Your Apple TV can create captions itself

Transcribed audio can generate captions for content that doesn’t already provide subtitles, expanding the amount of video you can watch with on-screen text.

Dynamic Text also arrives with tvOS 27, letting you choose a preferred text size that supported apps can use throughout their interfaces. The setting is available under Accessibility.

Apple has also added more granular parental controls. You can now block individual apps from launching, rather than relying entirely on broader content restrictions.

None of these additions fundamentally changes how Apple TV works, but several are easy to miss precisely because Apple doesn’t tell you about them when you update.

That’s especially strange for features such as Hi-Res Lossless, video podcasts, and automatic captions that you could have been using since September 14 without knowing they were added.

Apple’s full tvOS 27 release notes are now available nearly two weeks after the software itself.