Should you upgrade to tvOS 18 right away?

By Phil Nickinson Published September 17, 2024

Another year has come and gone, and that means we’re getting new major versions of Apple’s operating systems. Enter: tvOS 18. It’s probably not what you’d consider to be a huge update. I’ve been using it in its various beta forms for a while now, and you’re not going to see it and feel out of place or anything. But there are some new features.

But that brings up a good question, which is something worth asking anytime there’s a major update: Should up go ahead and update to tvOS 18? There are two camps on this sort of thing.

There are some folks who exercise a good deal of patience when it comes to updates. They hold off and see what other folks experience first. They’re not in a hurry for the latest and greatest features. They don’t see a software update and feel compelled by some invisible hand to click that install button just as quickly as possible.

Why? For the simple reason that bad things do occasionally happy. Corrupted installations aren’t exactly unheard of, though I’d argue they’re also not the norm when it comes to Apple products. And when it comes to Apple TV (both the 4K and previous models), well, it simply doesn’t have the scale of phones and computers. So if there are problems, you’re less likely to hear about them.

Then there are the folks who hold off on updating because they fear the future and like things just the way they are, thank you very much.

On the other hand, there are those of us who have to update anytime there’s anything available to update. We’re compelled to do so by some unseen force. Nothing wrong with that, either. And in the case of tvOS 18, I think it’s a reasonable path if for no other reason than you’ll get Apple’s new InSight feature, which mimics the actor and show info you get on Prime Video, though it’s limited to Apple TV+ content for now.

The Enhance Dialogue feature is pretty cool, too. If you skip back a few seconds, it’s smart enough to realize that you probably did so to hear something again, so it’ll automatically pop up captions to help you out. Same goes if you mute whatever you’re watching — captions start automatically.

Plus you’ll get new screensaver options and can use your own images as Portraits.

There are a handful of other improvements, too, including a revamped Apple Fitness+ (which I still highly recommend trying out), as well as support for the 21:9 aspect ratio for projectors, which is cool.

Yeah, I’d go ahead and update your Apple TV to tvOS 18.0 if it hasn’t already done it for you. This isn’t a drastic redesign or anything. It’ll act exactly as it did in tvOS 17, which arguably was a bigger update in that regard.

It’s just that you’ll now have some new features. And who doesn’t love that?