There’s also nothing new on the app side. That’s unchanged, since there’s no microphone of any sort tucked into the stick itself.
If you’re going to be using Alexa with your Fire TV Stick 4K Max, you’ll be doing so via the Alexa remote. Of course, your TV and sound system will need to support all that, too, if you intend on making any use of it. It still supports 4K resolution with Dolby Vision, HDR10+ and HLG for high dynamic range, and Dolby Atmos for audio. The other basic specs remain the same as the older Fire TV Stick 4K. But, still, Amazon really does need to get into the double digits sooner rather than later, and it’s only a matter of time before our patience really starts to wear thin.
But given that this is Amazon we’re talking about and not some no-name importer that just slaps Android on top of some hardware and calls it a day, we’re slightly less worried. That it’s still based on Android 9 and not something newer ( Android 12 is currently being released just now) is a bone of contention for some, and certainly at least a slight cause for concern. You’ve undoubtedly been using the new Fire TV OS user interface that rolled out earlier in 2021. If you’re a current owner of an Amazon Fire TV Stick, you know what to expect. Phil Nickinson/Digital Trends What’s still in the Fire TV Stick 4K Max The 2021 Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max looks exactly like the 2018 Fire TV Stick 4K - save for the logo. On screen, there’s really no difference.Īnd it now supports picture-in-picture, if that’s a thing you have to have.
The older stick just has the Amazon Smile.
In fact, the two are darned near twins in person, with the only visible difference the “Fire TV” moniker added onto the casing. I was flipping back and forth between the 2018 Fire TV Stick 4K and the new Max and immediately had no idea which was plugged in without actively checking. If you’re like us and are dumb enough to have more than one Fire TV Stick laying around, you’ll quickly forget which is which. In other words, it looks and acts pretty much like the Fire TV Sticks of yore. The point is those are important and obvious updates, but also certainly not something that’ll change the way you watch TV on Amazon Fire TV. If it’s the sort of thing you think you can notice over the older Fire TV Stick 4K, you’re probably lying, are an engineer, or are running the two devices side by side. If that’s the sort of thing you care about, good on ya. And the processor has been updated, too, to a quad-core Mediatek MT8696 at 1.8GHz. Not that 2 gigabytes is a lot, and it’s only a half-gig more than the Fire TV Stick 4K. The Max also has a little more RAM, which is important because it’s an Android-based device, and Android still needs all the RAM it can get. It’s plenty good.Įlsewhere, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max ships with the latest Alexa Voice Remote, which came out in April 2021 and has been redesigned ever so slightly, with a few extra buttons and features. In other words, stick to the Wi-Fi 6 built into the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. And in my case, that means getting around half the speed as I was seeing on Wi-Fi, to say nothing of not getting close to taking advantage of my true-Gigabit fiber connection. That adapter - which provides power as well as the wired network connection - is a 10/100 device, meaning it’s actually going to top out at a 100Mbps connection anyway. You’re almost certainly going to want to just go ahead and use Wi-Fi with the Fire TV Stick 4K Max over Amazon’s own Ethernet adapter, which isn’t included in the box anyway. By comparison, the previous-generation Fire TV Stick 4K got about 200Mbps downstream on Wi-Fi 5, with similar pings.įor those who are saying “Just grab the Ethernet adapter!” - let me stop you there. Connected wirelessly to an Eero Pro 6 (conveniently, another Amazon-owned product), I was pulling upward of 250Mbps downstream, with ping times between 20ms and 25ms. You shouldn’t necessarily expect warp-speed Wi-Fi, but you’ll have more than enough bandwidth to get the job done. That means it’ll take advantage of the latest wireless standards if you’ve got a Wi-Fi 6 router, or be ready for when you do. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max is the first in the Amazon lineup to sport Wi-Fi 6, aka 802.11ax. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max ticks a couple more boxes than the Fire TV Stick 4K, which at this point is three years old. More on that below.Īmazon’s own comparison chart spells it out quite well.
You have certain features at certain price points, so you’re guaranteed to make money no matter what. It’s a silly suffix tacked on to a product that itself mostly is an iteration on an iteration.
This one is Max, which we can only assume is a step above Plus but still below Extreme.