Amazon has taken care of the larger part of the living room with the new Fire TV Omni Series — the first-ever Amazon-built televisions — but it hasn’t forgotten about the smaller side. Enter the new Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. As the name implies, it’s basically the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K — already the best Amazon Fire TV device for most people — just made even better. Mostly.
You’ve still got support for 4K resolution. You’ve still got support for Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and Dolby Atmos. You’ve still got the newish Alexa Voice Remote. It’s still, well, a stick.
And perhaps most important is that it lands at a very approachable $55.
But new this time around — and this is the part that makes the Max the stick to get — is the addition of support for Wi-Fi 6 (aka 802.11ax, for those who refuse to follow the new naming convention). That means better networking, allowing for greater range and speed. And that means a better streaming experience for you, most likely. (Everyone’s home networking experience is going to be different of course.)
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And for the gamers, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max will support Luna, Amazon’s cloud gaming service.
And that’s all enabled by upgraded internals. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max is 40% more powerful than the Fire TV Stick 4K, Amazon says. It sports a new quad-core 1.8GHz processor. It’s got 2 gigabytes of RAM. And like the new Amazon Fire TV Omni Series, it’s got Alexa Home Theater running out of the box, which means you can hook it up to any Amazon Echo speakers you want.
And to go one further — the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max has earned Energy Star certification and sports Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly badge. Its packaging also is made up of 97% wood fiber-based materials from responsibility managed forests or recycled sources.
The introduction of the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max doesn’t mean the death of the Fire TV Stick 4K. Amazon says it will continue to be sold. And while Amazon didn’t give us any indication that it was a while-supplies-last sort of thing, it also didn’t give any sort of timeline for a possible switcheroo. As it stands today, the Fire TV Stick 4K is listed at retail for $50, but is currently being sold on a “limited-time deal” for $40. Also still available are the 2019 Amazon Fire TV Cube, the 2020 Fire TV Stick Lite, and the 2020 third-generation Fire TV Stick.
