Amazon just made one of the best and more affordable streaming sticks even better, making the Fire TV Stick 4K Max the one to get.
The most important feature of any streaming stick probably isn’t listed on the side of the box. It’s not how much RAM it has. It’s not the size of the on-board storage. It’s not whether it has 4K (OK, it’s more than a little about that), and it’s not the Wi-Fi speed or the processor. And it’s not all the apps it has access to. The most important feature of the new Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max is the price. That’s really what determines where it fits not just within Amazon’s lineup of Fire TV devices, but also its place in the greater scheme of things against its closest competitor, Roku, which has its own line of relatively low-cost streaming sticks. Sure, the specs determine the price. But tell us how much you want to spend, and we’ll tell you the best streaming device to get. And the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, despite being an iterative update (there’s certainly nothing wrong with that) and despite being quite a mouthful to say (that we take a little issue with), it’s definitely the Fire TV Stick to buy. Here’s why. This isn’t just the Fire TV Stick. It’s not the Fire TV Stick 4K. This one is Max, which we can only assume is a step above Plus but still below Extreme. It’s a silly suffix tacked on to a product that itself mostly is an iteration on an iteration. That’s how these streaming sticks work. You have certain features at certain price points, so you’re guaranteed to make money no matter what. More on that below. Amazon’s own comparison chart spells it out quite well. 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. And they’re not unimportant boxes. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max is the first in the Amazon lineup to sport Wi-Fi 6, aka 802.11ax. 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. You shouldn’t necessarily expect warp-speed Wi-Fi, but you’ll have more than enough bandwidth to get the job done. 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. By comparison, the previous-generation Fire TV Stick 4K got about 200Mbps downstream on Wi-Fi 5, with similar pings. For those who are saying “Just grab the Ethernet adapter!” — let me stop you there. 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. 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. 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. In other words, stick to the Wi-Fi 6 built into the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. It’s plenty good.
