Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) review: Inexpensive and feature-packed

After Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max, there are so few reasons to consider another streaming stick, you can count them on one hand. If you don’t have a 4K TV and have no plans to buy one, you probably don’t need this device. And if you need both an Echo speaker and a competent streaming stick, you might as well splurge on Amazon’s third-generation Fire TV Cube. And if you don’t think you’ll ever use Wi-Fi 6E at home, you can probably get away with the nearly identical Fire TV Stick 4K.

Otherwise, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max is the new champion of your living room. It’s speedy and responsive, simple to set up, and gives you access to HDR10 and Dolby Vision on one small device. The only caveat is that you’ll benefit most if you’re already tied into Amazon’s ecosystem. If you don’t have Prime, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max will be a pretty good, but not great, addition to your streaming setup.

Price and availability

You can pick up the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from any regular brick-and-mortar electronics store and Amazon itself (naturally). It regularly retails for $60, but we’ve seen it drop as low as $40 a few times over the past year. Your best bet is to wait until then or, even better, one of Amazon’s typical Prime Day sales, where you’ll probably find it for the lowest it’s going to get.

The similar-but-older Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K will save you $10 for a slightly less powerful device, but one that will feel just as speedy as the Fire TV Stick 4K Max.

What’s good about the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max?

A well-tuned upgrade

For only $10 extra, you get a decent upgrade to Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K, including a slightly faster quad-core processor (1.7GHz versus 2.0GHz), a slightly speedier GPU, and double the storage (8GB to 16GB). You’re most likely to notice that, as well as the boost to the streaming stick’s Wi-Fi capabilities (Wi-Fi 6E) and slightly nicer remote that now comes with an integrated IR blaster for controlling other devices in your home entertainment center.

I wouldn’t pay double the price of its predecessor for these extras, but $10 feels completely fair. Otherwise, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max should look familiar to anyone using one of Amazon’s streaming devices.

Assuming your TV can handle it, the streaming stick can output a 4K picture at up to 60Hz via its HDMI 2.1 connection (which requires an HDCP 2.2-ready connection on your TV to get that full 4K glory). Like the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K, the “Max” version supports both Dolby Vision and HDR+ and Dolby Atmos. And you can run all the major streaming services on it — you’re not just limited to Amazon Prime Video.

Assuming you have a Wi-Fi 6E router (most people don’t), and your Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max is in the same room as said router, given the lower range you’ll get on the 6GHz band, you’ll be sailing along at some of the fastest Wi-Fi speeds you can get. That means faster downloads, but it won’t really have much of an effect on your 4K streaming quality. (You don’t need that much wireless firepower to get a high-quality, 4K stream; even a 50-100 Mbps connection should be plenty.)

Once you’re up and running, the interface for the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max is the same as that of the company’s other streaming devices. On the interface’s front page, you’ll find a listing of various shows and movies you can access from connected services, along with customizable quick links to other services, like Netflix, Freevee, and Disney+.

You can even fire up some free games from Prime Gaming or Amazon’s paid Luna service, so long as you’ve connected a controller to the Fire TV Stick 4K Max via Bluetooth.

The Fire TV Stick 4K isn’t an Echo speaker, so you’ll need to use your Fire TV Stick 4K Max to benefit from the convenient Alexa button on the streaming stick’s remote. Hold it down to gain access to all of Alexa’s regular interactions, as well as the ability to make “sticky notes” on your streaming stick. These appear in the device’s exclusive (for now) Ambient Experience, which is kind of like a screen-saver-plus. You can use it to get information about upcoming calendar events, check out the weather forecast, play music, and more.

Heck, you can even use a fancy Amazon AI tool to create your own wallpaper from a prompt — a gimmicky but fun feature.

I loved the responsiveness of Amazon’s streaming stick, which was fast enough to load the various movies, TV shows, and apps I checked out. If you take a few minutes to set up its useful Equipment Control features, it’s similarly fast at powering your entertainment center up and down. It’s not quite as good as a universal remote, but it works in a pinch.

What’s bad about the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max?

Not much

There’s very little I didn’t like about the experience of using Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K Max. The biggest and most obvious is that you probably won’t get as much use out of some of its features if you’re not already bought into Amazon’s services—Prime gets you some games and shipping updates, which you can summon as a graphic on your TV using Alexa, in addition to all the various shows and films from Prime Video. The same is true for Amazon Kids+, a separate streaming service with content for the little ones at home.

Beyond that, I find the interface typically too cluttered for my tastes. The huge banner that runs across the top (that Amazon can’t resist using to highlight Prime Video content) eats up valuable screen space, and the interface, at times, can feel overwhelming with options and just generally like it’s yelling at you. It wouldn’t stop me from using the streaming stick; it just forces me to spend a little more time customizing some of these annoyances away.

Otherwise, my only other sticking point was that I couldn’t use AirPlay or Google Cast with the streaming stick. That said, I was able to use the clunkier Display Mirroring option within the Fire TV Stick’s settings to at least get my entire phone’s screen to appear on the TV, so that was a decent (though inelegant) solution. Of course, if you still want a device that can do more, you can still go with the Fire TV Cube instead.

Should you buy it?

This one’s a no-brainer

Amazon packs a ton of useful features and speedy performance into its inexpensive streaming stick. For just $40, if you catch one of Amazon’s frequent sales, you get an incredibly powerful device and a handy microphone for summoning Alexa. You can use it to stream anything you want in as high a resolution as it (usually) gets from all of your favorite services.

My only hesitation in recommending this specific device is that the Wi-Fi 6E connectivity isn’t much to celebrate. However, since you’re only saving $10 or so bumping down to the Fire TV Stick 4K, you might as well bite the bullet and go for Amazon’s slightly more future-proofed device. Its UI might feel cluttered, but that’s about the only real annoyance the Fire TV Stick 4K Max has against it. It doesn’t get much better (or cheaper) than this.