Amazon's New Fire TV Stick 4K Is Faster And Ditches The Power Brick
If your entertainment center looks like a chaotic nest of tangled cords sprawling every which way from your television, Amazon has some relief on the way. Amazon just refreshed its Fire TV Stick 4K streaming dongle, and unlike past models, it draws power directly (and entirely) from a USB port on your TV. Yes, that means there is still a cord, but it's potentially much shorter. More importantly, there is no dedicated power brick.
This is the path Amazon is taking with its streaming hardware, and we imagine consumers will be happy about it. The Direct Power feature, introduced earlier this year with the Fire TV Stick HD, helps clean up the clutter and enables the dongle to pull the juice it needs straight from your television's USB port using the included USB-C cable. The move doesn't add bulk, either.
Faster Silicon And A Tactile Remote Redesign
Beneath the sleek form factor, Amazon baked in some performance upgrades compared to past models. According to Amazon, the refreshed Fire TV Stick 4K delivers 35% faster app launches and up to 20% faster content playback, backed by Wi-Fi 6 connectivity to keep streams stable in congested wireless environments.
"Amazon also tested the speed of Fire TV Stick 4K against the built-in experience of three 4K smart TVs from top-selling brands, measuring the average across the three most popular apps on Fire TV. Fire TV Stick 4K played content faster than all three of the TVs we tested," Amazon says.
The refreshed dongle runs Amazon's proprietary Vega OS, handling up to 4K at 60fps alongside support for HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and Dolby Atmos audio pass-through.
Beyond the streaming stick itself, Amazon overhauled the bundled remote. The new voice remote features a revised shape with more distinct, tactile buttons designed to let you find mute, volume, and playback controls more easily in a dark room.
As part of the refresh, Amazon also announced that it is streamlining its Fire TV Stick family. What it essentially boils down to is abandoning (or combining) the Fire TV Stick 4K Select and Plus models, leaving Amazon with the following three models, as well as its Fire TV Cube:
- Fire TV Stick HD: $39.99 (on sale for $15.99)
- Fire TV Stick 4K: $59.99
- Fire TV Stick 4K Max: $84.99 (on sale for $44.99)
- Fire TV Cube: $199.99 (on sale for $89.99)
The refreshed Fire TV Stick 4K is available now, though it's the only one of the bunch that is not currently on sale. That could change soon, though, with Amazon getting ready to host its Prime Big Deal Days event next week (October 6-7).
