Amazon spent most of the Fire TV Stick 4K launch talking about speed. I get the instinct. Fire TV has carried a sluggish reputation for years, and the owner threads under the announcement went straight for that wound. The top reply called it “Faster for about three weeks until it slows down.”
Speed is the easy part to sell. The harder conversation is the software. The Fire TV Stick 4K runs Vega OS, Amazon’s own Linux-based platform, and with it go sideloading and developer options. Plenty of owners have already posted what they’re switching to.
I haven’t plugged one in. Everything below comes from Amazon’s announcement.
Apps open over 35% faster than on “a similarly priced 4K stick from another leading brand,” by Amazon’s count. You’d feel that one most in the minute before kick-off, when the match app should already be up and spinning.
Amazon never names the rival stick. That bugs me.
The remote interests me more than the chip. Its home button now has a metal surface of its own, and Amazon says Fire TV owners press that button over 100 million times a day. Finding it by touch in a dark living room should have been easy years ago. The star button, once kept for the pricier remote, can jump straight to your favorite app.
Direct Power is smaller news. Feed the stick from your TV’s USB port and one cable disappears from behind the screen.
Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos stay on the Fire TV Stick 4K Max. This model tops out at HDR10+. Fine for most TVs, a miss for anyone who bought a Dolby Vision panel.
Then there’s Vega OS. Amazon says it has added over 2,000 apps since the first Vega device, Spotify and VLC among them, and one long-time owner in the threads insists everything he uses still works. Others report the opposite. I can’t tell from here who’s right, and I suspect both camps are describing their own living rooms accurately, with the angriest voices belonging to people whose favorite apps never went through Amazon’s store in the first place and now have no way back onto the stick.
Every speed number comes from Amazon’s own testing. RAM isn’t listed in the announcement at all, and one commenter claims it’s 1 GB. I’d want that confirmed before trusting any of the percentages a year from now.
The Fire TV Stick 4K is easiest to recommend if you stick to the big streaming apps and have no interest in sideloading anything. I also like the stick format for a spare TV since there’s no box taking up space on the shelf.
Tinkerers should look elsewhere. So should anyone with a Dolby Vision TV.
The Fire TV Stick 4K gets the boring parts right, and I mean that as a compliment. Faster menus and a better remote matter more to me than another pile of features. Dolby Vision would have made the package easier to recommend, though. And if your first instinct with a streaming stick is to start tinkering with it, Amazon isn’t really building for you.