New Fire TV Stick 4K Max Review | The Best Amazon Fire Stick To Buy in 2023

Amazon has updated its Fire TV Stick 4K Max for 2023. The specs are a little better. The shape of the stick itself is slightly different. It’s pretty much the same Fire TV experience you’ve come to know and love.

But it’s the addition of the Ambient Experience — great screensaver backgrounds and useful widgets — that really make this stick stand out. And right now, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max is the only way you can get the Ambient Experience, without buying a whole new — and much more expensive — Amazon Fire TV Omni television.

And you get it all for well under $100.

BUY THE FIRE TV STICK 4K MAX

READ OUR FULL REVIEW

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VIDEO CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
01:04 Overview & What's New
02:21 Ambient Experience
03:26 Widgets
04:53 New AI Features
05:41 Final Thoughts

BEHIND THE SCENES

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[PhilNickinson]

Still a great stick. It'll be really interesting to see if any of the others get the Ambient Experience. (I wouldn't bet on it though.)

[theylied]

No offense, to me a new user of the fire stick, the majority of this video was useless. My only concern is the streaming experience itself. I don't care about the background, photographs, or the ambient experience.

[tomh]

If I don't care about the ambient experience and all that, is this worth upgrading from the 2021 4k max or is there not much of a difference?

[stopthefomo]

The current generation fire stick 4K is only $23 and it is definitely adequate for most people

[FrickDude]

This review felt next to useless. Literally played no content or compared content to other streaming players.

[rickwhitehead]

Amazon had it for $39.99 today (Nov. 13) so I bought one to replace the old Fire TV 4k stick I had. It was worth it for the ambient feature, faster processor and more storage.

[chibbyylol]

Dang it Nvidia. Give us a Shield TV Pro 2 cowards!!

[realtime]

Been thinking about getting a new stick for a while now. Nothing wrong with my old one, but it is almost 5 years old now and it is starting to show its age.

[christopheroliver]

Have they fixed the DV blank screen when playing back mkv ? Does it pass lossless audio, ATMOS TRUEHD / DTS:X ?

[MrBrianclaz]

The new Fire Stick also passes lossless Dolby TrueHD/Atmos via say Plex. The new Cube did this as well and now also the new Gen fire stick. This is also a pretty big upgrade

[IchinoseRodrigo]

Something I wanted to see testing was latency using the Home Theater mode of this device, using Echo Studio speakers as sound via eARC to hear the sound from the TV, and playing on the Xbox or even using an AppleTV 4k.

[PDillz]

Also is this worth adding to an already smart TV?

[davidcole]

As long as they continue to allow Side Loads of Application they are going to be a great choice. I do wish nVidia would come out with updated version of Shield. last model was 2019.

[ronpatterson]

Firestick & VPN do not work ? Does this confirm with your findings

[livingthedream]

Do the 4K sticks still work on non 4K tvs? Have an older tv for now I’d like to use this on and possibly keep for future use.

[Ishn]

I have a first model Fire TV Stick 4k Max, and I have issues playing certain video formats on PLEX. Does this version have the same issues?

[JCourtsk]

I have a 65 inch in Signa Fire TV, base model cheap, in my living room, purchased earlier this year. Mostly use it for DIRECTV Stream app, and I find it very laggy on the Fire TV. Would it be any faster with the Fire TV ultra stick?it's not laggy on my Apple TV 4K. Thank you

[TiagrajI]

Bought it today with prime. It works smoothly. And got more storage

[unleashthedog]

I still have the very first Fire TV (the square brick with sharp edges) and since it's starting to have some issues like stuttering just browsing the menu until a restart, I'm thinking of getting a new one. For $60 my reaction is to just get a used Apple TV. I'm going to keep my Prime subscription, but is there a benefit in having a Fire TV over the others?
PS: my Fire TV has even a USB port I can load content from, does any of the current devices have this?

[marklabonte]

General question on the state of streaming sticks: Any reason why TV Manufacturers refuse to support adding ports that feature USB-C-PD? It's a real chicken/egg problem, but would go a long way to realizing a TRUE plug-and-play streaming stick without having to figure out where to plug them in for power. Cheers!