So this is the new Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max in addition to being quite the mouthful
it's also the second version of the Stick and it's new as of September 2023. from
the outside it looks a whole lot like the first Fire TV Stick 4K Max I'm just gonna
call it Max now because that's ridiculous saying it over and over again maybe one
or two more times but anyway you get the idea so yeah it's still a Fire TV Stick
4K Max all right I did it once more already but this one does something actually more
than a few things that the others don't and it's going to do even more later this year
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and all that stuff right you did it all right get ready lean back chill out because we got a pretty
cool ambient experience coming right up so let's do the basics Fire TV Stick 4K Max the max it's
just called the Max cost 60 dollars before you get into any sort of sales price that's about
five bucks more than it used to be but for my money and just where this stands in the scheme
of pricing not a big deal so the internals haven't really changed all that much it has a slightly
faster Mediatek processor same Ram but it now has double the storage at 16 gigabytes now you might
never fill all that but there's actually pretty good reason for it and we'll get to that in a
second in in any case you always always want more storage has Dolby vision for HDR and Dolby Atmos
for audio if you're into that sort of thing and it also yeah has all the other HDR flavors that
you could possibly want and it also has Wi-Fi 6E on board it's not quite the newest standard but
it's really close so for all intents and purposes this is very much the same Fire TV Stick Max 4K
I'm gonna use the whole name a little bit that you've been using this whole time it's just
better still has all the apps still has all the Alexa still has all the Amazon features and that
user interface continues to get just a little bit better and better and better and better over time
Amazon's doing a really nice job with that keep it up now the main difference right now is the new
ambient experience previously this was only on the Amazon branded Fire TV uh TV the Omni Series right
we've done videos on that in the past looks really good think of it as one part screen saver and one
part widgets and now it's on the Fire TV Stick 4K Max and only on the max now I am a big fan of
screen savers on my TVs especially good ones you might have seen in other videos Apple I think is
still the king of this and Google has some really good ones too and on the Fire TV Stick 4K Max
Amazon's ambient experience is really good Amazon has a ton of high-res options here some are more
artistic than others but they're all great and they include information about what you're
looking at which I definitely enjoy there also are some backgrounds that include motion they're
pretty good but maybe not great sometimes the movement is just a little more subdued than I
would like and it's also just not as smooth as I would expect from this sort of thing it doesn't
ruin the experience by any means it's just not quite as nice as I was hoping for it's a fairly
small complaint though overall it's killer for a 60 device absolutely and then there are the
widgets so at launch Amazon's given us 10 of them there's weather calendar and reminders recipes
live TV music and audio smart home favorites Sticky notes what should I watch what to eat
and your Amazon deliveries if you just have to see them on the TV so they come in two sizes small and
large and they're pretty well done you can choose to have them on the screen all the time or you can
hide them away and if you have an OLED TV Amazon does a nice job of warning you that you're not
necessarily going to want to have a widget just frozen there because burn-in is real now exactly
how useful the widgets are it depends on how much Amazon stuff you use the cool thing here again is
that you don't have to have them on the screen all the time if you don't want them you can have them
show up and then disappear or you don't have to use them at all and by the way if none of
Amazon's own backgrounds tickles your fancy but definitely check them out they're really good
you can use your own pictures if you've uploaded them to Amazon photos but you'll need to make sure
that they are the right aspect ratio otherwise you're going to get black bars on the side and
nobody wants that regardless all good stuff my only complaint here they're occasionally laggy
when you're bouncing back and forth between the widgets or trying to open up a widget or trying
to get out of a widget I think it's kind of an inherent thing to just a platform that's based on
Android it's you know not uncommon for this sort of thing in a Fire TV Stick or for that matter in
Google TV I think it has to do with the platform itself and just what's powering it right but for
60 bucks I think I can put up with it now a couple other things that are coming to the Fire TV Stick
4K Max and actually other Amazon Fire TV Sticks later this year that we gotta look at at Amazon
HQ2 at their fall services and devices event that I was at so first is search results that
took advantage of Amazon's AI efforts they look like the usual search results but the information
you get is going to be better there's also some cool AI stuff coming to your images uh first you
can actually direct Alexa to just create to to make an AI generated picture it's really cool
and you can also use AI to make your own pictures look cool here's Daniel Roush at the Amazon event
make this photo watercolor style okay creating your background this will only take a few seconds
so that's it for the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max for my money this is absolutely the Amazon
Fire TV Stick to get it's not completely new or anything it's mostly an iterative update but the
addition of the ambient experience is a really really good one I don't know that I'd go out and
buy a whole brand new one if I already have the old Fire TV Stick 4K Max but if you're in the
market for a new one absolutely and again given that it tops out at 60 bucks before sales prices
just it's a no-brainer you absolutely get your money's worth so if you've got
any more questions on the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max go hit me up in the comments
down below hit the notification bell and subscription thing and all that stuff you
know what to do because we got more videos coming your way real soon see you next time