Mine is that they’re crap. We’ve had several die on us over the years, and our latest firestick keeps losing the wireless connection and saying ‘network not available’. Even a reboot doesn’t bring it back up. Then after 5 or 10 minutes it inexplicably returns.
I thought at first it was an issue with our router, or our internet provider that often has 5 minute mini-outages, but I’ve established that there’s a working wireless connection with another device while the firestick was down several times now.
I realize that since they’re inexpensive they’re probably cheaply made, but I’ve had Bic lighters last longer.
I think you’ve answered your own question here. But to expand on that - unless the failure time is really egregious, I would not classify this as a design mistake. Given the rapid progress of technology in this area, I honestly wouldn’t want them to produce something more expensive with more robust hardware. I’d expect to throw it away and upgrade to newer tech in a year.
We’re on our second Fire Stick; the first one started to get glitchy after about four or five years.
I also have Fire Sticks for my parents, on both of their TVs (but on my Amazon account); we’ve had a similar experience with those, and recently replaced the older of the two devices for them.
How long do they last for you ? I actually just replaced a couple of 4 or so year old Rokus with Firesticks because they became a pain in the ass and required re-booting pretty often - but since they only went about 3 years before starting to have problems, I wouldn’t expect Firesticks to last much longer than that. And even if the Firesticks work perfectly for longer than 3 years, chances are that there will be new features and I will want to upgrade at some point.
I bought three Firesticks at the same time. One failed after 2.5 years, and i suspect another is about to shit the bed at 3 years. I think MTBF is about 3 years if you’re lucky.
The wife replaced a fire stick that died with a fire cube, it seems a little better and more robust. The other one is starting to get wonky and won’t play anything on IMDB TV. It’s still better then the smart tv offering it’s connected to.
Fairly good and we have 5 of them. I had 1 remote fail, and one we replaced because it was getting too laggy. That laggy one was their original 4K model and actually was called a fire TV not a fire stick, and was a bit larger then the stick and had a short dongle instead of the ability to plug it directly in. To be fair that one that was laggy was near full and also had unapproved apps sideloaded to expand functionality which may have caused the lag situation.
Bought a firestick in 2018, and an additional one in 2019. Replaced both of them last fall, though to my recollection only one of them was misbehaving. So, 2-3 years lifespan.
One is from March 2018 and one from November 2019. Both are working fine. The older one is used more and has sideloaded apps on it. Guess I’m running ahead of the average.
Looks like we bought ours in November 2017, and it’s still doing fine. I also bought one in 2020 for my mom‘s house, it gets less used, but it’s still working fine.
I’ve had both a Tivo Stream and Firestick and Tivo died in less than a year. It was replaced under warranty and the replacement also died but the Firestick lives on.
My opinion based on the above and other reviews . . . it’s a crapshoot.
I have one that I bought in 2015, then kept in a drawer and forgot about for a while, and started using in 2018 or so. Still works fine. For a while I got frustrated with it because it would often lose wifi, but I found that this is usually when I use it shortly after plugging it in - I use it only occasionally and don’t keep it plugged in all the time, but rather set it up when I want to watch something on it. If you give it a few minutes of heads-up before usage, the connection remains stable, or so I have found.
Same - mine lives on the back of my smart TV. Also has ample space for air circulation so it can cool itself effectively, that also can impact electronic components.
do they run off the tv power or do they have their own power supply?
The reason I ask this is the first stand-alone Roku stick I bought died because unknown to me my cousin’s tv didn’t really have enough power to run it so it burned its self out
I found this out when I put it in the tv and unlike the first one it told me it needed the provided power cord which the first one didn’t have … and that was almost a year ago … so that might be a problem for you