Recent trends in the Fire TV Stick 4K sale prices appear to indicate a new model is on the horizon, but it’s probably not what you think. Most people associate bigger and better sales as an indicator that a manufacturer is trying to clear out stock of an existing model to make way for a new upcoming model, but that’s not the case with Fire TVs and other Amazon devices. The sale price of the Fire TV Stick 4K has actually been getting worse lately and here’s why that’s an indicator that a new model is close to being revealed.

As with most electronic devices, deals on Fire TV models tend to slowly get better the longer a particular model has been available. Take the $39.99 3rd-gen Fire TV Stick, for example, which reached a low of $27.99 by the end of 2020, its first year on the market. By mid-2021 it hit a new low of $22.99 which was followed up by a new low of $19.99 in late-2021. Then, in 2022, it reached a new low of $16.99, which is still the lowest price it has ever been.

While most Fire TV models follow this trend of slowly reaching lower and lower all-time low prices as the model ages, the exception tends to be at the end of a model’s life when the sale prices often get worse in the last year. I believe this is because Amazon stops manufacturing outgoing models early and doesn’t want to run out of the outgoing models before the new model is announced. The simplest way to make a limited supply of the outgoing model last long enough is to make sales for that model less appealing. I expect that Amazon would rather be left with a stockpile of the old model after the new model is released, which can then be sold on Woot or Amazon at a steep discount, instead of having a period of time where neither the old nor new model is available.

That leads us to the Fire TV Stick 4K, which is now showing this type of behavior with its sale pricing. The $49.99 Fire TV Stick 4K, which was first released in 2018 before being updated with a new remote in 2021, reached an all-time low price of $24.99 in 2019. While its all-time low price hasn’t dropped any further, it did become more and more common over the years, to the point that $24.99 became the everyday sale price during most of 2021 and 2022.

That leads us to this year where, despite the Fire TV Stick 4K being readily available for $24.99 during 2022, it has never dropped below $29.99 in 2023 and hasn’t even dropped below $31.99 since March. You might think that inflation is to blame and that all sale prices are just worse these days than they have been in the past, but that’s not the case. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max first hit its all-time low price of $34.99 in 2021 and it has been available for that same all-time low price during at least 9 different sales this year. The poor sale prices are unique to the Fire TV Stick 4K.

It’s not a stretch to guess that the Fire TV Stick 4K, which is the oldest model in the current Fire TV lineup, will soon be replaced by a new model. However, being the oldest model certainly doesn’t guarantee it will be the next model to be replaced. In the past, Amazon has kept older Fire TV models in the lineup while replacing models that were newer first, so the Fire TV upgrade cycle can be unpredictable. Most notably, Amazon replaced the 2017 Fire TV pendant with the Fire TV Stick 4K in 2018 and replaced the 2018 Fire TV Cube with a new model in 2019, all while the aging 2016 Fire TV Stick remained in the lineup until 2020.

That said, the recent worsening of Fire TV Stick 4K sale prices, combined with it being the oldest model, is a strong indication that it will be replaced with a new model very soon. Amazon typically announces new Fire TV models in September and releases them in October, so that’s likely when we’ll hear about a replacement for the current Fire TV Stick 4K. If I had to guess as to what a new Fire TV Stick 4K model will offer, I expect it will have similar performance to the Fire TV Stick 4K Max but without some of the perks, like 2 GB of RAM or WiFi 6. Let’s just hope it’s finally the first Fire TV Stick model with more than 8 GB of storage.