Most people keep their Fire TV on all the time, so how long it takes to power on isn’t that important. However, many people power on their Fire TV every single time they sit down to use it. The most common way to do so is to connect a Fire TV Stick to the USB port of a TV, even though you shouldn’t, because many TV USB ports lose power when the TV is turned off. Whether you power off your Fire TV every time you’re done using it or you frequently reboot it to fix an issue, a device that boots up quickly can be quite convenient. I tested how quickly every Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, and Fire TV Cube model powers on and here are the results.
Power to each Fire TV model was cut off completely for a few seconds and timing started as soon as power was connected. The timer was stopped when the home screen was fully loaded, including all visible icons and image thumbnails. Each model was tested 3 times and the 2 fastest times were averaged for the final score.
Something worth noting is that the four fastest booting devices are the four Fire TV models running Fire OS 7, the newest version of Amazon’s opperating system. Since these are not the four most powerful Fire TV models, it seems to indicate that the OS version makes more of a difference to boot time than raw performance. With the exception of the 2nd-gen Fire TV, the next batch of models in the ranking are Fire OS 6 devices and Fire OS 5 devices make up the slowest group.
The 1st-gen Fire TV is an odd one out at just shy of 2 minutes to boot, even though it is still more powerful than many of the devices that boot more quickly. I suspect that this is the case because the original Fire TV is the only device that uses a Qualcomm SoC, which may have a much longer boot process than the other models which mostly use Amlogic and MediaTek ships. Another strange result is the 2nd-gen Fire TV Stick being only a few seconds faster than the aging 1st-gen Fire TV Stick, even though the 2nd-gen model is about twice as powerful as the 1st-gen Fire TV Stick. The 1st-gen Fire TV Stick is the only one that uses a Broadcom processor, so that may be the deciding factor.
If you’re the type that keeps your Fire TV powered off or you reboot often, it may be worth upgrading to a newer model for boot time improvements alone, since the newest devices, regardless of price, are the ones that boot the quickest. As was evident when I tested which Fire TV models launch apps the quickest, raw processing power certainly isn’t the only way to determine everyday performance. These boot time results are another way weaker Fire TV models can outperform more powerful devices.
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Another good read Elias but for me, it would be beyond aggravating if I had to wait for my FTV’s to boot up every time I used them. They consume minimal power and data when in sleep mode.
Interesting test. I wonder what the bottleneck is for most these streaming devices. The APU, storage, ram, etc.. I’m not an engineer, but considering they are solid state electronics, with no moving parts, I am often surprised they are not quicker.
Firestick 4k is a lot lower on the list than Id expect.
Not bad! Just timed my FireTV 3 and by golly gee, 49 seconds! Interesting. Don’t want to leave it on all the time as that just stays online. using data, regardless of how small of an amount.
Ever since I’ve updated to 6.2.8.1/4054,the boot times for the Fire TV Stick 4K have been taking longer to boot. When I was on 6.2.7.7/3033, the boot times for that version have loaded faster so the device hasn’t always booted so slow until now.