Even when they were first released, streaming sticks were intended as a workaround. You probably bought one because the software on your TV was slow, too cluttered to make sense of, or just stopped getting new apps after a few years, and $29.99 feels (and still would feel) like a fair price to get around those issues.
That logic has held for around a decade, but stopped this month when Amazon raised the price of every Fire Stick on the market. It was the last big name that hadn't done this, and a streaming stick now costs more than the thing it was supposed to fix. That, fundamentally, changes consumer behavior as well.
Amazon was the holdout, until it wasn't
The turnaround tells us more than the price hike does
When I wrote about the summer's widespread price rises a couple of weeks ago, Amazon was the only company that had held its list prices steady, but I also said then that its decision to cut features should worry people. The Fire TV Stick 4K Select and the new Fire TV Stick HD on Vega OS (its Linux-based platform) shipped with 1GB of RAM, compared with 2GB on the older Fire OS stick. There was also Wi-Fi 5 instead of Wi-Fi 6, and no Dolby Vision at all.
Five days later, however, it had seemingly chosen the worst of both worlds: the Fire TV Stick 4K Max went from $59.99 to $84.99, and the 4K Plus went from $49.99 to $69.99. Similarly,…