Amazon's attitude towards its Kindle device customers is one of lofty disregard.
Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc.
But they appear to exult in dashing the hopes of their customers, or at the very least they don't care about them at all. They've doubled down on no-key devices with stupid pens, pointless and poorly-implemented color, and tiny or excessively large form factors with little in between. It's kind of crazy just how much they don't seem to care.
The subtext of the article indicates that the problem isn't discontinuing support alone, but discontinuing support without offering those customers a reasonable replacement for their old devices that had keys and buttons. (Even if it's just a couple of buttons.)
It's not. It's really not. It's 14 years of you can still access the store and buy stuff. That's not that good. You can buy a DVD and it'll still work on 25+ year old players. You can still buy digital content on an almost 20 year old PS3, you can use iTunes purchases on an original iPod from 25 years ago. Even in the eBook space you can get a new DRM'd purchase on a Sony PRS-500 from 2006 with Adobe Digital Editions.
These Kindles were not getting firmware updates (outside of maybe security certificates), they weren't getting new features or patches. You could just get new content.
I don’t know how I feel about it. I’ve been on one side, looking at usage numbers of older iOS versions, and arguing that low single digit percentages were fine to stop supporting with the new version.
On the other hand, I view my kindle as an appliance, and I don’t need it to have updated functionality. I think this is true of many electronics: digital cameras, printers, misc USB peripherals, etc. I believe Amazon could easily support the APIs it uses, and keep delivering me books that I’ve paid for or borrowed.
Financially, I suspect the kindle devices have a much longer lifetime than iPhones do, and Amazon is still making $$ off of old kindles.
If there were TLS concerns, a partial disablement (ex: can’t buy books from the device) would be way more acceptable than a complete cutoff. I’ve seen suggestions that it’s a DRM issue, and if that’s the primary motivation, it’s pretty disappointing.
I'm supporting a 30 year old product, the oldest one in the field are 20+ years old, we still support them.
I'm just in the process of developing a lifecycle policy, being able to cut off support for a 12 year systems would make my life much more full of joy.
(This may be a very ungenerous reading of your comment, so my apologies if this is not what you mean.)
The phrase that jumps out at me is:
> being able to cut off support for a 12 year systems would make my life much more full of joy
I think this is a nearly-poetical capturing of the core problem.
The focus is on the joy and well-being of the maintainer, not the impact to all the people who will be impacted by this change. Possibly some people rely on these devices and it adversely impact their joy and livelihood when support is ended.
> Possibly some people rely on these devices and it adversely impact their joy and livelihood when support is ended.
This happens over and over again in tech.
its true and i agree with you as a user
on the other hand, some software gets harder and costlier to support the longer its out there (think spec changes, security issues, updates in law etc), and even paying a normal subscription for it can cause roi to go negative, especially when factoring in opportunity cost for a business (help the old users or spend that time/money making a new feature for the majority)
my thought on it is if its a subscription, maybe for some software, the longer someone uses the old version the subscription cost could go up slowly, or if its a one-time purchase, after x years they could just buy a support ticket or something...? for ad-supported software i have no ideas...
We only had to, because some buerocrats certified IE6 for some processes and did not bother to update with the real world that moved beyond that piece of garbage. So ... thanks for bringing back bad memories.
You try building software with a version of Delphi that wont run on something newer than windows 7 and tell me how well that works out for you.
Some of those customers cannot be upgraded without hardware replacement, we can sell them a brand new system that will do everything (and more) their old one will, but they dont want to spend the money, and we are happy to take the money for support (the old CAPEX vs OPEX argument).
Some of this is sorta easy, its COTS hardware, but we also have much older systems that due to component obsolescence I simply cannot build replacements anymore. 10+ years of support ought to be enough for 90% of the products out there, at some point the answer really is “upgrade your hardware” - we didn’t sign up to indefinitely support not just hardware (much of which we cannot build spares for) much less the software ecosystem around the hardware.
Long term I plan on increasing support renewal costs for systems that are older than 10 years old to encourage hardware refreshes.
Like I still have to have XP VM’s to build firmware for older products, when is it reasonable to cut off service and support?
Supporting is a word that means many different things.
It’s ok to stop providing updates to old software and hardware.
It’s OK to not support ancient devices when writing news software.
It’s not ok to make old devices inoperable if they are using the old software and don’t need updates.
Will my old Kindle stop being able to show me the books I bought and downloaded to it? Or will it become impossible to buy new books? If it’s the earlier, it’s borderline criminal. If it’s the latter, I’m unhappy but understand realities.
This isn't about hardware "lasting", it's about basic software functionality on older hardware intentionally being disabled. Somewhat similar to Apple's Batterygate.
This is nothing at all like Apple. This is like having to continue to support BMP files in the browser for the next 20 years while fixing any potential exploits that are discovered and deciding there aren’t enough users to justify that expense and risk.
Nobody is insisting that the physical kindles last forever, not that the software that they run be upgraded to support all the new bells & whistles of newer devices.
The point is that e-books are basically a data format plus a reader, and if the data format hasn't changed (it hasn't) and a reader is still working, what is gained by preventing that reader from being given new data to present?
amzn doesn't have to "provide support" for old kindles, but they also don't need to prevent them from downloading ebooks.
This isn’t sabotage, this is deprecation. Keeping old systems working that communicate with servers is a constant expense and a security vulnerability. No one can afford it.
I have a customer that had to be talked into ending support for a product they built in the 80s and provided unlimited, material cost only, repair plan for.
They replaced the product, but they kept buying the parts and updating the software for the old one. And customers were absolutely still sending back their broken ones getting at cost replacements.
It was like looking at a well engineered, thoughtfully maintained hole in the bottom of a cruise liner.
There are companies that will make deals with tens of thousands of book publishers and provide storage and access for millions of books, magazines and comics? I suppose they will do it for free?
For (others) reference the oldest bits of code in our software are from the mid-late 90’s and the oldest systems still paying for support rely on parts to build that is not available at any price, its all just made of unobtainium, whereas I can sell them a brand news that does everything they have today and more.
I'm not sure if they ever changed away from it, but early generation kindles were running an old version of embedded java (4 I think? Pre-generics), that was already quite painful to deal with, with the team having to maintain their own forks, build tools etc. because nothing supported it. Reportedly there wasn't a way to actually upgrade the version either. While I wish they'd support them longer, I'm not surprised that they've finally decided it's not worth it.
It seems they’ve gone out of their want to make them useless. They could have ended official support, while still allowing users to download ebooks from the store and side loading them through a computer. However, before killing support, they eliminated the ability to download ebooks to the computer.
If you don't allow the device to connect to the internet, yes. Kindles are somewhat infamous for updates that wipe storage if they think you are side loading pirate ebooks
> Kindles are somewhat infamous for updates that wipe storage if they think you are side loading pirate ebooks
Source? I've never heard of this, and I used to work there, including building the OS from source (though my contributions to the OS were pretty minimal). If you just put a .mobi file onto the storage, how does it have any idea where it came from?
> If you don't allow the device to connect to the internet, yes
Why is that a problem for a device which has been EoL'd?
Only if they are DRM-free. And only if they are in a compatible format. It's a solvable problem for techies in a lot of instances but for mainstream users it's pretty close to bricking.
If only you knew the lengths amazon went to to keep supporting these devices. Stopping support is emblematic of the Jassy era, of amazon becoming just like any other bigco. This would've been unthinkable under Bezos.
It's not like old books are particularly rare and fragile either (although many which did not use acid-free paper can deteriorate quite rapidly); I have a few from the early 19th century, which are still in good condition.
(They have also been scanned and are available on archive.org; the copyright is long expired and they're public domain.)
I'm sad that Apple cut off support for my iPod. It still takes a charge and is a joy, except that most of the apps no longer work, because what they connect to is gone.
I used to be able to read books on it and watch Netflix.
My iphone is a boat anchor next to the sleek, slick iPod.
My ps2 has Ethernet, so does my Xbox 360. They're two different phases of online access. The ps2 I wouldn't worry about putting on the Internet. The 360 is a bit different because it has firmware updates. That said, afaik Microsoft has not tried to remotely disable the 360, which is about 20 years old. Xbox live even worked a couple years ago when I really wanted to play rez. I think they disabled xbl finally but they didn't brick my console or make it not work less.
So it's a choice.
Oh the PS2, as in the one that Sony sabotaged and removed an advertised feature, of OtherOS?
They only had a joke of a payout, and no criminal charges? Thats the console youre using as an example???
If we actually had real jurisprudence for the Public, Sony execs would be in prison for felony hacking, and the payout would have been treble the cost of console payable to each owner. Then lawyer fees would be on top of that (not removed from treble damages).
You can just as easily insert an NES cartridge today as when it launched, and you can just as easily copy a .mobi file over USB to a Kindle as when it launched, both without using the internet.
It says a lot about our world that artificially discontinuing a fully functional device (thankfully mine are offline and jailbroken) is "pretty incredible".
I think that's kinda different - these repair shops could repair anything because things were repairable and because people had the skill to do so, and because the financial reality meant that repairing something almost always made more sense than buying new. I still know these people who are happy to do soldering on modern TV motherboards to fix them, but it's just very hard to justify financially in Western economies. I once shipped an entire HiFi system to a repair shop in Poland because a guy there could fix it for equivalent of €50, even with shipping the thing there and back it was worth it. Meanwhile my local repair shop wanted €100 just to diagnose the issue.
You can get HDMI to analog converters for pretty cheap for use with streaming devices. You can also get devices that will receive digital OTA signals directly and output them to analog signals.
Yeah, I do not really see the problem here. These devices are ancient and the panic is unwarranted. The older Kindles can be jailbroken if anyone cares that much.
I think there is a smaller argument that the newer Kindles don't feel as nice. The Oasis was the pinnacle of e-reader hardware design, and it'll be sad when they stop supporting it, but it certainly won't be worthy of a news article or this kind of reaction.
> The Oasis was the pinnacle of e-reader hardware design, and it'll be sad when they stop supporting it, but it certainly won't be worthy of a news article or this kind of reaction.
To me it would. If they don't have a similar device released by that time.
It would get me motivated enough to finally de-DRM all the books on my device (or pirate copies I can't otherwise decrypt) and copy them to a third party something like a Kobo Reader or whatnot.
I am firmly in the Kindle ecosystem sort of by accident and inertia, but if they were to end support of the only device that meets my needs (page turn buttons and waterproof - which for the latter to be useful you need the former) it'd be the end of Kindles for me forever, and I'd certainly bitch a lot about it on-line!
If they end support for it 12 year after release but offer a reasonable upgrade path? I'd grin and bear it. 12 years is a decent amount of time for a $200 device.
Isn't it already too late for that?
The devices were made obsolete in part to disable known methods of de-DRM kindle books.
It is quite possible you won't be able to de-DRM anything if you try right now, and any point in the future.
> Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc.
WWII fighter plane with red spots on it dot gif.
The vast majority of people who buy Kindles simply read books on them and don’t repeatedly cry online about features that are never coming back.
I’ve bought about 10 of the things dating back to 2012 either because I wanted to have the latest model or because I wanted to give one as a gift. They are all amazing devices.
I’ve never thought, “boy I better go online and complain about this one.” I’ve just been too busy buying and reading books on them!
The reason people complain is because the old kindles used to have buttons, and honestly the touch screen is really fucking janky if you're used to the page turning buttons of the kindle 4, or the onscreen keyboard is janky if you're used to the kindle 3g.
And the sad part is that there's no best of both. You can't get a kindle paperwhite with buttons.
No amount of "getting used to buttonless" can keep a touchscreen from registering water droplets as touch.
So until they can figure out how to make touch screen work in those conditions, any device released without page turn buttons is useless to me.
It's not a preference thing for me. It's simply a physical requirement for my environment.
Yes, I do understand I'm a rather niche use-case and don't really expect them to pander to me. But I will be vocal about it just so they know I exist! There are at least dozens of us!
The fact I can continue to buy refurbished Oasis units whenever I leave one in airplane seatback pocket is the only reason I'm still on the Kindle ecosystem. The second I cannot make that work it's off to third party for me and they will lose an infinitesimal portion of their captured audience for future book purchases.
I left my Kindle in the airplane seatback pocket. I got it back because taped to the back of it was my name, phone #, and email. I was very happy to get it back!
Why 15 years? Why should I ever have to accept things getting worse? Isn't the point of progress that things get better?
There's multiple touch zones (which aren't visible or marked), there's multiple gestures you can interact with, and it's so slow and janky enough that you never know what will happen when you touch it.
Will it go forwards? Or backwards? By one page? Or a dozen? Will it open the settings? Or change the brightness? Or just close the book? You never know.
I want to lose myself in the book, I want to forget the device even exists, not fight the device for half a minute whenever it decides to go forward by 11 pages, open the settings, change the font and brightness just because I wanted to go one page back
> Are you normally reading in a moving vehicle or something?
Indeed I am! My primary use case for the kindle is to use it on the train.
> which has much larger touch zones than the normal Kindle software.
That may actually be the reason why. The regular software is extremely sensitive to gestures and has small touch zones, so it's easy to miss the zone, or trigger a gesture, instead of clicking what you want to click.
I also frequently have to go back a page or two and re-read a section or two, so if I read physical books I always have my fingers placed so I can go back a page or two easily, and on the kindle that works a lot less reliably (especially due to the ~500ms latency on the paperwhite).
Wheras on the Kindle 4 with the forward/back buttons on both sides it was really convenient to actually go back and forth (and instant, as flipping a page back or forth on the kindle 4 never triggered a full display refresh)
I've gone back to physical books. Even if that means carrying huge hardcover textbooks that weigh more than a pound, the reading experience is much nicer than a Kindle if I can flip between e.g. an explanation and the corresponding figure easily back and forth.
Which I can't with a touchscreen kindle with a "back" zone that's 5mm wide and easy to miss. And even then the back zone only works if I keep the finger perfectly still, as even the slightest movement is interpreted as a "forwards" gesture.
And no, it's not cheaper. They were 40€/80€ back then, which would be 54€ and 108€ respectively, and now the equivalent model costs 109€.
Kindles for extended backpacking trips, though ... a godsend. Unless you're one of the younger crowd that is somehow OK reading books on a phone (though that uses way more power).
You may have noted the number of automobile makers announcing they are switching back to buttons after trying several years of button-free ... I wonder why that might be ...
You are only making complaints about criticisms (which you acknowledge as legitimate). If complaints from consumers about consumer devices are pointless and the consumers are "vocal crybabies", then how would you categorize yourself and your complaints about their complaints?
I’m no better than anyone. I was using the other persons definition where it seems there is no illegitimate criticism. I honestly think anybody crying that there aren’t buttons on a kindle needs to come to terms with reality and move on with their life.
"Crying" is needlessly dismissive and it doesn't strengthen your position.
I'm happy there is a mass of popular sentiment that consumer devices are better with buttons. I think they're to whom we can credit the return (or addition of new) buttons to cars, to phones, and to all manner of appliances (induction stoves, thermostats, ACs.)
In either case, it looks like the last Kindle with buttons disappeared only late 2024, a year and a half ago. This was a recent enough phenomena that these complaints make sense. Amazon still has a chance to get with the times and release an eReader with buttons.
I know "touchscreens are the future and those button-lovers are rarities who will die out soon" was a popular thing to believe, but that was back in the 00s. People like b uttons.
We must be operating in completely different circles, because I can’t remember the last time I came across someone that didn’t prefer buttons in a lot of sensible scenarios.
if they want buttons just look at the various e-readers online there's like such a breadth of these things now its insane. i personally was fetched an xteink reader cause theyre tiny (literally magsafes to the back of my phone wtf) and i love that (they have buttons) and chucked this dudes custom firmware on it to make formatting and usability a lil bit better https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader
is it kindle, no but can i read a book on it yeah. easily.
Keep buying phones with headphone jacks and removable batteries then. They exist. If every social media user that whined about these things acted with their wallet maybe they’d be able to change something.
They are — all non-flagships do still have headphone jacks, even the Pixel A lineup kept them for many many years after the mainline Pixel phones dropped them.
And the reason most phones keep these is because wireless headphones are in the end luxury. They're not necessary, they're not even significantly better, but they're in the end a class symbol.
They are significantly more convenient. No wired to tangle or snag on anything. Seamless handoff between all your devices. It’s genuinely a better user experience.
They don’t sound better, but if you care about sound quality over ux then you’re even luckier nowadays than any time prior because you can plug an amp/dac into your phone
I see this every day in our video calls. There's always
1. The user whose jabra headset is intermittently cutting in or out, or whose airpods are empty, who then switches to macbook speakers & microphones
2. The user user whose left airpod is still playing music from the iphone and only the right airpod did the handover correctly
3. The user whose airpods manage to noise cancel his own voice away
And this isn't every now and then, I see at least two out of these three users every single day. No matter which company, which client, every single day, for years. This is not an exaggeration, it's absolutely maddening.
And honestly, I don't care about the cable tangling or snagging if it at least reliably works.
Then there's the other issue of latency. Wireless headphones, even airpods on MacBooks, have horrible and unpredictable latency. The OS tries to hide it from you, but if you're doing live video/audio/broadcast, they're absolutely useless. I do volunteer work in that field, and over the past years it's gotten worse and worse with volunteers bringing wireless headphones, which they can't use for critical audio/video work.
And honestly, I don't care about the audiophile grade quality, we had good enough quality for free in every device, there was no reason to remove the 3.5mm port. Every current-gen midrange phone still has them, and Sony even keeps them on the flagships (which is why I buy Sony, and recommend everyone else to do so as well).
It's great that the best-case scenario is better. But like with FPS, the experience is primarily determined not by the average, but by the 95th percentile.
Also I think the more serious issue is the SD card slot. The missing headphone jack is annoying, but you can work around it with an adapter. Not so for the card slot
You can work around the SD card just as "easily" as you can work around the card slot, as you can just always keep a usb-c sd card reader plugged into the phone.
Obviously, both of them are absolutely silly "solutions" to problems that wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
It is an insurmountable hassle as none of my other devices — cameras, beltpacks, intercoms, mixing consoles — use or support usb-audio, nor will they ever.
It's already enough of a hassle to add/remove the 3.5mm/6.35mm headphone adapter, I don't need to have another adapter I can lose.
Aside from that, the whole usb-c stuff is so much more sensitive to dust and dirt, I wouldn't even want to have a usb-c adapter on my headphones.
While I currently buy Sony phones, for a while I had a phone without 3.5mm port and ended up just supergluing a splitter cable & headphone adapter to the back of it. But you have to replace it regularly as even with a right-angle usb-c connector the twist and turn is too tight to survive more than a few months.
I recently had to do a flight without my headphones, because they had discharged because the switch had got jostled and activated in my luggage. 10 years on, we're still running into the disadvantages of losing 3.5mm headphones, so of course there's complaints.
Ah yeah certainly there’s nothing else to be done. One must complain on social media about something that they have no control over yet is easily avoidable.
I also think they leave so much money on the table by not having the simplest of features - why can't I gift someone kindle books? I'd be buying so many for friends and family, but there is literally no way to do that on kindle. It's money they aren't getting.
Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc.
But they appear to exult in dashing the hopes of their customers, or at the very least they don't care about them at all. They've doubled down on no-key devices with stupid pens, pointless and poorly-implemented color, and tiny or excessively large form factors with little in between. It's kind of crazy just how much they don't seem to care.
The subtext of the article indicates that the problem isn't discontinuing support alone, but discontinuing support without offering those customers a reasonable replacement for their old devices that had keys and buttons. (Even if it's just a couple of buttons.)