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Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

reuters.com

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Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#261

Post by kuschku »

paulcole wrote: post #248
kuschku wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kindles are much cheaper today than they were 15 years ago (adjusted for inflation). Seems like progress!

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€.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#262

Post by MrDOS »

rypskar wrote: post #179
jay_kyburz wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kobo is all that but without Amazon.

I did consider a Kobo, but the terrible website did turn me away. When trying to browse it was wait for button on tracking consent to be active so I could click reject. Then change language to what I'm fluent in instead of getting language based on IP, reject tracking, reject changing region back to IP based and the same two reject for every link clicked. Half the times pages was still shown in language based on my l…

This argument would hold a lot more water if the alternative you're siding with weren't Amazon.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#263

Post by kuschku »

u_fucking_dork wrote: post #228
anonymars wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I traded occasionally making my life more difficult, and in return I got what? My old phone was equally waterproof

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.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#264

Post by tmerc »

mystraline wrote: post #235
segmondy wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you think? i can bring up my 40 yrs old NES and it works every time.

That was before the public everything-connected internet era. Now, even Nintendo destroys your hardware if you do something they dont like. Like every one of these terrible companies, Im 100% sure that if they could update the NES firmware to destroy the console or sabotage it, they would.

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.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#265

Post by jzb »

Aloha wrote: post #107
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #34

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 p…

14 years of support for a device is pretty incredible.

No. It’s not. It’s just that we’ve been conditioned to accept that disposable devices are the way of things.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#266

Post by gambiting »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #34

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 p…

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.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#267

Post by gambiting »

pjmlp wrote: post #175
Aloha wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

14 years of support for a device is pretty incredible.

I still remember support for life. TV, refrigerator, recorder, whatever electronics, broke down and I or my parents would take it to one of several repair locations around town. Software coming in eproms or disks meant QA was actually a thing to get right, not as online updates that eventually stop.

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.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#268

Post by wilsonnb3 »

gambiting wrote: post #266
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #34

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 p…

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.

You can do that, in the US at least.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#270

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

Aloha wrote: post #187
_doctor_love wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 c…

How long should a hardware and software product be expected to last? Try estimating doing win11 updates on a 20 year old piece of delphi spftware with hardware full go custom ASICs be expected to lsat?

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.

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