> 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!

Different way to think about it: Whatever failings device might have, people still buy it for Amazon service integration.

Also "but people buy it anyway" is terrible way to disregard legitimate criticizm without thinking

“But people cry about it” doesnt mean the criticisms are legitimate.

To be fair, I don’t think the criticisms are illegitimate by your definition, I just think they’re pointless and from vocal crybabies.

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'm happy there is a mass of popular sentiment that consumer devices are better with buttons

There is not. It’s the same 11 people who have a hobby of posting online about how much they miss buttons.

This is more needlessly dismissive rhetoric. You don't really believe it's eleven people.

This sentiment is widespread enough to be a common point of comedy and conflict, and it's widespread enough problem that consumer intelligence companies have been reporting on this for years ( https://www.jdpower.com/sites/default/files/file/2025-09/202... , https://www.vibilagare.se/english/physical-buttons-outperfor... , https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/tesla/model-y/2020/road... , etc.) If you spend time in the lobby of a kiosk-only fast-food, you are sure to hear someone complain too.

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.

There’s 12 of us!

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.

> I’m no better than anyone.

> dismisses user wishes and calls people “vocal crybabies”

I’m honestly amazed how someone can lack so much self-awareness.

I’m not amazed by it!

You don’t really care about any buttons or Kindles, you just want to complain about “vocal crybabies”, do you?

+1. It seems like there is just a vocal minority who complain about the missing HW buttons etc.

I’m sure Amazon has enough actual customer data to make their product decisions based on what moves the most volume.

Just like the 3.5mm headphone jack, which a very vocal bunch of people are still complaining about, 10 years after iPhone got rid of it.

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.

Earlier this year, the Guardian had a piece about the way in which wired headphones were now the status signifier among a certain cohort ...

You can buy a Bluetooth headset at Action for 20 euro. I'm sure wireless was a status symbol once but it hasn't been for a very long time...

This very much depends on region

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.

You can keep the adapter attached to the headphones and it's not an insurmountable hassle

You certainly can't realistically keep an SD card dongle permanently sticking out of your phone to store your photos/etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Kindle 4 came out in 2011. I think 15 years is enough time to get ready for a buttonless kindle world.

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.

There being capacitive touch panels that are designed not to register water as a touch has been a thing for 15+ years.

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!

Yes, this is exactly what I’m talking about.

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

I've never had this issue. And I use Koreader - which has much larger touch zones than the normal Kindle software.

Are you normally reading in a moving vehicle or something?

Reading in a moving vehicle?

Is this something people aren’t supposed to do?

Depends on each individual's propensity for motion sickness when doing so. If you don't get it, read on!

So being prone to motion sickness can be a contributing factor to touchscreen misbehaviour?

Is this what you’re saying?

> 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)

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€.

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).

What a stupid thing to say.

The problem with a buttonless word is that it doesn’t have buttons.

Anyone who’s ever even seen a button from a distance has immediately known a world with buttons is superior to a world without buttons.

Though zippers are still welcomed by many folks.

<knee slap!>

> What a stupid thing to say.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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 ...

Ultimate consoomer. Eats whatever shit it’s being fed and doesn’t complain. Powers that be know better what is good for you anyway, right?

Yes, let’s flock to social media to complain, that’ll surely do something other than signal to other dipshits that we are in their perpetually dissatisfied in group

As opposed to what?

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.

Why would I complain? I can start reading nearly any book I want to in a few seconds for around $10.

How long is your expectation that you can access that e-book, after you pay $10?

Even in the past, when the only thing people would purchase was livestock, you wouldn't expect them to last more than 12 years.

14 years of support for a device is pretty incredible.

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.

Sigh. The unnoteworthy useless ancient device Noone should talk about that has the features everyone wishes the newer versions had.

Yeah, it's the smells wherever you go problem.

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.

This happens over and over again in tech.

  > 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...

This reminds me of the time we needed to support IE6.

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.

Gives me PTSD too!

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?

> How long should a hardware and software product be expected to last?

Until it dies due to unintentional software or hardware defect.

NOT when it is sabotaged by the manufacturer.

>!

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.

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.

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.

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?

Presumably that “support” you officer is tied to a nice fat multi-year support contract, no?

You can’t equate that to providing ongoing updates and support for a $100 hardware device indefinitely.

It is, but I cant build them spares (not even thru broker bought parts) anymore. At some point you have to force the customer to say goodbye.

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 other people who can and will support it. Let them.

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?

How do you know what Aloha does?

I dont think they read any of the parallel posts.

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.

But you can still sideload them, right?

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.

14 years is impressive? Wait until you find out how long a real book can last.

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.)

Yes, and you can buy a new e-reader and read all those same books.

A kindle is more like a bookshelf from IKEA, it has a finite lifetime.

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.

How well do those TVs pick up HD digital TV signals?

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.

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.

not when all it takes is not to actively boycott the device

I have my 2010 Kobo and it still works fine, you can copy books by usb to it.

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

Cool story bro. Maybe you should read books on it on the go too then.

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.

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".

Sad even

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

My 20-year-old laptop still runs latest Debian with all security and (optionally!) feature updates.

And it will be deprecated as well one day.

How? All drivers are part of Linux and free software.

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.

But really what does it need to do? Write some characters on a screen. If it could do that 14 years ago it can do it today.

It's not like ereaders have evolved to do full motion video and the text ones have become obsolete.

Luckily koreader works well on old kindles. I'm even running it on my new one now.

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.

Can you?? It's never been an option here in the UK. Damn.

I bought a cheap Kindle 2 years ago (remember Amazon subsidizes these things) and never bought a single book from the Amazon store.

They totally should disregard me.