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Comment by Grazester | Hacker News Reader

I find this argument flawed. Why only now are they are removing encryption when hardware is getting more powerful and storage getting faster(read/writes). As another reader pointed out Amazon tablet hardware as also plenty powerful. Google does not control the Android hardware market so if someone wanted to make a phone using a slow processor which did not support hardware encryption(Qualcomm processors do...no one uses it though) they can but performance would be brutal with encryption on.

Amazon controls everything in their ecosystem. They could make the hardware to go with the software.

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It's very possible that this never registered high enough on the list of problems to deal with. It's likely that there are very few kindle fire owners that use the encryption.. which is what they say.

The only reason I agree with you is that, if the hardware is the problem.. then why not just say that?

Then this begs the hypothetical question, 'If even only one person used encryption out of all of the devices sold, is it a feature worth keeping?'

I think most people here would say 'yes'.. but would most average company executives?

I don't like the idea that there is no way to freeze the build to avoid the un-encryption and or the possible bricking of a couple kindles for the few that used it however.

It's one thing to say, we don't support this going forward so if it's something you use get a different device next time. It's another to say, we are disabling or bricking, your choice.

When you're selling devices for $50, margins are tight. It is possible the encryption was slowing down the system so instead of adding HW to deal with it, they just simply turned off the feature.

Any idea what HW is in the cheap Kindle tablet?

According to this blog:

http://www.blog.fictiv.com/posts/50-kindle-fire-teardown

* Samsung KLM8G1GEND-B031 - data storage chip

* Mediatek ARM Mt8127A - SoC (system on chip)

* Mediatek MT6323LGA - integrated circuit

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