TheVerge purposefully left that out of the headline for clickbait. It's really not hard to write "Amazon's Older 2G/3G Kindles" or "Lose Their Cellular Connections"
For customers with Kindle (1st Generation), Amazon is offering a free Kindle Oasis (10th Generation) device and cover.
Customers with Kindle (1st and 2nd Generation), Kindle DX (2nd Generation), and Kindle Keyboard (3rd Generation) can receive $70 off a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, plus $25 in ebook credits.
Customers with Kindle Touch (4th Generation), Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation, 6th Generation, and 7th Generation), Kindle Voyage (7th Generation), and Kindle Oasis (8th Generation) can receive $50 off a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, plus $15 in ebook credits.
That sounds like a fair deal to me. Although it’s pure speculation. I haven’t checked if that is actually the case.
...I'm actually quite confused as to why the people with the oldest devices—whose Kindles presumably had the longest usable life—are the only ones getting free replacements.
Maybe there is a lifetime clause in the AGBs? If they promised 15 years of usable time (for example), this might be their way to get out.
Also, the longest customers are probably the most loyal and bought a lot of books over the years, while also being the smallest subgroup.
And, now I'm kicking myself for dropping my 1st gen Kindle off at the e-waste recycler!
I guess that's too tangential for this post, though.
Headlines are hard.
Clearly, a lot of people felt like the headline was misleading.
I remember thinking at the time that hacking these would make nice sensors to deploy in the field and that they could stay online for free, essentially. Kindle had a built-in web browser, so HTTP calls wouldn't be too hard to make.
Controversial HN opinion: ten years ago everyone would be up in arms about this change. Something happened. We no longer care about device obsolescence. It's like our concept of ownership and longevity has been stripped from us.
You stream music instead of owning it, you download games instead of owning physical copies, devices are locked down, you can't run software you want, and we tolerate devices no longer working after a certain date.
It's okay if things stop working, because they weren't meant to work forever. It's sad.
Broadly speaking, I absolutely agree. People are impressed that Apple supports 6-year-old iPhones, whereas I think that's an unconscionably short length of time. (Particularly given how Apple makes customers reliant on them for everything.)
However, in the case of these Kindles, I'm a bit more sympathetic to Amazon here. They're not the ones who are turning off 3G networks, so I'm not really sure what they could do.
For some reason, I didn't get one--probably because my device is no longer registered on Amazon.com. Not that I have any real reason to run out and buy a new Kindle anyway.
Also, there is a clear reason they are turning these off (dropping on 2G and 3G coverage) as opposed to companies that needlessly brick devices just because they turned off a easy-to-maintain DRM server somewhere without an alternative recourse.
That feature was quite nice while travelling as it got me free Wikipedia everywhere, which is nice to read up on sights etc.
I don’t think this is true at all. Ten years ago, we had already gone through the analog to digital transition in a number of countries [1], obsoleting a lot of older television sets without the aid of a converter box.
In the US, TDMA and AMPS cellular networks were shut down by 2008 (TDMA shutdown started even earlier), obsoleting tons of early cellular phones, but also many phones from the early 2000s (again, TDMA). People were often given vouchers by carriers IIRC, since phones were largely subsidized by rate plans.
DIVX, a terrible DVD rental scheme that helped put Circuit City out of business, went under by 1999, leaving the devices essentially worthless (fortunately, most did receive a firmware update allowing them to be used as regular DVD players).
I’m sure there were some grumbles about some of this stuff (people were very mad about TV, even though converters were given away for free), but it is largely accepted that progress obsoletes certain technologies. This isn’t new.
However there has been many more fights about turning of the FM signals, at least here in Denmark, mostly because people can't upgrade the radio in their cars easily but probably also because the new type of radio is a lot worse than FM. So now we have both.
I suspect that when/if they turn it of people won't get a new radio and will just play music from their phones.
I still think the major issue is our cars, the fleet is old because there is an extremely high tax on cars, and it isn't as easy to just upgrade the radios as it used to be - and of course with FM available (and as you said, better in many cases) there is no big incentive to update, although we have more channels available on DAB.