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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It says a lot about our world that artificially discontinuing a fully functional device (thankfully mine are offline and jailbroken) 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.
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.
This happens over and over again in tech.
12 replies →
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.
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.
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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.
[dead]
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
1 reply →
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.
No. It’s not. It’s just that we’ve been conditioned to accept that disposable devices are the way of things.
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.
you think? i can bring up my 40 yrs old NES and it works every time.
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.
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.
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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.)
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.
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.
How well do those TVs pick up HD digital TV signals?
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.
I have my 2010 Kobo and it still works fine, you can copy books by usb to it.
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.
not when all it takes is not to actively boycott the device
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
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.