10 ms·

I consider the Kindle one of the most underbaked products I have ever used, and it staggers me that no one seems to care. Earlier iterations were truly ground-b

by mdoms 6y ago

I consider the Kindle one of the most underbaked products I have ever used, and it staggers me that no one seems to care. Earlier iterations were truly ground-breaking, so we gave them a break on the details. But we've been at this for 12 years now, the product really should have matured more. I'm not talking about the state of E-ink, but the usability of the Kindle device itself. I current use a latest-gen Paperwhite but I've owned almost all of them. The current one, in my opinion, is a huge step backwards in lots of ways from earlier iterations. The touch screen is appalling and has no place on an E-ink device. The software is incredibly bad. There's so much scope there to surface useful information on the home screen but there's nothing of value there - I can't even see more than a couple of books in progress, much less find something I may want to read later. It's just astoundingly bad.

dman 6y ago
In the big tech companies it is much harder to make the case for incremental improvements to existing products than it is to take on new disruptive problems.
- setzer22 6y ago
  But the opposite could be argued as well? Taking on a new disruptive problem is a huge risk, and big corps are generally risk averse...
  - dman 6y ago
    Depends on the company - in a company like Amazon where Jeff is constantly pushing the envelope - standing still is the best recipe for falling behind. And you can see a hint of this happening in the article itself - the person running Books is given the reward of commoditizing Books as the reward of doing a great job of running Books. All the glory is in delivering new bigger and better things to Jeff, not in incrementally delivering 10% year over year improvements on an existing problem. In fact in such companies it can become difficult for managers to attract and retain ambitious talent to work on "incremental" things.
simonklitj 6y ago
(I have the Kindle Oasis 2) I agree with almost all of the above, except for the touchscreen. I had the Kindle Non-Touch 4 and used it from 2012-2019, and having the touchscreen was an amazing improvement in usability and QOL when using the Kindle. Makes navigating, creating collections etc a lot faster. Other than that, I wish they would show the Kindle more love!
- WalterBright 6y ago
  The touchscreen makes the Kindle unusable with one-hand operation. I'm glad the Oasis went back (at least partially) to buttons, though the buttons are too small. The Kindle 3 did buttons right. You don't even need to push the page advance/retreat buttons, just flex your palm holding the Kindle. Very nice.
throwawaySlu 6y ago
Presumably, they’re making enough profit through Kindle that no one at Amazon thinks it’s worth investing in a completely new Kindle reader. It’s also possible that people who read on these devices aren’t tech savvy enough to care about how awful of an experience it is.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > It’s also possible that people who read on these devices aren’t tech savvy enough to care about how awful of an experience it is. Absolutely. Some people who don't quite "get" computers seem to find it really difficult what they should expect from a device. They can have a laptop that needs 5 minutes to boot and a broken mouse that jumps to a random location on the screen once every minute, and the only thing they'll complain about is that Windows doesn't let them select a lot of files properly(because the mouse jumps around like crazy). The skit in IT Crowd with the "laptop from the exorcist" is sometimes more accurate than one might like.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Exactly this. This also explains why most modern software has so atrocious UX, and why companies can get away producing hardware that can barely lift its own software. It's because non-tech-savvy consumers don't have a point of reference and a mental model to express what's wrong, and also don't have a choice other than to suck it up, or not have a device at all.
  - solidasparagus 6y ago
    I actually think this is more of a problem with technical people overvaluing the importance of the technology and not caring enough about what their customer actually needs. They think that the technology is what matters. But technology is just a tool. It really doesn't matter how ugly, janky or suboptimal the technology is if it is a useful enough tool. People want a cheap device that doesn't ruin the reading experience and has access to all the books they want.
alpaca128 6y ago
> The touch screen is appalling and has no place on an E-ink device. It's okay, but it's also obvious they didn't put any buttons into the Paperwhite to have a reason for the more expensive model which does have buttons to turn the page(and nothing else of value it seems). I find my Paperwhite to be quite usable, but I agree that almost everything could have been done better. I still don't get why some ebooks I buy land on the Kindle immediately but some will only download once I try to read them(which is super annoying on vacation), I don't know why the library seems to be randomly shuffled every time I look at it, and I don't know why it's not possible to completely shut off the Paperwhite's backlighting. A lot of little strange decision were made with that thing.
orisho 6y ago
There just isn't any good competition. As with anything else, lack of competition stifles innovation. Why should they spend engineer time on this when it sells just as well?
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I think for the reasons mentioned in the tweets we are all commenting on.
kekeblom 6y ago
What I think is driving this is the lack of competition. No-one is going to take on the Kindle. Not because they don’t think they couldn’t make a better device, but because the don’t think they could create a digital bookstore with enough titles to be useful.
- patkai 6y ago
  Maybe a tablet maker will one day add a second, e-ink screen to the back of the tablet and run the Kindle app on it.
- donatzsky 6y ago
  There is actually competition to the Kindle, although you often wouldn't know it, reading "mainstream" US-centric forums such as HN. Kobo offers a complete ecosystem similar to the Kindle, with bookstore, devices and syncing. There are a number of regional players as well in this space. Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.
  - Multicomp 6y ago
    > Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content. Someone on hacker news talked about using syncthing for their ebook and I had to replicate it. it sounded so much more useful than my previous experience with ebook readers, the nook simple touch. My quest to find an e-reader that supported Android 4.4+ and both headphone jacks and SD cards resulted in a likebook Mars. Now I can use syncthing to sync my library...ebooks, PDF, and audiobooks, automatically in the background, no account needed. I would have preferred to purchase a modern incarnation of the very first Kindle, with a headphone jack, SD card, and keyboard, but nobody makes such a device any longer, or if they do, it is so out of date that it cannot run syncthing. I continue to be excited about the pine phone keyboard design, because from there it is only a properly sized e ink screen away from being a tiny e-reader with keyboard headphone jack and Linux!
CGamesPlay 6y ago
I'm gonna disagree with you. I have a previous-gen Paperwhite and I absolutely love it. I love that it's a simple piece of technology. The touchscreen rarely causes me problems, and I even dropped it into a pool and after 2 weeks of drying it's still working fine. I consider it a well-made piece of technology that Just Works. (actually, a recent software update changed something that required changing my muscle memory... wish I could disable updates!)
numpad0 6y ago
I just don’t understand why Paperwhite is so sluggish compared to Kindle Touch. It’s just objectively worse for no apparent reason. Anyone has any insights into it?
- marvindanig 6y ago
  Dan Luu has some insight into it: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ Apparently, Kindles are the worst in the terms of input latency and performance, but then this is also expected given their specification and the price point.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    My problem is that Kindles of late are slower than earlier Kindles, not against non-E Ink devices.
bluejellybean 6y ago
The kindle could have been the best, no clue what happened but development just seemed to completely stall. It's sad because the vast majority of consumers don't even realize there are incredible advances being made to E-ink displays, they never see it. Last summer I was sitting in a library and had noticed the person across from me was using an E-ink device I had never seen before. I showed the person my kindle and asked if they like their device more or less than mine. I vividly recall the woman's eyes light up with excitement as she handed me the device and pen she was holding. Perfect written text on an e-ink device the size of a paper notebook with what felt like an almost identical weight to my kindle. Stunning! She told me how she had been using it exclusively for note taking and the battery life was fairly comparable. I wish I could recall the name of the device but I think it was something by Sony. I couldn't help but be stunned though, Amazon is completely missing the opportunity with these devices and I feel bad for the people who will continue to purchase their obsolete products.
- marcocampos 6y ago
  Maybe it was a Remarkable [1] ? A new version is coming out soon. [1] https://remarkable.com https://remarkable.com
  - marvindanig 6y ago
    I used it initially for sometime but then slowly fell back to the iPad. I mean the comparison between an iPad and Kindle/Remarkable isn’t fair, but if a tablet is the go-to form-factor for books and note-taking, I’d stick to the iPad.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      There was a time when e-ink seemed pretty compelling versus a tablet for certain uses, but that gap has shrunk to the point where it's hard to justify another special purpose device. I do have a Paperwhite in addition to an iPad but honestly don't use it very much. don't want to travel with yet another device and the iPad is actually a much better reader if the book isn't just flowing text.
lm28469 6y ago
Idk, I can put all the books I have ever owned on it and read them, that's what it's supposed to do and it does it for 80 bucks. 99.99% of my time on the Kindle is spent reading a book, not fiddling with menus or on the home page. On top of that they're well made and the battery lasts forever, i can't complain at all.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  If that was the first-gen device, sure. But in comparison to older models, Kindle keeps regressing UX-wise. Before my Paperwhite, I owned the old keyboard version with no touchscreen, and it was much more useful as a device - it was easier to take notes, and it even made sense to use the built-in browser. (Not that touchscreens are bad per se, but the responsiveness of the screens/whole OS on Paperwhite is bad.)
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    I like the first keyboard model. The experience was just right when using it.
iamthemonster 6y ago
I have I think a 2nd gen Paperwhite and I feel like the main "problem" I have is that the reading experience is more or less perfect. It could be much faster and more convenient to shop for new books, but I rarely do that on the device anyway. But when it comes to reading a book, I am so used to the Paperwhite 2nd gen that I would pay a significant premium to get a like-for-like replacement than some new model.
- kranner 6y ago
  I have a 2nd-generation Paperwhite that I haven’t used in a couple of years because it keeps slowing down a few weeks after booting. It also slows down immediately if I sideload more than a handful of e-book files. I switched to an iPad Mini and never looked back.
kanox 6y ago
What's the point of a dedicated e-reader instead of a phone or tablet with the brightness turned down? As a device category it will go the way of mp3 players and button phones. I owned several kindles but my current one has been gathering dust for years and instead I just use the kindle phone app.
- mdoms 6y ago
  I share a bed with my partner, and even the paperwhite is nearly too bright on its lowest setting for her. A tablet on low is a total non-starter.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  An e-reader battery lasts longer than a phone. Also, there are no temptations to constantly check news or social media (or even Amazon’s ecosystem: my Kindle has been in airplane mode since the very minute I unboxed it). I don't even take my phone into the bedroom because it is a proven source of distraction and poor sleep, but a Kindle allows me to do some long and productive reading at night or when I wake up in the morning.
m463 6y ago
I was satisfied to send the books to the kindle, and then on the device, page back and page forward. I agree about the touchscreen, I'm really happy with just page back and page forward.
dunkelsten 6y ago
This seems to really be a pattern with Amazon. Their sweet spot is doing Zero to One by watching what goes off and then leveraging their size for a Second Mover Advantage. Once something sticks to the wall, they are absolutely ruthless at getting it to product-market fit and commercial success, but interestingly enough, they stop there and all further development is merely iterative. They usually have some of the first decent and usuable products in any market, but tend to go for full commercial exploitation and pure maintenance mode from there. Redshift used to be an absolute game changer for the Big Data market (I still remember their 1 TB for under 999$/month claim to this day), but Snowflake or BigQuery are just much better products this day and they never made the architectural shift from the client/server based architecture. Prime Video is an absolute success story despite their awful interface, UX and crappy metadata, just because they got a grip on the hardware, smartly cross-sold it and bought / produced some good & free content. I could go on and on, but it seems to be company core DNA to stop at 80/20. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm still unsure.
- toohotatopic 6y ago
  Maybe because Bezos stops being involved and there is nobody inside the company who dares to change whatever Bezos has implemented? Reading the tweets, it seems like Bezos made all the important decisions. If he is not around because he is focussed on other projects, who could do it instead? Judging by the story that Bezos didn't allow any pixel to be changed on the Amazon homepage, I can imagine that this is a pattern and whoever tried to implement a change doesn't dare to try it again.
- delecti 6y ago
  From my experience at Amazon, products launch, and then the team starts building the next thing, and the previous thing only gets mandatory attention from then on. There was always just too much to work on to completely polish anything.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Prime video seems to have fleshed out its content with a lot of old, obscure, niche documentaries. Fortunately, I like old, obscure, niche documentaries and enjoy watching them. Netflix seems to stick with only mainstream content.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I'm adding 2.4 Ghz WiFi only on a $250 device in 2019 and a browser which is permanently 'experimental'. May be the browser is not being used by many hardcore Kindle users, but Hacker News on my Kindle Oasis is a delight to use(if the attached URLs went easy on JS, Looking at you TechCrunch); Especially when I was bedridden after a surgery and Kindle was one of the few devices which worked for my accessibility needs. It feel having 'experimental' tag on the browser is like 'If you keep using this browser, instead of buying books from us, we'll pull the plug anytime'.
atombender 6y ago
I like my Kindle Paperwhite, but it's also a very frustrating product — slow, low-res, terrible UI, etc. But my biggest complaint is that Kindle made books ugly. I love beautiful typography, and bad typography can ruin a reading experience. Reading Kindle books are like stepping back in time to low-quality mass-market paperbacks. Using John Crowley's Little, Big as an example: * Original print version: https://i.imgur.com/pLmQyja.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pLmQyja.jpg * Kindle: https://i.imgur.com/xRu0eLo.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xRu0eLo.jpg * Kindle Cloud Reader: https://i.imgur.com/GDqCD9u.jpg https://i.imgur.com/GDqCD9u.jpg There's absolutely nothing stopping us from being able to render the book beautifully with the right font. In this particularly egregious example, they didn't even bother to include the ornamentations. That's one thing, but those underlined chapter headings? They didn't even try. As I understand it, modern e-books are just HTML, designed to be reformatted to different screens. There appears to be limited support for fonts, and whatever Kindle uses to render text is awful. Another frustration about the quality of the books is how a lot of older fiction is only available in very shoddily digitized versions that don't even use correct typography ("smart" quotes, em dashes, indented paragraphs, etc.).
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  You need a 300ppi display. Then you won't have a reason to complain about quality. The Paperwhite 3 looks amazing.
  - atombender 6y ago
    How does resolution address any of my complaints?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > very shoddily digitized versions Funny you should mention that. I usually watch old movies with the closed captioning on, and it's clear the captioning isn't even proofread. Lots of times it will be a sound-alike word that doesn't fit in the sentence. Perhaps they employ non-native English speakers to type in the text.

by mdoms 6y ago

dman 6y ago

In the big tech companies it is much harder to make the case for incremental improvements to existing products than it is to take on new disruptive problems.

setzer22 6y ago
But the opposite could be argued as well? Taking on a new disruptive problem is a huge risk, and big corps are generally risk averse...
- dman 6y ago
  Depends on the company - in a company like Amazon where Jeff is constantly pushing the envelope - standing still is the best recipe for falling behind. And you can see a hint of this happening in the article itself - the person running Books is given the reward of commoditizing Books as the reward of doing a great job of running Books. All the glory is in delivering new bigger and better things to Jeff, not in incrementally delivering 10% year over year improvements on an existing problem. In fact in such companies it can become difficult for managers to attract and retain ambitious talent to work on "incremental" things.

simonklitj 6y ago

(I have the Kindle Oasis 2) I agree with almost all of the above, except for the touchscreen. I had the Kindle Non-Touch 4 and used it from 2012-2019, and having the touchscreen was an amazing improvement in usability and QOL when using the Kindle. Makes navigating, creating collections etc a lot faster. Other than that, I wish they would show the Kindle more love!

WalterBright 6y ago
The touchscreen makes the Kindle unusable with one-hand operation. I'm glad the Oasis went back (at least partially) to buttons, though the buttons are too small. The Kindle 3 did buttons right. You don't even need to push the page advance/retreat buttons, just flex your palm holding the Kindle. Very nice.

throwawaySlu 6y ago

Presumably, they’re making enough profit through Kindle that no one at Amazon thinks it’s worth investing in a completely new Kindle reader. It’s also possible that people who read on these devices aren’t tech savvy enough to care about how awful of an experience it is.

alpaca128 6y ago
> It’s also possible that people who read on these devices aren’t tech savvy enough to care about how awful of an experience it is. Absolutely. Some people who don't quite "get" computers seem to find it really difficult what they should expect from a device. They can have a laptop that needs 5 minutes to boot and a broken mouse that jumps to a random location on the screen once every minute, and the only thing they'll complain about is that Windows doesn't let them select a lot of files properly(because the mouse jumps around like crazy). The skit in IT Crowd with the "laptop from the exorcist" is sometimes more accurate than one might like.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Exactly this. This also explains why most modern software has so atrocious UX, and why companies can get away producing hardware that can barely lift its own software. It's because non-tech-savvy consumers don't have a point of reference and a mental model to express what's wrong, and also don't have a choice other than to suck it up, or not have a device at all.
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  I actually think this is more of a problem with technical people overvaluing the importance of the technology and not caring enough about what their customer actually needs. They think that the technology is what matters. But technology is just a tool. It really doesn't matter how ugly, janky or suboptimal the technology is if it is a useful enough tool. People want a cheap device that doesn't ruin the reading experience and has access to all the books they want.

alpaca128 6y ago

> The touch screen is appalling and has no place on an E-ink device. It's okay, but it's also obvious they didn't put any buttons into the Paperwhite to have a reason for the more expensive model which does have buttons to turn the page(and nothing else of value it seems). I find my Paperwhite to be quite usable, but I agree that almost everything could have been done better. I still don't get why some ebooks I buy land on the Kindle immediately but some will only download once I try to read them(which is super annoying on vacation), I don't know why the library seems to be randomly shuffled every time I look at it, and I don't know why it's not possible to completely shut off the Paperwhite's backlighting. A lot of little strange decision were made with that thing.

orisho 6y ago

There just isn't any good competition. As with anything else, lack of competition stifles innovation. Why should they spend engineer time on this when it sells just as well?

jjeaff 6y ago
I think for the reasons mentioned in the tweets we are all commenting on.

kekeblom 6y ago

What I think is driving this is the lack of competition. No-one is going to take on the Kindle. Not because they don’t think they couldn’t make a better device, but because the don’t think they could create a digital bookstore with enough titles to be useful.

patkai 6y ago
Maybe a tablet maker will one day add a second, e-ink screen to the back of the tablet and run the Kindle app on it.
donatzsky 6y ago
There is actually competition to the Kindle, although you often wouldn't know it, reading "mainstream" US-centric forums such as HN. Kobo offers a complete ecosystem similar to the Kindle, with bookstore, devices and syncing. There are a number of regional players as well in this space. Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.
- Multicomp 6y ago
  > Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content. Someone on hacker news talked about using syncthing for their ebook and I had to replicate it. it sounded so much more useful than my previous experience with ebook readers, the nook simple touch. My quest to find an e-reader that supported Android 4.4+ and both headphone jacks and SD cards resulted in a likebook Mars. Now I can use syncthing to sync my library...ebooks, PDF, and audiobooks, automatically in the background, no account needed. I would have preferred to purchase a modern incarnation of the very first Kindle, with a headphone jack, SD card, and keyboard, but nobody makes such a device any longer, or if they do, it is so out of date that it cannot run syncthing. I continue to be excited about the pine phone keyboard design, because from there it is only a properly sized e ink screen away from being a tiny e-reader with keyboard headphone jack and Linux!

CGamesPlay 6y ago

I'm gonna disagree with you. I have a previous-gen Paperwhite and I absolutely love it. I love that it's a simple piece of technology. The touchscreen rarely causes me problems, and I even dropped it into a pool and after 2 weeks of drying it's still working fine. I consider it a well-made piece of technology that Just Works. (actually, a recent software update changed something that required changing my muscle memory... wish I could disable updates!)

numpad0 6y ago

I just don’t understand why Paperwhite is so sluggish compared to Kindle Touch. It’s just objectively worse for no apparent reason. Anyone has any insights into it?

marvindanig 6y ago
Dan Luu has some insight into it: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/ Apparently, Kindles are the worst in the terms of input latency and performance, but then this is also expected given their specification and the price point.
- numpad0 6y ago
  My problem is that Kindles of late are slower than earlier Kindles, not against non-E Ink devices.

bluejellybean 6y ago

The kindle could have been the best, no clue what happened but development just seemed to completely stall. It's sad because the vast majority of consumers don't even realize there are incredible advances being made to E-ink displays, they never see it. Last summer I was sitting in a library and had noticed the person across from me was using an E-ink device I had never seen before. I showed the person my kindle and asked if they like their device more or less than mine. I vividly recall the woman's eyes light up with excitement as she handed me the device and pen she was holding. Perfect written text on an e-ink device the size of a paper notebook with what felt like an almost identical weight to my kindle. Stunning! She told me how she had been using it exclusively for note taking and the battery life was fairly comparable. I wish I could recall the name of the device but I think it was something by Sony. I couldn't help but be stunned though, Amazon is completely missing the opportunity with these devices and I feel bad for the people who will continue to purchase their obsolete products.

marcocampos 6y ago
Maybe it was a Remarkable [1] ? A new version is coming out soon. [1] https://remarkable.com https://remarkable.com
- marvindanig 6y ago
  I used it initially for sometime but then slowly fell back to the iPad. I mean the comparison between an iPad and Kindle/Remarkable isn’t fair, but if a tablet is the go-to form-factor for books and note-taking, I’d stick to the iPad.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    There was a time when e-ink seemed pretty compelling versus a tablet for certain uses, but that gap has shrunk to the point where it's hard to justify another special purpose device. I do have a Paperwhite in addition to an iPad but honestly don't use it very much. don't want to travel with yet another device and the iPad is actually a much better reader if the book isn't just flowing text.

lm28469 6y ago

Idk, I can put all the books I have ever owned on it and read them, that's what it's supposed to do and it does it for 80 bucks. 99.99% of my time on the Kindle is spent reading a book, not fiddling with menus or on the home page. On top of that they're well made and the battery lasts forever, i can't complain at all.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
If that was the first-gen device, sure. But in comparison to older models, Kindle keeps regressing UX-wise. Before my Paperwhite, I owned the old keyboard version with no touchscreen, and it was much more useful as a device - it was easier to take notes, and it even made sense to use the built-in browser. (Not that touchscreens are bad per se, but the responsiveness of the screens/whole OS on Paperwhite is bad.)
- Aeolun 6y ago
  I like the first keyboard model. The experience was just right when using it.

iamthemonster 6y ago

I have I think a 2nd gen Paperwhite and I feel like the main "problem" I have is that the reading experience is more or less perfect. It could be much faster and more convenient to shop for new books, but I rarely do that on the device anyway. But when it comes to reading a book, I am so used to the Paperwhite 2nd gen that I would pay a significant premium to get a like-for-like replacement than some new model.

kranner 6y ago
I have a 2nd-generation Paperwhite that I haven’t used in a couple of years because it keeps slowing down a few weeks after booting. It also slows down immediately if I sideload more than a handful of e-book files. I switched to an iPad Mini and never looked back.

kanox 6y ago

What's the point of a dedicated e-reader instead of a phone or tablet with the brightness turned down? As a device category it will go the way of mp3 players and button phones. I owned several kindles but my current one has been gathering dust for years and instead I just use the kindle phone app.

mdoms 6y ago
I share a bed with my partner, and even the paperwhite is nearly too bright on its lowest setting for her. A tablet on low is a total non-starter.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
An e-reader battery lasts longer than a phone. Also, there are no temptations to constantly check news or social media (or even Amazon’s ecosystem: my Kindle has been in airplane mode since the very minute I unboxed it). I don't even take my phone into the bedroom because it is a proven source of distraction and poor sleep, but a Kindle allows me to do some long and productive reading at night or when I wake up in the morning.

m463 6y ago

I was satisfied to send the books to the kindle, and then on the device, page back and page forward. I agree about the touchscreen, I'm really happy with just page back and page forward.

dunkelsten 6y ago

This seems to really be a pattern with Amazon. Their sweet spot is doing Zero to One by watching what goes off and then leveraging their size for a Second Mover Advantage. Once something sticks to the wall, they are absolutely ruthless at getting it to product-market fit and commercial success, but interestingly enough, they stop there and all further development is merely iterative. They usually have some of the first decent and usuable products in any market, but tend to go for full commercial exploitation and pure maintenance mode from there. Redshift used to be an absolute game changer for the Big Data market (I still remember their 1 TB for under 999$/month claim to this day), but Snowflake or BigQuery are just much better products this day and they never made the architectural shift from the client/server based architecture. Prime Video is an absolute success story despite their awful interface, UX and crappy metadata, just because they got a grip on the hardware, smartly cross-sold it and bought / produced some good & free content. I could go on and on, but it seems to be company core DNA to stop at 80/20. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm still unsure.

toohotatopic 6y ago
Maybe because Bezos stops being involved and there is nobody inside the company who dares to change whatever Bezos has implemented? Reading the tweets, it seems like Bezos made all the important decisions. If he is not around because he is focussed on other projects, who could do it instead? Judging by the story that Bezos didn't allow any pixel to be changed on the Amazon homepage, I can imagine that this is a pattern and whoever tried to implement a change doesn't dare to try it again.
delecti 6y ago
From my experience at Amazon, products launch, and then the team starts building the next thing, and the previous thing only gets mandatory attention from then on. There was always just too much to work on to completely polish anything.
WalterBright 6y ago
Prime video seems to have fleshed out its content with a lot of old, obscure, niche documentaries. Fortunately, I like old, obscure, niche documentaries and enjoy watching them. Netflix seems to stick with only mainstream content.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

I'm adding 2.4 Ghz WiFi only on a $250 device in 2019 and a browser which is permanently 'experimental'. May be the browser is not being used by many hardcore Kindle users, but Hacker News on my Kindle Oasis is a delight to use(if the attached URLs went easy on JS, Looking at you TechCrunch); Especially when I was bedridden after a surgery and Kindle was one of the few devices which worked for my accessibility needs. It feel having 'experimental' tag on the browser is like 'If you keep using this browser, instead of buying books from us, we'll pull the plug anytime'.

atombender 6y ago

I like my Kindle Paperwhite, but it's also a very frustrating product — slow, low-res, terrible UI, etc. But my biggest complaint is that Kindle made books ugly. I love beautiful typography, and bad typography can ruin a reading experience. Reading Kindle books are like stepping back in time to low-quality mass-market paperbacks. Using John Crowley's Little, Big as an example: * Original print version: https://i.imgur.com/pLmQyja.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pLmQyja.jpg * Kindle: https://i.imgur.com/xRu0eLo.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xRu0eLo.jpg * Kindle Cloud Reader: https://i.imgur.com/GDqCD9u.jpg https://i.imgur.com/GDqCD9u.jpg There's absolutely nothing stopping us from being able to render the book beautifully with the right font. In this particularly egregious example, they didn't even bother to include the ornamentations. That's one thing, but those underlined chapter headings? They didn't even try. As I understand it, modern e-books are just HTML, designed to be reformatted to different screens. There appears to be limited support for fonts, and whatever Kindle uses to render text is awful. Another frustration about the quality of the books is how a lot of older fiction is only available in very shoddily digitized versions that don't even use correct typography ("smart" quotes, em dashes, indented paragraphs, etc.).

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
You need a 300ppi display. Then you won't have a reason to complain about quality. The Paperwhite 3 looks amazing.
- atombender 6y ago
  How does resolution address any of my complaints?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
WalterBright 6y ago
> very shoddily digitized versions Funny you should mention that. I usually watch old movies with the closed captioning on, and it's clear the captioning isn't even proofread. Lots of times it will be a sound-alike word that doesn't fit in the sentence. Perhaps they employ non-native English speakers to type in the text.