I'm pretty sure that that's incorrect. I worked at Amazon, on Kindles, and we used retail units with whatever random USB cables we could scrounge up, on all of

I'm pretty sure that that's incorrect. I worked at Amazon, on Kindles, and we used retail units with whatever random USB cables we could scrounge up, on all of the various Kindles (fire and eink). I also can't find anything on google mentioning it, and just tested with my own (non-Amazon) cable on my own retail paperwhite from 2015. You may have just had a cable without functioning data lines.