Quote:
Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg
Amazon, at least, seems innocent of making older devices obsolete.
More than two years after release, there was a Kindle Keyboard software update for compatibility with the new KF8 book format. And AFAIK (please correct me if wrong), newly published books sold by Amazon still work on the original 2007 Kindles. Plus, after more than 5 years, those original Kindles still have unlimited free cell-phone network internet for text-based web sites like twp.com (Washington Post mobile).
The eInk Kindle browser degraded about two months ago because the service that allows easy font size control ( www.readingthenet.com) is down until later this month, per programmer Robin Gardner. But that's not Amazon. My periodical subscriptions through Amazon (New York Times Latest News Blog; Atlantic Monthly) work the same as ever.
I don't know about other brands of eReaders. Are manufactures doing anything to make them obsolete?
Now, if someone wants to replace this year's model with last year's, no automaker, or tech company, is going to stop them. |
Nice summary highlighting that the idea of dedicated readers is to sell ebooks.
Yes, new Kindle releases still work with first-gen kindles *and* apps; they even have a mechanism in place that serves mobi7 files to old devices and apps but KF8 to the newer ones. (If you have a new Kindle and an old one you you might even see a clear diffeence in the layout.) When Amazon introduced KF8 they looked at the hardware in their readers and drew a line between the ones that had the capability to offer a good experience rendering KF8 and those that probably wouldn't (shades of gray in the screen, CPU power, etc). But they have not abandoned early adopters nor have they gone out of their way to force people to upgrade. They figure that normal attrition and the annual incremental improvements in newer models will suffice?
Other vendors?
Well, Sony is notorious for *not* updating the firmware of their readers but they have offered up the occasional bug fix for their last two models. Nook has an ongoing war with hackers so they issue regular updates with bug fixes and tweaks in addition to blocking the hackers' exploits.
Kobo still runs a firmware of the month operation so *their* readers actually get better with time; I understand that year-old readers actually perform close to their originally advertised spec.
So, no; I don't think planned obsolescence is prevalent in the dedicated reader business. Though I do think we should start to see a wave of dead battery-driven upgrades at some point. But with a typical rechargeable battery being good for 300 recharge cycles and 30 honest hours of use it takes a long time to rack up the 7000 hours of use where batteries become an issue.
(Four-plus years at 4 hours a day might do it. So early K2 should start hitting the wall this year.)
One advantage of the content-driven walled-gardens is that the vendor benefits as much as the buyer from device durability.