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Originally Posted by JSWolf
If these sorts of options are so obscure, when then did Amazon once upon a time have TTS and have an SD card slot? Why did Amazon update the PW2 to 4GB from 2GB?
Amazon seems to be playing around and not in a good way. Amazon has taken away useful features in place of features that are not so useful like cloud collections instead of allowing collections to be managed from the computer.
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I think Amazon moved away from different features for different reasons.
Amazon moved away from TTS because authors and publishers had a cow about it, and it was easier to build readers without the feature than to deal with the support calls when people found out that most bestsellers didn't support it.
As for the SD card slot, the first generation Kindle only had 180 MB of user-accessible storage, so it really benefited from expandable storage. However, since all subsequent models had at least 6 times as much user-accessible storage, Amazon stopped including the SD card slot on new models. New Kindles didn't need one to meet Amazon's design goals.
Replacing computer collections with cloud collections was a deliberate choice to make the Kindle more useful as a standalone device that didn't require a computer.
Kindle exists to enable people to purchase and consume Kindle content; Amazon prioritizes features that better serve those design goals over those that don't.
They're not playing around, they're building a device to serve a purpose. It may not serve your purposes, but that's a different matter entirely.