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Originally Posted by rcentros
I get your main point, but I don't think there's been a Kindle DX (sold by Amazon) in three or four years. I can still buy an Aura (Edition 2) from Kobo (or even down the street at Walmart and pick it up today). I know there hasn't been a Sony Personal Reader (PRS) sold by Sony in at least four (probably five) years. So whether it's the last half of a boatload of Auras, or new batch, it's immaterial — they're still new, they still have full warranties and they're still being sold by Kobo. Ditto with Kindle Basics (Gen 8) or Voyages. If they're still in their lineup, they're still in their lineup. (Like the Kindle Touch was for a couple years after the first Paperwhite came out.)
As it stands, at $99 (via Walmart) the Aura is closer to the Kindle Basic as "low end." The Paperwhite, Glowlight 3 and Clara are mid-range. The Forma, Oasis, Voyage Aura One, Aura H20 are at various levels of high end. Maybe the Voyage and H20 could be thought of as "upper middle class" — though the Voyage was once Kindle's high-end. In the Tolino, you have the Page (low-end, competes with the Kindle Basic), the Shine 3, competes with the Clara, Paperwhite and Glowlight 3 — the Vision 4, competes with the Voyage and H20 and the Epos, which would be their high end (Oasis, Forma and Aura One). Of course nothing fits exactly, but $130 for the Paperwhite 4 is not out of range ... unless you want to get into the $20 to remove ads which, for those who must removes ads, is an important consideration.
I'm rambling. Sorry.
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Not a problem.
Clean exchanges are fun.
About the Basic Kindle, try this:
If a product spends two thirds of its time selling at price A and a third of the time selling at Price B, you would be inclined to say its real world price (rather than list) is A. But if the product actually sells 60-70% of its units at Price B, wouldn't its real world price be closer to B than to A? Especially when the "promotional" Price B shows up at predictable times?
Amazon is a fun outfit to watch because they're tricky and play all sorts of games, especially with pricing. Everybody knows they practice variable pricing yet few actually consider what it means. For the Kindle Basic it means they can legally get away with claiming the $50 price is a sale price and the $80-100 price is the "regular" price while most of the sales come at the lower point. There's few knowledgeable folk that would even try to argue that a Kindle Basic at $80 is a fair value. But then, knowledgeable folk know to wait for one of the regularly scheduled sales so Amazon gets to eat their cake and have it too. The unwary/price-insensitive pay the higher price. Those that do their homework will find the reviews that say "wait for the sale". And they get away with it because there is no competition at either price point because there isn't much profit in selling ereader hardware at those prices. Maybe $5 if the teardown estimates can be trusted.
But $5 is $5 and their main goal isn't just to make money off the hardware but to entice readers into their ecosystem. And once they do that they get to sell books, videos, subscriptions of all kinds. Or dry goods. Which is the purpose of the ads. If they get even one click through a year, they're home free. And typically they do better than that.
It's what makes them so effective: they're upfront and low key.
You know they want to sell you stuff. And sooner or later, you'll want to buy stuff.
Or not.
But there's plenty of folk that do. And their entry level products like Basic Kindle, Echo Dot, AmazonBasics cables and batteries, are all part of the ecosystem draw.
Looking at individual items in a vacuum doesn't tell the whole story; there's always something else. Like: entry level the Basic Kindle may be, but it supports Audible. So it's not just an ebook storefront; it also sell audiobooks. And ebook/audiobook bundles.
To some people that matters.
To Amazon it does: the basic got the feature before Paperwhite.