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When I first paid attention to that fact, that hardware kept changing but the internal CPU/SOC remained pretty much unchanged, I too was a little frustrated. But I was coming from the perspective of a mobile smart phone, where every year there is development of faster CPUs to drive faster and more capable experiences. But that is a different world. The cell phone makes calls, browses the web, runs apps, plays games, decodes and encodes video, runs camera optimization, autofocus and bokeh algorithms. It even runs AR applications, has voice interaction capabilities, GPS and turn by turn navigation, and multitasking of all of these things at once.
The eReader, by contrast, is pretty simple and basic. It is essentially just like running Adobe Acrobat. It just has to display text content and allow a user to move through that content, and it does that -did that- just fine with technology from yesteryear.
If it were to keep pushing the boundaries of what is capable, sure it could render PDFs faster, and render web pages faster in the browser, then it could decode and display YouTube videos and encodes video, so slap a camera on it and do video conferencing, and pretty soon you are in a race to be .... A tablet?
The eReader is a golf cart. It lets you get around 18 holes without having to walk or carry your clubs. It's a niche use vehicle. Saying the engines aren't getting any bigger or faster doesn't make it less of a golf cart. If you want something that can rip around city streets and haul kids and pass on the highway and have a backup camera and GPS, then buy a car. They get faster and better all the time.
Once I started thinking about it that way, I wasn't so worried that e-readers are running an older CPU SOC that isn't very powerful and isn't actively being developed for more capabilities, and hardware companies aren't pushing to use something radically newer in their newest devices.
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