[tomsem]

It depends what is meant by ‘adequacy’.

Certainly many smartphones exceed adequacy when it comes to core functions of making phone calls and messaging, no need to spend more than $100 for that, but well, it is nice to have a decent camera and probably a good idea to get one that will get prompt security updates for a few years and now you’ll spend 3x that or more.

Lab126 has churned out millions of cheap Fire tablets and they are adequate at being cheap but are insufficient in other ways. They are okay for consuming media but beyond that they are inadequate. For more generative tasks (drawing, editing audio or video, productivity, etc.) you need something much more ‘adequate’, including a community of app developers to meet those more sophisticated requirements.

When it comes to eReaders, it seems adequacy is more easily achieved, and requirements develop more slowly. I’ve never been that interested in color shift, waterproofing, or larger screen size, or expandable storage, or having buttons in addition to touch screen.

But yeah, I eventually got a Voyage that happens to have buttons when the price was right and found the display a vast improvement over 7th gen Paperwhite, and since bought the latest Paperwhite that happens to be waterproof (even though I have no plans to immerse it and do no bath or beach reading), because I hadn’t bought a new Kindle for a few years. And after some trade-in credit/discount and Prime only deal, I bought the 10th gen Kindle for $5: it’s perfectly adequate, much better than the 1st gen Paperwhite I traded in!

OTOH I would be interested in seeing support for TTS (as K2 through Kindle Touch had, but with additional languages) and immersion reading, even if it drains battery 3x faster (I have not benchmarked power consumption of VoiceView or audiobook playback on my newer Kindles but assume it is about what it was for the older Kindles or better). Or support for BT keyboard and simple BT remote page turner. But these features should not require anything more than a software update to the Kindles I already have.

I’d probably be a sucker and buy the next Paperwhite if it had these features and they couldn’t be ported to previous Kindles for some reason. And then probably would play with these features for a few weeks and go back to my iPad Mini, which had these features the day I bought (and now has Voice Navigation, and if reading apps would only implement it, multi-document views).

I’m probably beyond the point where I’d buy a new Kindle just for faster page turns or incrementally better contrast. And my mini is probably likewise ‘adequate’ until there is one with OLED and FaceID.