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FWIW:
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My PW3 is unregistered and in permanent Airplane Mode, and I've been sideloading to it (using Calibre) and using the device for years while in this state. No problems. Works fine.
History and usage of this device:
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It was bought in Oct 2017. Initially I registered it. It started freezing up. I updated firmware, did factory resets, but that did not fix the problem. Eventually I sent it back to Amazon for diagnosis and repair. They sent it back with a note saying that they updated the firmware (to the same version that I had previously updated it to). It still froze up. And then, a few weeks or months later, it stopped freezing up. And it hasn't frozen up again to this day - 8 years later. Whatever ... it evidently fixed itself.
But somehow in that lockup period back in 2017 it became unregistered. I don't know if that happened when I was updating firmware, doing factory resets, or when Amazon got their hands on it and did the same things. I never bothered to re-register it because there was no compelling reason for me to do so. It still sideloaded books just fine, and that is the only way I have ever put any ebook onto the device. I might have updated the firmware since Amazon sent the device back to me in 2017. I can't really remember. But if I did update firmware, that would have been done by sideloading the update file(s) to the device myself, no via some online connection to Amazon.
After getting the device back from Amazon, I nuked its online access using redundant techniques: I zapped the Kindles memory of any usable WiFi passwords by changing all passwords on my WiFi router (it shouldn't have remembered any passwords anyway since had just been factory reset), I configured my router to reject any and all connection attempts for the Kindles MAC address, and I put the Kindle in permanent Airplane Mode. So Amazon hasn't touched it since. Or at least not since it got its current version 5.9.4 firmware installed on it (whether that version was a manual sideload by me, or just the way it came back from Amazon in 2017, I simply can't remember).
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Based on my experience, I would not expect any problems from de-registering or factory resetting the devices now. HOWEVER, my experiences are based on using the 5.9.4 firmware - and things may have changed in more recent firmware versions. De-registering and/or factory resetting may not be so benign these days if you're running newer firmware. Amazon could have theoretically added new "brick the device" code to the firmware that triggers upon de-registering or factory resetting.
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