> Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc.
WWII fighter plane with red spots on it dot gif.
The vast majority of people who buy Kindles simply read books on them and don’t repeatedly cry online about features that are never coming back.
I’ve bought about 10 of the things dating back to 2012 either because I wanted to have the latest model or because I wanted to give one as a gift. They are all amazing devices.
I’ve never thought, “boy I better go online and complain about this one.” I’ve just been too busy buying and reading books on them!
The reason people complain is because the old kindles used to have buttons, and honestly the touch screen is really fucking janky if you're used to the page turning buttons of the kindle 4, or the onscreen keyboard is janky if you're used to the kindle 3g.
And the sad part is that there's no best of both. You can't get a kindle paperwhite with buttons.
No amount of "getting used to buttonless" can keep a touchscreen from registering water droplets as touch.
So until they can figure out how to make touch screen work in those conditions, any device released without page turn buttons is useless to me.
It's not a preference thing for me. It's simply a physical requirement for my environment.
Yes, I do understand I'm a rather niche use-case and don't really expect them to pander to me. But I will be vocal about it just so they know I exist! There are at least dozens of us!
The fact I can continue to buy refurbished Oasis units whenever I leave one in airplane seatback pocket is the only reason I'm still on the Kindle ecosystem. The second I cannot make that work it's off to third party for me and they will lose an infinitesimal portion of their captured audience for future book purchases.
I left my Kindle in the airplane seatback pocket. I got it back because taped to the back of it was my name, phone #, and email. I was very happy to get it back!
Why 15 years? Why should I ever have to accept things getting worse? Isn't the point of progress that things get better?
There's multiple touch zones (which aren't visible or marked), there's multiple gestures you can interact with, and it's so slow and janky enough that you never know what will happen when you touch it.
Will it go forwards? Or backwards? By one page? Or a dozen? Will it open the settings? Or change the brightness? Or just close the book? You never know.
I want to lose myself in the book, I want to forget the device even exists, not fight the device for half a minute whenever it decides to go forward by 11 pages, open the settings, change the font and brightness just because I wanted to go one page back
> Are you normally reading in a moving vehicle or something?
Indeed I am! My primary use case for the kindle is to use it on the train.
> which has much larger touch zones than the normal Kindle software.
That may actually be the reason why. The regular software is extremely sensitive to gestures and has small touch zones, so it's easy to miss the zone, or trigger a gesture, instead of clicking what you want to click.
I also frequently have to go back a page or two and re-read a section or two, so if I read physical books I always have my fingers placed so I can go back a page or two easily, and on the kindle that works a lot less reliably (especially due to the ~500ms latency on the paperwhite).
Wheras on the Kindle 4 with the forward/back buttons on both sides it was really convenient to actually go back and forth (and instant, as flipping a page back or forth on the kindle 4 never triggered a full display refresh)
I've gone back to physical books. Even if that means carrying huge hardcover textbooks that weigh more than a pound, the reading experience is much nicer than a Kindle if I can flip between e.g. an explanation and the corresponding figure easily back and forth.
Which I can't with a touchscreen kindle with a "back" zone that's 5mm wide and easy to miss. And even then the back zone only works if I keep the finger perfectly still, as even the slightest movement is interpreted as a "forwards" gesture.
And no, it's not cheaper. They were 40€/80€ back then, which would be 54€ and 108€ respectively, and now the equivalent model costs 109€.
Kindles for extended backpacking trips, though ... a godsend. Unless you're one of the younger crowd that is somehow OK reading books on a phone (though that uses way more power).
You may have noted the number of automobile makers announcing they are switching back to buttons after trying several years of button-free ... I wonder why that might be ...
if they want buttons just look at the various e-readers online there's like such a breadth of these things now its insane. i personally was fetched an xteink reader cause theyre tiny (literally magsafes to the back of my phone wtf) and i love that (they have buttons) and chucked this dudes custom firmware on it to make formatting and usability a lil bit better https://github.com/crosspoint-reader/crosspoint-reader
is it kindle, no but can i read a book on it yeah. easily.
You are only making complaints about criticisms (which you acknowledge as legitimate). If complaints from consumers about consumer devices are pointless and the consumers are "vocal crybabies", then how would you categorize yourself and your complaints about their complaints?
I’m no better than anyone. I was using the other persons definition where it seems there is no illegitimate criticism. I honestly think anybody crying that there aren’t buttons on a kindle needs to come to terms with reality and move on with their life.
"Crying" is needlessly dismissive and it doesn't strengthen your position.
I'm happy there is a mass of popular sentiment that consumer devices are better with buttons. I think they're to whom we can credit the return (or addition of new) buttons to cars, to phones, and to all manner of appliances (induction stoves, thermostats, ACs.)
In either case, it looks like the last Kindle with buttons disappeared only late 2024, a year and a half ago. This was a recent enough phenomena that these complaints make sense. Amazon still has a chance to get with the times and release an eReader with buttons.
I know "touchscreens are the future and those button-lovers are rarities who will die out soon" was a popular thing to believe, but that was back in the 00s. People like b uttons.
I recently had to do a flight without my headphones, because they had discharged because the switch had got jostled and activated in my luggage. 10 years on, we're still running into the disadvantages of losing 3.5mm headphones, so of course there's complaints.
Keep buying phones with headphone jacks and removable batteries then. They exist. If every social media user that whined about these things acted with their wallet maybe they’d be able to change something.
They are — all non-flagships do still have headphone jacks, even the Pixel A lineup kept them for many many years after the mainline Pixel phones dropped them.
And the reason most phones keep these is because wireless headphones are in the end luxury. They're not necessary, they're not even significantly better, but they're in the end a class symbol.
They are significantly more convenient. No wired to tangle or snag on anything. Seamless handoff between all your devices. It’s genuinely a better user experience.
They don’t sound better, but if you care about sound quality over ux then you’re even luckier nowadays than any time prior because you can plug an amp/dac into your phone
I see this every day in our video calls. There's always
1. The user whose jabra headset is intermittently cutting in or out, or whose airpods are empty, who then switches to macbook speakers & microphones
2. The user user whose left airpod is still playing music from the iphone and only the right airpod did the handover correctly
3. The user whose airpods manage to noise cancel his own voice away
And this isn't every now and then, I see at least two out of these three users every single day. No matter which company, which client, every single day, for years. This is not an exaggeration, it's absolutely maddening.
And honestly, I don't care about the cable tangling or snagging if it at least reliably works.
Then there's the other issue of latency. Wireless headphones, even airpods on MacBooks, have horrible and unpredictable latency. The OS tries to hide it from you, but if you're doing live video/audio/broadcast, they're absolutely useless. I do volunteer work in that field, and over the past years it's gotten worse and worse with volunteers bringing wireless headphones, which they can't use for critical audio/video work.
And honestly, I don't care about the audiophile grade quality, we had good enough quality for free in every device, there was no reason to remove the 3.5mm port. Every current-gen midrange phone still has them, and Sony even keeps them on the flagships (which is why I buy Sony, and recommend everyone else to do so as well).
It's great that the best-case scenario is better. But like with FPS, the experience is primarily determined not by the average, but by the 95th percentile.
Also I think the more serious issue is the SD card slot. The missing headphone jack is annoying, but you can work around it with an adapter. Not so for the card slot
You can work around the SD card just as "easily" as you can work around the card slot, as you can just always keep a usb-c sd card reader plugged into the phone.
Obviously, both of them are absolutely silly "solutions" to problems that wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
Ah yeah certainly there’s nothing else to be done. One must complain on social media about something that they have no control over yet is easily avoidable.
> Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.
Shocker, you're 25 years older and feel nostalgia for the way things were when you were young.
> I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?
I mean, find out what the fun is in that? Or don't and cry on HN? Your choice.
> I don't care for coding new stuff.
OK, don't code new stuff then.
Take the opposite view that computers are more fun than ever and see if you can understand that perspective? What would someone who believes that be doing on their computer? Why would that be fun for them?
If you're not willing to consider that seriously then yeah you're probably just going to get sadder and sadder.
> Forgetting code exists is by definition not suitable for serious work
This is just like everyone who says, “An iPad is not suitable for serious work.”
By which they (and you) generally mean, “What I do is serious work. What you do is unserious work.”
I think I do serious work – I mean they pay me for it? And I have only copy/pasted and just run whatever code’s been generated by AI for the past 12 months or so. Whenever I can I just let the AI run it itself.
Sad to learn that I’ve been so unserious all this time.
No, not reading the code. I vouch for the correctness because it runs and produces output that is useful. It might not be 100% right but neither was the code I wrote by hand.
I don’t block ads. I like buying things. I go to work and make money. I’m going to spend some of it on stuff that looks nice and seems fun. Ads are a good way (not the only good way) to find out about new things to buy.
I feel as if you're exactly the opposite of me. This feels, to me, like such an upside down, back-to-front position.
If I need to buy something new in order feel like I'm having 'fun', then I try to ask 'why' as many times as necessary to work out what hole I'm actually trying to fill, or what scratch I'm trying to itch. There are a couple of second hand items I want to buy off Gumtree, but I have no immediate need for them, they'd be for some future situation that's more likely than not to be only theoretical. Knowing that they are there, available, makes me want them, rather than some actual existing purpose.
> to find out about new things to buy.
I would interpret this as "to find out why I should feel unhappy and empty that I don't own these things".
On things that look nice, yes, I've got some nice art, but there's a limited amount of space in which to put up nice looking things, and if you're buying them frequently then you're either throwing out a lot or you're having to store a lot. Additionally, I don't think I've ever seen anything that looks remotely nice advertised on the Internet; or at least looks nice and isn't, in actuality, mass-produced shit that's been polished up.
Having said that, if I had more money to throw away I'd do up my study like an old-school English manor-house library, full matching bookshelves, wainscoting, desk and chair. That's purely 'looks nice' and I would throw away the patchwork that currently furnishes my study. I'll say that's been advertised to me through (un)intentional 'product placement' in movies and TV shows, rather than Internet advertising though.
Exactly. Good ads are a service to me that inform me of things I want to buy. They aren't tricking me into buying stuff. Sometimes I see an ad and immediately believe the product would improve my life and it does.
I think the problem with HN/Engineer types is they basically never see ads designed to appeal to them because they aren't a large enough audience.
I always thought of ads as "something that informs me about the things I should want", and that the point of the entire "discipline" or marketing was to "create desire".
It's kind of amusing to me how such an obvious statement like this is getting downvoted so much. I suspect most people feel this way about ads and HN readers are more bothered by them than most people.
(I hate ads too, but I think I understand the alternative perspective).
I've installed a lot of adblockers for non-hacker type people over the years. As far as I've seen, no one has ever asked or attempted to uninstall them. I think most people are mostly fine with ads, but prefer life without them.
Even as a kid, me and all my friends used to groan when the commercial breaks came on. I've been muting commercials since I knew how to use a mute button.
Everybody had a chance to learn it those year. No one who had already learned to code had a chance to learn it first, as in before other ways of coding. Not everyone can be AI-native.
You might assume they aren't going to be so stupid as to try to exclude everyone who isn't new to programming. I wouldn't. They're a crypto business.
Isn’t max unemployment in California like $450/week? It’s not nothing but it’s not gonna help much if you’re used to spending like a big tech engineer.
Luckily I am about as frugal as they come (humble beginnings) - but also I'm in Australia and big tech here pays about as much as an average Sr salary in a non big-tech company in the states.
At my last job, I was on 220k/y USD TC as a Sr.
This role is 140k/y USD, which is close to the top end of non big tech salaries here.
WWII fighter plane with red spots on it dot gif.
The vast majority of people who buy Kindles simply read books on them and don’t repeatedly cry online about features that are never coming back.
I’ve bought about 10 of the things dating back to 2012 either because I wanted to have the latest model or because I wanted to give one as a gift. They are all amazing devices.
I’ve never thought, “boy I better go online and complain about this one.” I’ve just been too busy buying and reading books on them!
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