[shurane]

This is like the Kindle with Ads model from Amazon. You can pay Amazon an extra $20 (or request via support) to not have advertisements on the device forever. Or save a few bucks and deal with the occasional ad. And from what I can tell, the Kindle with Ads is still a pretty popular product.

[franga2000]

The thing is, you can't pay extra for a TV without ads - that option simply doesn't exist like it does for the Kindle. At best, you can buy a completely different TV from a digital signage vendor for 10x the price, but that's going to be a completely different product.

And what if I want the smart features, just without the ads and tracking? Where's the "unlock ad-free version" button that Android apps figured out a decade ago?

[laumars]

I have paid to turn ads off and the infuriating thing is you still get ads for Amazon services, usability hints and a tonne of other junk that cannot be turned off (like “you haven’t bought washing liquid in a while, want to add it to your list?”).

[wizzwizz4]

Recently, they reprogrammed every Kindle Paperwhite so the UI is almost completely different. Ever since I first saw one in a shop, Kindle Paperwhites have always looked and functioned a certain way… and now it's different. Instead of the “book” that I have muscle memory for, it's now interacting with a computer interface again. If I wanted that, I'd read on my laptop.

Looking “clunky” and “old”, more like a dictionary-bookmark than an iPhone, was a feature, to me. It doesn't need to be slick and rounded with a main menu. You certainly don't have to move everything around so that there's a × button in the top-right corner of things that aren't modal popups; that just breaks the pre-existing “top-left corner to go back” idiom (which still exists for the “library” and reader mode).

And whose idea was it to make it so the “change brightness” menu also drew a cross-hatched pattern over your actual book? That makes it so you have to repeatedly enter and exit that menu (which now takes up nearly half the screen, for smaller buttons than before), unless you've memorised the brightness level numbers. You also can't judge at a glance where to touch for the correct brightness level if you do know it, because they replaced the custom 15-little-boxes interface with a generic slider widget that only uses the middle of the range – making it behave differently to every other identical-in-appearance slider in the OS. So what's the point of making it look the same?

The one improvement is that they removed a banner ad (presumably because they wanted the space for extra UI padding). I don't think that's worth it – but I have no choice, because I don't control my own device.

(They also removed the “experimental” from the “experimental web browser”, which might be an improvement, even though it seems the same; there's less UI space thanks to the pad-pocalypse, and it still can't do Cloudflare DDOS-walls properly. Not that I blame Amazon for the latter problem; my browser can't, either.)

[polymatter]

In general, I'm beginning to feel that habitually updating software is a risk.

I have a paperwhite, but I haven't connected it for a while. Generally when I do connect it to a PC to upload more books, I'll habitually update the software. Its good practice right? Guess I'll now have to remember in perpetuity not to.

Recently I updated my Raspberry Pi setup to find that the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS does not support the official Raspberry Pi cameras (it does add a ton of functionality, including a speed boost for Raspberry Pi 4, but nothing that adds stuff in my setup). So I rolled back everything. And I'll have to remember not to update unless they (or someone else) has added camera support back in.

The point is that I used to laugh at the old guys who refused to update their software. Now I'm turning into them. If everything is working the way I want, why update? Especially for personal devices where the impact of "security vulnerabilities" is so low.