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Kindle Fire Is Sold Out Forever
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from geek.com: "Amazon has released a rather bizarre bit of news today. The Kindle Fire has completely sold out. You can no longer buy one, and the wording of the press release suggests there won't be any more manufactured. In nine months on sale Amazon claims to have secured 22 percent of tablet sales in the U.S.. With that in mind, Amazon will definitely be selling more Kindle Fires, however, the next one you'll be able to buy will probably have a '2' at the end of the name. Jeff Bezos said that the Kindle Fire is Amazon's most successful product launch so far and that there's 'an exciting roadmap ahead.' He also confirmed Amazon will continue to offer hardware, but there's no detail beyond that." Also covered on Slashcloud.
Product withdrawn from sale pending announcement of new product.
Film at 11.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/23/us-amazon-event-idUSBRE87M0XH20120823
That's the only reason I can think of that they would stop making money. It's like how Microsoft used to lose money on every Xbox sold, or Sony and the PS3. They wanted a foot in the door of the market, and their next offering will be something that makes them money for each unit sold, rather than losing them money.
I'll consider the KF2 if Amazon can prove they've permanently removed the ability to remotely delete files from it. No "Sorry (that we got caught)," no "We really truly promise, cross our hearts and hope to die, that we won't use this remote-kill feature which we've conveniently left fully intact and operational on our store servers." I'm not settling for anything less than "We're sorry we fucked with your property, we were wrong to do it irrespective of any licensing disputes, and we've irreversibly crippled our own ability to ever do it again. Here's proof and here's the list of files to rename or delete on your own device to make sure that even if we change our minds, we won't be able to do it to you ever again." Otherwise, I'll keep steering people toward Nook, BeBook, Onyxbook, Kobo, and other brands. Except Sony, of course.
I'm unwilling to buy a device that I end up not truly owning and controlling. I consider the lack of WLAN connectivity on my BeBook to be a feature after what Amazon pulled with 1984.
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tfs:
Amazon will definitely be selling more Kindle Fires, however, the next one you'll be able to buy will probably have a "2 at the end of the name.
I take it this is a typo... surely they meant 2", as in, Kindle Fire 2", Finally, a kindle fire that you can fit in your mouth!
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An all season, outdoor weathersealed version. Probably won't happen, but it would be more useful to me than one which shorts out in a light drizzle (the ones they've been making.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I know Amazon is trying to get everone to store everything in the cloud, but I really hope they put a media slot (micro or regular SD) on the new Kindle.
I'm seriously considering the nook tablet over the Kindle or Nexus 7, because I can't imagine doing anything on a tablet that really pushes the CPU/GPU, but I can see needing more than 16gb of storage. And not having a nearby wifi spot for the cloud, or the patience to download everything over wifi instead of swapping out a memory card.
Good timing for Amazon if they can sell out their existing inventory before Apple moves into the 7 inch device market. Perhaps Amazon has seen the writing on the wall. I expect many players will be forced out of the market.
If Amazon does a Fire 2 it will need to be more than a vanilla Android with a custom GUI. 7 inch devices are about to become a market requiring innovation, not just low pricing.
You can get a cheap, no-name, Android tablet with a capacitive touchscreen for less than $150 and the KF's specs were always fairly low. The CPU's OK, but the screen is 1024x600, there's stereo speakers but no microphone, there's no camera, and the only ports are audio out and micro USB - no video, no audio in. Oh, and it has a whopping 6G of RAM.
I suspect, actually, the KF does cost less than $200 to build. Not much less, but enough for it not to make a loss if someone buys one and never buys a single app or piece of music.
This development strikes me as a classic "Build anticipation for KF2" thing, not a "Phew, we got rid of the things. They were taking up space" type complaint.
Bear in mind that if the KF2 is a sub-$100 device, or alternatively is a $200 device with specs rivaling the N7, people who just bought a KF1 a few days before are going to be very upset with Amazon unless they issue free upgrades. Older Slashdotters may remember Amstrad's CPC664 fiasco where Amstrad replaced a 64K home computer with a 128K one over night, and the resultant bad press it got Amstrad! Consumers think they're being ripped off if a manufacturer makes their brand new device obsolete.
I'm very interested to see what the KF2 will be. Are Amazon going to go for cheap, or are they going to go for a Nexus 7 competitor?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"...but I've played with the fire..."
Traditional wisdom would recommend against such actions.
Why would you continue to make an old product when your new product (Kindle Fire 2) is scheduled to be released any day now? Nothing about that seems bizarre to me.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
And maybe not. The original Kindle sold for around $500. Do you think they felt "ripped" off when Amazon released the K2 for $250? Or the current base version for $79? Another example: I know many people who paid $25,000 for their Echo-style Priuses but a year later a dealer offered me one for a mere $18,000 because he knew a Prius 2 was coming soon. When you adopt something early, you should understand that you are paying a premium price and that later versions will be cheaper.
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Amazon Kindle Blaze
Amazon Kindle Bonfire
Amazon Kindle Campfire
Amazon Kindle Charring
Amazon Kindle Combustion
Amazon Kindle Conflagration
Amazon Kindle Embers
Amazon Kindle Flame
Amazon Kindle Flare
Amazon Kindle Heat
Amazon Kindle Inferno
Amazon Kindle Scorching
Amazon Kindle Searing
Access to the prime lending library is the thing keeping me with Kindle at the moment.
Although I would nonchalantly agree with you, many people including my wife, would vehemently disagree. From her perspective, an automatic transmission is an obvious upgrade over a manual in so far as you don't have to know how and when to shift the gears yourself and don't have to worry about rolling back into the car behind you on "tricky" incline starts.
I recently tried to sell a 2001 vehicle with a manual transmission. For every interested buyer I probably encountered three or four who were no longer interested as soon as I mentioned that it had a manual transmission.
My wife loves the stick. Can't keep her hands off it.
Not exactly. An automatic transmission is a *requirement* for some drivers, so there is no upgrade/downgrade about it. For someone who is good at (and enjoys) driving stick, manual->automatic is not an upgrade. For instance, an electric->gas stove isn't an upgrade for my parents because they don't have a gas connection at their house.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I love manual transmissions. Last thing I want to do when I buy a car that I'll be driving for years is to ask myself, man it's going to be hard to find someone to buy it when I'm done. I just think of myself doing some other manual transmission enthusiast a favor, years from now.
Sometimes? But after I moved to a far busier city than I was in before, automatic became the way to go; there was too much stop and go traffic for me to really enjoy shifting.
I also grew up in a city on a fairly large hill (~1000 ft elevation difference between the lowest and highest points), and driving a manual was a pain at times when you were heading up the hill - although learning how to drive stick in that environment, especially in winter, definitely built some character.
LegendMUD
I believe that torque converters are generally less efficient than the use of a mechanical clutch, due to the inherent losses involved in having a heavy additional piece of machinery that transmits torque through a fluid bearing compared to the relatively simple and direct clutch mechanism. No matter how intelligently the car shifts, the simpler transmission in a manual is inherently more efficient. CVT might be better than manual, though.
The VW auto stick wasn't an automatic transmission. It was a manual with a torque converter and vacuum actuated clutch (it had only two pedals: accelerator and brake. The transmission released the clutch when you grabbed the stick).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostick
CVT, not currently due to current designs and materials. It theoretically could be though.
VW's DSG could theoretically be on par but is more costly and complicated. It still can't anticipate the road ahead though which is what my preference for manual is about (though that can be compensated for with the correct control interface).
What *are* you talking about? Maybe *you* don't know how to drive a manual.
>>>definitely an upgrade for the driver behind you, who has to stop accelerating each time you switch gears manually
Good shifters don't slow down. Professional shifters (raccar drivers) do it so fast you have to rewind the tape to see what the blur was. And of course good automatic drivers should stop following so damn close so they don't need to brake when I shift from 1 to 2 or 2 to 3.
Volkswagen comes with Direct-Shift-Gearing which has discrete gearing like a manual, but does the shifting by itself. That's what it gets +2 MPG on the highway (for diesels; gasoline car don't appear to have a difference).
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don't have to worry about rolling back into the car behind you on "tricky" incline starts.
I don't know if this is a good technique, but I used to use my parking brake to hold the car still so that I had both feet free to work the clutch and gas pedals when starting from an incline.
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The CVG version of the '12 Subaru Imprezza is more efficient than the manual.
that's the way to do it, however, this can be tricky on older American cars where the parking brake was a handle under the dash.
Because the fire benders wiped out all the air benders...
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These days basically all torque converters have a lock-up feature -- a mechanical clutch that eliminates slip after the engine and vehicle speed get close. You're still spinning all that oil around, but no slip means negligible losses to fluid friction. As to whether a slipping torque converter with computer-controlled fuel-injection blipping to match revs with minimal power loss is more or less efficient during an upshift than a clutch (with some driver-selected portion of slip, wheelspin, and throttle adjustment), it depends on the driver, but it's a small fraction anyway. There's more efficiency difference among driving styles or among different transmission models of the same type than between manual and automatic as a whole.
But the one place automatics are, and always will be, inferior to manuals, is that they can only react to control inputs -- so I can't shift in preparation for a planned maneuver (e.g. downshift preparatory to passing) or upcoming road condition without actually beginning the manuever.
While I'm enough of a gearhead to like manipulating a good 5-speed, I can't make an argument that it's mechanically better than a modern automatic-like (torque-converter & planetary gearing) transmission, provided it has paddle and/or push-pull interface to directly select gears. (Of course, the funny bit is that automatic transmissions are increasingly changing to conventional design, with the shift yokes and clutch controlled by a computer.)
Do you have any idea how hard it is to hold onto the steering wheel, work the clutch, talk on the phone, eat a messy taco, *and* have to shift gears manually? Do you *want* me to get in an accident, or something?
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