This makes me worry about Amazon's future in the ereader space. The Touch is gone, replaced with this for $139 sans offers. The capable Kobo Touch and Nook Touch are $99.
$40 for a light and whiter background? I'll continue to use my $4.50 clip-on light, thanks.
Kindles aren't at the head of the price versus performance curve anymore.
I probably won't be upgrading from my 3rd-gen kindle either, but somehow i doubt amazon cares. I'm sure they make more off of book purchases from 3-year-old kindles than they do from the sale of new hardware. They want to sell kindles to as many people as they can, but once you've got a kindle all they need you to do is keep buying content.
Also, how do you search for words or phrases without a keyboard or touchpad? I find that a very handy ereader feature. Well worth $10.
Oh remember the days of paper books and indexes...
That said, the physical page-turn buttons are the best part. Without those, I'd never use the thing.
(I do passionately hate bad indexes, though.)
They make the money on content sales, as long as you keep buying books they are happier you don't purchase a new loss leader device.
It's possible that the new software couldn't be ported to the older hardware of course, and keeping multiple lines of software current takes more developer resources, but if Amazon doesn't want people to upgrade, then turning their hardware into abandonware seems like it's a counterproductive move.
Amazon makes a virtue internally of doing everything 'on a shoestring' supposedly, this is probably just an external reflection of that I guess.
Amazon seems the opposite; good software updates would make your old device feel new (just optimize speed and bugfixes, if nothing else). That would prevent people from upgrading to such "cheap" new models.
On the other hand maybe they expect to sell an order of magnitude more devices each generation. Also, depending whether the old devices end up in desk drawers or new users' hands it might all work out.
They've still pretty much abandoned the K2 & DX users, but perhaps the userbase for those is so small it isn't worth supporting them: it would probably be cheaper to just send them all new Kindles, but I doubt Amazon will do that...