I’ve never particularly loved Amazon, either as a retail behemoth or as a hardware and software company, but despite that I still probably get more excited about new Kindle releases than I do about most other gadgets at this point.
Some of that is because I rely on my Kindle for distraction-free reading and because I’m constantly highlighting things and taking notes, so even minor improvements have a major impact on my day-to-day experience. And some of it is because the Kindle’s relatively limited tech has left it without a lot of headroom to shove additional ads or other paid add-ons; they include lockscreen ads and “special offers,” but they can be permanently turned off with a nominal $20 fee, and even when you don’t turn them off, they don’t degrade the device’s performance or intrude on the actual reading experience. This isn’t to say that Kindles are perfect, just that it’s rare that I am roughly the same amount of annoyed by a software platform’s ads and tracking than I was a decade ago.
Enter the new 12th-generation $160 Kindle Paperwhite, which like most Paperwhites is the Kindle that most people should buy.
