Since Apple had their big fall announcement yesterday regarding the new iPad and iPhone updates/features, as usual the hardware news belongs to Apple and not Amazon. In a recent report Amazon did sort of not announce that this holiday season it MAY release a $50 six inch tablet. If it works anything like the Kindle Fire (of which I am a first generation owner), it’s likely to be less than wonderful.

I neglected to mention that my Kindle Fire’s recharging port stopped connecting and the device is now dead in the water. That is until or unless I replace it myself (a 15 minute how-to-fix-it-yourself video convinced me to not bother and I don’t have a working soldering iron anyway).   That Kindle Fire device never worked that well as anything but an e-reader as far as I am concerned.

I also should remind those of you that don’t know that I am a big fan of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com in general. When it comes to distribution of consumer goods, hosting and deployment of business services and innovative ideas Amazon is a brilliant company.   When Amazon tries to be a hardware company it almost always fails miserably. The original Amazon Kindle was cool and innovative (pre-iPad mind you) however Amazon has been chasing its tail (and Apple and Android) ever since when it comes to consumer hardware devices. The Original Amazon Kindle was the best device it ever has made. Remember the Amazon Fire phone?   Didn’t think so. That was so 2014.

It’s not surprising that Amazon would have the desire to provide hardware devices in order to control the user experience as much as possible. From a business perspective there’s great motivation to create as closed a system as possible.

Do Amazon’s continued consumer hardware problems hurt its brand image? I think the answer is a definitive YES. Personally I know few if any people that have positive experiences with Amazon consumer hardware. For the record very few people I know HAVE Amazon devices.

The expression ‘those that ignore the past are destined to repeat it’ applies here. So why does Amazon keep trying?