Yesterday I happened to notice that Amazon’s 8-inch Fire tablet has suddenly gone missing.
It’s no longer listed at the top of the page with the other Fire tablets, and its price has been removed from the fire comparison charts at Amazon.
Yesterday the Fire HD 8 was listed as “currently unavailable”, with no option to buy any of the models.
Now today the buying options have returned, but every single color and variation of the Fire HD 8 is out of stock until September 14th.
That’s kind of bizarre. How is it that they managed to run out of four different colors with two different storage capacity models, plus each with the option for ads or no ads, all at the same exact time.
Something seems fishy about that. Perhaps the Fire HD 8 is getting updated next month and they’re just waiting until then to bring it back. But orders can still be placed so that doesn’t make a lot of sense.
The Fire HD 8 was first released in September 2015, and Amazon likes to replace Fire tablets each year with a new model, so an updated Fire HD 8 is a possibility. One with a higher resolution screen and a larger battery would be nice.
It’s already getting close to that time of year again. New Fire tablets are most likely going to get released soon either way. Hopefully a new larger-screen Kindle is in the works as well…
If they don’t return, the better question might be: what took them so long? It’s long been an overpriced and under-featured part of the Kindle Fire lineup. A while back I bought an 8″ Lenovo for $99, with twice the memory of the 8″ Fire, which goes for $149. It also has a much better battery (10-11 hours) and no ads on the home screen. I’ve always been surprised that Amazon seems so non-competitive in the 8″ market.
All the more mysterious with the HD7 perpetually “on sale” for $70 (which seems to me by far the best value in Amazon’s whole product lineup)…
Maybe they found a terrifying flaw in the processor that hackers can exploit to crack into your system, lock you out, steal all your account data, and then drain empty all your bank accounts and credit cards, or just turn on your camera and sit there just watching you 🙁
Of course I’m just kidding… kinda sorta
Amazon has would out of the Amazon fire HD 8.