Because the hardware is basically a near-loss leader meant to dump another sales acquisition funnel into the market. Which is actually what AMZN should have done with their Fire Phone; no one's buying an Amazon-branded product as an aspirational purchase (even the Kindle is a utilitarian buy), so trying to capture the high end is a terrible, terrible idea. Instead build a low-end device at Shenzen-level pricing and just slap purchase option after purchase option on its UX. Low quality has a quantity all its own.
Did you mean to say, 'Low quantity (as in price) has a quality all its own'? That's what this Ars Technica review is saying. That, surprisingly, it's good enough for most tasks despite being cheap as chips. So it's not low quality, that'd mean it's kinda crap, I bought one of those cheap chinese tablets a few years back and that _was_ low quality. Ugh. This is good enough quality and cheap.
I have a nexus 7 (2013) and gave the kid my 2012 Nexus 7, and I'm still thinking of getting one of these just because. And a Nexus 9, which I think is drool-worthy.
This is the spec-level of the "cheap chinese tablets" currently. I know what you mean about what you'd get a couple of years ago, but they've come a long way.
Most of them are speced about the same as this Fire tablet or slightly better at a somewhat lower price as long as you take care to weed out a few 800x480 resolution ones.
There's also some variability in built quality and look and feel (in particular it's worth paying attention to thickness and whether the case is flush with the glass or not as there's some really clunky ones) but overall you can pick pretty much random models and have a pretty decent odds of getting something similar to the reviewed one, quite likely with more flash - 8GB is really low, especially if they've not been very careful about how it's partitioned.
One more caveat: The specs of the lowest end Chinese tablets sometimes go downhill depending on variations of component prices. E.g. suddenly you find RAM on offer has halved without changes to the price, or flash, or the display resolution drops. So don't think even what's billed as the same model will be the same specs without actually carefully checking the specs you care about.
It seems as if a number of the pieces I read about this tablet were by reviewers who just don't really think that much about price points. There was a lot of "Meh, it's cheap but the specs are those of a three year old tablet."
Guess what, three year old tablet specs may not make for a aspirational purchase but but they do make for a perfectly usable mini-tablet. I'd been wanting a smaller tablet to use when traveling and this was just the ticket. I couldn't justify spending hundreds of dollars for a second smaller iPad but $50? Sure. That I can watch Amazon Prime videos offline makes it even better.
Great point! I was actually riffing a bit on Stalin and trying to make the point that Amazon doesn't need to worry about having, e.g., what HN readers would consider a decent Android fork; a low-quality, low-price product with the Amazon brand will sell in massive quantities just because there are a lot of people for whom price-sensitivity is key, and yet whom are still likely to be loyal Amazon customers if they have the right consumptive channels in their hands.
As you point out, I was a bit flippant in my description, because obsolete specifications don't mean low-quality as such, and while AMZN can sell truckloads of low-end tablets, you're right that they couldn't sell poorly-made tablets and not have that redound poorly on their brand.
