Amazon kills off budget Fire line to launch premium Alexa Tablets

Amazon is killing off its budget Fire tablets. In a major shift to its consumer electronics business, the retail giant is replacing its cheap, entry-level screens with a new line of premium, higher-priced "Alexa Tablets" designed to compete directly with Apple's iPad.

The new lineup, announced on Thursday, features 8-inch, 11-inch, and 12-inch models starting at $230 and rising to $550. Pre-orders have opened, and the first units are scheduled to ship on 14 October.

For over a decade, Amazon's hardware playbook was simple: sell devices like the Fire tablet or the Echo speaker at or near the cost of making them, then cash in when users bought movies, books, or household goods. But under chief executive Andy Jassy, who took over from Jeff Bezos in 2021, the company has been pushing to make its hardware division profitable on its own merits. It has already raised prices on existing Echo speakers and started charging non-Prime members a subscription fee for its advanced voice assistant, Alexa+.

At $550, the new flagship Alexa Tablet 12 Pro is more than triple the cost of the old $155 Fire HD 10. Amazon is betting that customers will pay the premium for vastly improved hardware. The new tablets feature sturdy aluminum backings, faster processors, and higher-resolution displays. On the high-end 12-inch model, Amazon teamed up with Corning to design a "Nanomatte" screen that dramatically cuts down on glare.

Crucially, Amazon is also abandoning its restrictive Fire OS software. The new tablets run Google's Android operating system, giving users access to a far wider ecosystem of apps than the old Amazon Appstore ever allowed.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon is putting its voice assistant front and centre. A "dynamic tab" on the home screen tracks what users are reading or watching so they can jump back in quickly. The tablets also introduce an AI feature called "On-Screen Intelligence." In a demonstration, Panos Panay, Amazon’s devices chief, showed how a user watching a cooking video on TikTok could ask Alexa to identify a cooking tool on the screen and pull up a shopping page to buy it.

The launch comes during a period of intense pressure on device manufacturers. A global shortage has sent memory prices soaring, forcing companies like Apple and Nintendo to hike prices on their hardware. While Amazon insists that memory costs did not dictate the price of the new tablets, Panay admitted in an interview with CNBC that the supply crunch made it "quite tricky" to design a premium device without making compromises.

For consumers who already own a Fire tablet, Amazon has promised to keep supporting the older devices. But if you want a new Amazon tablet, the cheap era is over: the company has stopped manufacturing new Fire units.