Perhaps the only thing you need to know about Amazon's new Kindle Fire HDX tablets is that if you turn off a feature that allows an Amazon representative—a live human—to appear on your Kindle and take control of it, you would be, in Jeff Bezos's words, "disabling the greatest feature we've ever made." Called Mayday, it's the flagship feature of Amazon’s two new tablets, the Kindle Fire HDX 7 and Kindle Fire HDX 8.9. Like a Genius Bar in a button, it provides around-the-clock tech support three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
When you press the button, a person should appear in a tiny rectangle on your tablet within fifteen seconds to respond to your query. While you can see her, and she can see whatever is on your tablet, she cannot see you. She can draw on your tablet though, like a sportscaster diagramming N.F.L. plays on "Monday Night Football," or, in dire circumstances, take complete control of it to fix whatever the problem is. If Mayday succeeds, it will provide the tech support of your dreams—an utterly unmatched experience, in which you don't have to go to a store, pick up a phone, or wander over to a computer. It is something only Amazon, whose mission is "to be Earth's most customer-centric company," would build: in an age of big data and uber-automation, it has created a supremely costly feature whose success is entirely dependent on an army of people—an army that will need to scale up in order to handle, for instance, the millions of users who will shred the packag es of new Kindles on Christmas morning.
The feature also helps make the new Kindle Fire HDXs the most precise distillations of Amazon into individual products yet. It's a truism that every tablet and phone now is a blank slate of sorts, but they're more like shards of companies that have been chipped away and cast into the world. The previous Kindle Fires always felt slightly more solipsistic than other tablets, in that Amazon's ambition to get users to simply buy more Amazon stuff—Kindle books, Amazon music, Prime video—felt more naked than with, say, Apple and the iPad. This was a problem because the Amazon universe felt small; while a Kindle runs applications built for Google's Android software, they are clearly not the point. But the new Fire software, paired with the improvements that Amazon has been making in services like its Prime Instant video, appears to make that universe seem far more cohesive than before. Amazon's Internet Movie Database service details, in real time, the actors, music , and trivia featured in the films and TV programs you watch; its recently purchased Goodreads book social network will be deeply integrated with the reading experience; MatchBook will port printed books you already own to Kindle devices; Amazon's twenty-million-song music collection will stream anywhere; and Prime members can download movies for free, to name a handful of features. These things—a constellation of services that Amazon has pieced together over the years—make the Kindle Fire HDX seem like the first real device from Amazon.
Just as crucial to the new Fires' quintessential Amazon-ness is that they are so reasonably priced: the entry-level Fire HDX 8.9, which has a 2560-by-1600-resolution screen, a 2.2-gigahertz quad-core processor, and two gigabytes of RAM, costs three hundred and eighty dollars and competes with the five-hundred-dollar iPad, the four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar Surface 2, and the four-hundred-dollar Nexus 10. The HDX's seven-inch counterpart, which has a 1920-by-1200-resolution screen, is just two hundred and thirty dollars. And their lesser sibling, the remodeled Fire HD, starts at just a hundred and forty dollars. (Google is able to match Amazon's HDX 7 pricing with its acclaimed two-hundred-and-thirty-dollar Nexus 7, because, like Amazon, it aims to make money when you use the device, not when you buy it.)
In this way, particularly with the addition of Mayday, a costly service to run, these tablets are embodiments of one of Amazon's defining traits: the undercurrent of anxiety you experience with every dollar you save and every convenience you exploit. You sense that all the discounts and features are leading up to a moment in some not so distant future when, after Amazon has slowly forced every competitor out of business, it will hike prices so that it can finally make real profits. Or as Slate's economics correspondent Matthew Yglesias put it, "Wall Street has essentially granted Bezos the right to operate an extremely forward-looking charitable venture on the theory that at some future point it will acquire monopoly pricing power and start screwing us all." Yes, that would negate everything Amazon has built since its inception in 1994, and the life's work of Jeff Bezos, who seems to engage in one extremely expensive charitable venture after another: a spaceship company, a ten-thousand-year clock, and his two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar purchase of the Washington Post. But Amazon isn't really a charity, right? (Though perhaps it doesn't need profits after all.)
One suspects, though, that the first time the Kindle Fire HDX Mayday button spares somebody an hour-long tech-support phone call with his or her parents, at least some of those anxieties might simply melt away.
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