Amazon Kindle Touch

What delights long-term owners is how little the device demands of them. Several describe going years without updates, without buying anything from Amazon's store, and in one case leaving the Kindle in airplane mode for years at a stretch. It just sits there and lets them read.

The hardware itself holds up well. Owners report their original Kindle Touch units running a decade or more, and in at least one case swapping the battery once along the way rather than replacing the whole device. The bigger threat isn't wear, it's Amazon's own support cutoff for older models, which is why some owners have started jailbreaking their units to keep them running past the point Amazon intends to brick them. The sample here is small (eight accounts), so this is a pattern worth watching rather than a settled verdict.