Vergecast: Kindle Scribe feelings, printer problems, and earbuds on a bike

Dave Limp: It’s the Kindle I think the team wanted to build for a long time, too. But sometimes you have to wait for the technology to catch up to the vision. And I think there are two things that converged to make this possible.

The first is the display technology and our ability to build a display stackup that made sense. We could have built a writing-only device years ago, but you can’t put Kindle on that. It has to be a world-class reading experience, so you don’t get to use the name Kindle. It would have to be some new name. There’s some things that we have to have in a Paperwhite display. These days, if you’re not 300ppi, it’s a nonstarter. If you can’t do a front light that is really uniform and beautiful — people have just come to expect that from Kindle now. So that display stackup took a little bit longer than I think we would’ve thought.

And then, secondarily, you have to build a writing experience — I would call it a whole experience — that is up to what people expect from writing. The state of the art of writing on things has moved forward a long way. You have to have the latency, and it has to feel like writing. So, you get to play with various waveforms on the Ink display. And once those converged, then we felt like we could build something we loved. And here it is.