Fortune Tech: Why Amazon is launching more tablets

Amazon has decided the cheap tablet era is over. On Thursday, it introduced a fresh lineup of Alexa tablets aimed squarely at Apple and Samsung, a sharp turn from the Fire tablets that mostly acted as portable screens for Amazon’s own entertainment services.

The move has Panos Panay’s fingerprints all over it. Amazon brought him in from Microsoft in 2023 to help with devices, and now he’s helping push the company into more premium territory. These new tablets come with aluminum casings, run Android, and have full access to the Google Play store. That alone makes them a much less closed-off product than the Fire line.

The headline model is the Alexa Tablet 12 Pro, starting at $499.99 for the 128-gigabyte version. It’s 6.5 millimeters thin, has a 12-inch display at 280 pixels per inch, and Amazon will sell a $549 version with a Nanomatte display that it says cuts glare dramatically. There’s also an Alexa Tablet Pro Pen and Pro Keyboard, which push the whole thing closer to a laptop-style setup. Below that sit the $329.99 Alexa Tablet 11, the 8.7-inch Alexa Tablet 8, and two kids’ tablets.

Amazon is also phasing out the Fire tablets, though it says security updates will continue for four years. Supply is limited for now, and the new tablets go on sale Oct. 14 in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, with the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and Spain following on Oct. 19. The pricing still undercuts Apple, but Amazon is no longer playing the bargain-bin game. It’s trying to look like a real premium hardware company, and that’s a much harder act.

Apple still has the edge where it counts most for tablets: display technology, connectivity, thinness, and storage options. But Amazon clearly thinks there’s room to squeeze into the middle, where the hardware looks nicer, the software is less fenced in, and the price isn’t quite absurd. That’s a tougher pitch than “here’s a cheap screen for Prime Video,” which is probably the point.