
Hardware Isn’t Hard, Competing with Apple Is Hard - tdrnd
https://hackernoon.com/hardware-isnt-hard-competing-with-apple-is-hard-27ae935bab1b
======
canuckintime
> Dopplr’s product was ambitious, gorgeous, and by all accounts, it worked
> well, but it didn’t provide the magical experience the Airpods did. Almost
> no startup could! That “magic” is the cumulative product of decades of R&D
> and manufacturing expertise.

Nope. The "magic" of Airpods (I own a pair) is quick synced pairing. Startups
like Dopplr can't provide that "magic" for iOS/Mac users because Apple doesn't
enable the requisite access on their software. Dopplr, Bragi etc are better
than Airpods but Apple controls many of the devices they need to interface
with so they are fucked.

The lesson is don't design your hardware to match Apple and primarily at Apple
users. They will cut the legs under you

~~~
post_break
Android user with Airpods. Magical syncing doesn't do anything on Android.
It's the battery life, ear comfort, and the fact that the case is designed so
well. There isn't a single set of wireless headphones that does the same thing
as the Airpods.

~~~
canuckintime
Have you tried, or even heard about, any of the other options like Bragi and
Doppr?

~~~
photojosh
Two of my colleagues were in on the Bragi Kickstarter. They were buggy and
went through many firmware updates, but those couldn't fix the poor BT
connection between the two.

------
jackyinger
As a HW designer I’d like to contest the title; hardware is hard. Mistakes
always happen on any project, but with hardware they’re very expensive to find
and fix. Test equipment like oscilloscopes and bus analyzers are in the $100k
range, furthermore building your hardware will cost $100k++. Hardware is hard.
Software tools are generally free and fixes only cost engineer’s salaries.

Not that this keeps me from thinking HW ideas, and SW is great too.

~~~
replicatorblog
Hey there, I'm the writer and I'm definitely guilty of exaggeration on the
title. My goal was to push back against this popular narrative that it's
something intrinsic about hardware that kills these startups, not strategic
errors or poor execution. Hardware is less forgiving, but I'm not sure it's
meaningfully harder to build a new gadget than take on Facebook or Google in
social or search.

My first job was at an HW startup and I launched a dozen hardware products.
It's tough. A screw-up at a single soldering station in Shenzen can screw-up a
deal years in the making with Walmart. Overordering materials means you have
to lay off friends.

But saying "Hardware is Hard" is an oversimplification.

When we say that to explain the failure of HW startups, we miss a lot of
important nuances. Hardware is hard, but that's not the primary reason most HW
startups fail. Almost all of the high-profile failures we see in hardware are
companies that are trying to be the "Apple of X."

In this post, there are two hardware startups, valued at nine-figures, that
are essentially bootstrapped. Hardware was hard for them too, but they managed
to win with very little in the way of resources.

~~~
syncsynchalt
A quick note to the author: The article names the company as "Dopplr" but it
should be "Doppler". The former seems to be a defunct social networking
service.

~~~
replicatorblog
Thanks! Just fixed!

------
SonOfLilit
“We fucking started a hardware business! There’s nothing else to talk about.
We shouldn’t have done that.”

What I hear in this quote is "we went into a technological field we know
nothing about with the intention of making money. We shouldn't have done
that".

Nothing wrong with going into hardware if you have experience end-to-end
bringing a hardware product to market. It's just that less people have that
than in the software world, and us software people get used to being able to
figure out everything JIT.

Probably don't go into chemistry either, or algotrading, or practicing law,
thinking "eh, I'll figure it out as I go".

~~~
ryandrake
Also, the current trendy management practices in software like: "Move fast and
break things," "Release crap early and iterate," and "QA is a useless cost"
don't transfer over to manufacturing hardware.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Nope; a lot more rules and regulations you have to respect, certifications for
e.g. electrical safety, etc.

Mind you there's a few similar things in software, things like security
requirements when handling payments, EU privacy laws, cookie banners, that
kinda thing. But they're a lot easier to either outsource (use a payment
processor service) or implement (cookie banners range from a notice that says
"by using this site you agree to cookies", which probably isn't enough for the
law but reasonably user-friendly, to full off-site cookie walls.)

------
fpgaminer
I was part of a hardware startup for nearly a decade.

Most real hardware companies that I recall failed for reasons other than
hardware. Which fits with the author's overarching argument.

When people imagine a hardware company failing, I think most imagine something
going terribly wrong with prototypes, some failure in the field, manufacturing
failures, overbuying, etc, etc. But I think those events are rarely fatal for
real hardware companies.

I say "real hardware companies" because those kinds of failures are endemic
with crowd funded hardware startups. And I think that's why most people assume
that all hardware companies fail for those reasons, because crowd funded
hardware startups get so much public attention.

But outside of the crowd funding bubble, my experience has been that those
kinds of events are just normal bumps in the road. We were on razor thin angel
funding, and we hurdled all those kinds of problems. What really kills
hardware startups is what kills _any_ startup. Bad product-market fit.

Over the decade of my involvement with my previous hardware startup, we
watched _tons_ of fellow hardware startups die. Not because they hit some
manufacturing snag, or shipped a million units of explosive doorstops. Every
single one died because no one wanted their product. The classic startup tale.

Perhaps I have a unique perspective on the whole software startup versus
hardware startup thing because I'm a jack of all trades. I'm just as
comfortable working software as I am hardware (and boy does that duality come
in handy). So I've seen both sides from the trenches. Hardware people will
tell you it's harder, because they don't know how frustrating real software
development is and assume it's some kind of greener pasture. And software
people will tell you it's harder, because hardware is a mystery to them.

I've wasted days dealing with Google Cloud's SDK issues. And I've wasted just
as many days chasing a defect in a board remotely with a customer half way
around the world.

In other words: The grass is not greener on the software side.

------
dmitriid
There's another important aspect: No, You Can’t Manufacture That Like Apple
Does [https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-
apple...](https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple-
does-93bea02a3bbf)

~~~
toast0
This article doesn't mention it, but if you follow all their guidelines, not
only did you lower your expectations if fit and finish, but you also lower the
expectations of the whole product for people who buy it.

That's actually a good thing. First revision hardware is going to have issues
and building a beautiful product and putting in a beautiful box will set you
up for disappointed customers.

------
debacle
Hardware is hard in ways that software will never be.

* The cost model is different.

* The hiring model is far more interdisciplinary.

* You can't apt-get your supply chain.

* There's near zero real world A/B testing.

* You're at the mercy of far more external factors.

Relative to SaaS, hardware seems Sisyphean.

------
baybal2
I don't get their line of thinking:

>Do the opposite of what Apple would do

Count how many Chinese companies just jack into Apple lookalike market or
market for goods designed along the same line of thought.

Take Rapoo for example, once an unremarkable company. What elevated them to
the current level was a big bet of proper design. Their first red dot winning
product was designed by an intern that they almost had fired for insisting on
design that "does not look enough like apple".

I also see no surprise if a company like Jawbone gets into "last mile
operational impediment" what in reality was just the usual result of company
not having engineering expertise.

Here, I'd say lies the greatest rift in between SV style software startups
that take quality compromise in code as something usual and a normal hardware
company that knows that a broken product is literally simply broken with all
resulting material losses

------
tzhenghao
Hardware is hard imo due to:

1\. Cost and pricing models. This is very difficult especially when you're not
big enough to place larger production runs. You don't have economies of scale
here. It's expensive to manufacture just a few boards at a time.

2\. Manufacturing/supply chain points of failure.

3\. Hardware points of failure (buggy vendor chips etc.) which could easily
derail a project. Hardware isn't as malleable as software too.

4\. Long product development times. Your first version of the product can
quite easily stretch out to many months or even years. This is a huge risk
from a shareholder's perspective.

To gain some context into hardware manufacturing, I recommend reading:

The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware by Andrew
Bunnie Huang.

------
igama
"Building a hardware startup is hard, but trying to build one that competes
with Apple is nearly impossible."

So what is it? Hard or not?

~~~
michaelt
What the author is trying to say is:

1\. Apple products are glossy and polished, aiming to capture the premium end
of a large consumer market for very complex products.

2\. Doing this better than Apple is very difficult.

3\. However, other less difficult business opportunities exist.

~~~
astrodust
I don't know why people think competing against Apple is hard or impossible.
Apple steers a pretty clear course, and they don't like to take risks on niche
products. They're not like Google where, on a whim, they might make an IoT
blender for reasons that nobody can explain.

Apple also maintains very high margins, something that leaves more than enough
room for another company to compete on price. The trap here is instead of
producing a good product at a better price, most companies produce the
cheapest possible product in a race to the bottom.

Find something Apple isn't doing, doesn't seem interested in doing, and use
their business model. It worked for Nest. It worked for Tesla. It could work
for you.

~~~
IBM
>I don't know why people think competing against Apple is hard or impossible.

You just made the case against this. The fact that they won't make an IoT
blender is why they're hard to compete with. Apple is the polar opposite of
Google in so many ways but a big one is their organizational mentality of
"more wood behind fewer arrows". Apple is the batter in a no-called-strike
baseball game (to borrow a Buffett quote) which means they're only going to
swing when they get a fastball right over the plate.

Apple has high margins but it's actually because they have the lowest costs.
In Porter's terms, they're the benefit leader but they're also the cost
leader.

>Find something Apple isn't doing, doesn't seem interested in doing, and use
their business model.

This isn't actually competing with them then. This advice is probably valid,
but you're basically saying to just be the Apple of some other industry (like
Keurig or Nespresso).

~~~
astrodust
I'm saying Apple has amply demonstrated a business model others can apply, and
it's not like Apple singularly invented this model. They just borrowed from
other companies like Nikon, Canon, BMW and others, adapting and perfecting it
for the business they operate in.

There's a lot of other industries that need an Apple and don't have one. Who
is the Apple of toilets? Of mattresses? Of 3D printers? Of blenders?

Some have leaders that succeed not based on having a superior product, but by
their crushing marketing pressure and omnipresent retail representation.
They're ripe for disruption.

------
digi_owl
Never mind that Apple has a long running inside track with MSM, and do some
serious marketing.

I recall being virtually unable to go a commercial break without seeing at
least one iphone feature demo ad right after launch in my part of the world.

With Apple it is just as much about attention as it is actual products. They
have managed to make the choice of phone or computer into a lifestyle signal
that their competitors can only dream about.

Oh, and i recall the Palm CEO talking about how when they were designing the
Pre they constantly ran into Apple having bought up whole factory outputs of
part Palm wanted to use. End result was that Palm constantly had to go with
their second best choice.

------
jasonmaydie
I think the competition is on par with Apple, maybe it should be titled
"Copying Apple is hard". Ultimately, have been a lot of innovation by the
competition long before Apple did it, like QI charging, large screen, multiple
usability improvements etc.

~~~
macintux
The point is that starting a new company to compete with Apple is effectively
suicide, not that an existing business with billions in capitalization like
Samsung et al can't do it.

