I loved, loved, loved my Pebble Time. It did everything I wanted out of a smart watch, especially eliminating my phone-checking habit, because I was always on top of whether new emails were worth reading, it was a sanity saver during an intense M&A process. Also, it somehow had a super long-lived battery, and it had so much more personality than most electronic devices, with its little 8-bittish animated icons, reminded me of a Gameboy Advance or something. Thanks for making one of my favorite devices of the last decade, Eric.
And the battery life!! My first Pebble still had about 7 days of battery life after ~6 years of use, just unreal. I think it was rated for 10 at launch. Seeing 10% battery usually means I'm good for a day, maybe two.
I'm on my second Pebble Time Steel now - I only had to get a new one because the waterproofing failed while I was surfing!
I've had two separate instances of strangers (in Sydney) coming up to me and bumping their wrist to my wrist, because they also had a Pebble and recognised mine. Really lovely community.
I'm actually shocked that battery life wasn't mentioned at all in this article. A watch that you don't have to charge for a week+ was Pebble's #1 differentiator. No other smart watch had that feature, and (almost) no other smart watch has it today in 2022.
The super lightweight C-based runtime and eInk display combination was a genius move. But I'm not sure they realize it, even in hindsight, other than alluding to the "geeky/hacker user base." As one of those geeky hackers, I didn't buy the watch because it looked like an off-brand Casio calculator, I bought it (and came back to buy the Pebble Steel and Time 2) because I don't have to plug the damn thing in every night. And I'd buy another one today if I could.
I've always thought it ludicrous that a smartwatch (like the Apple watch) should have to be charged daily - makes it pretty much useless to me, especially if it can't even tell the time! I realise that the latest Apple watches last longer but I still find them overengineered and ridiculous.
Since nobody else seems to have mentioned it, I'll mention that I've been delighted to have an AmazFit Bip (with a 176x176 colour e-ink transflective screen) on my wrist for almost 4 years now (I previously had a Pebble) and it still goes at least 3 weeks between charges (previously more like 4 weeks) despite being connected to Bluetooth, taking my pulse every few minutes, and selectively relaying notifications to my wrist.
See https://m.gsmarena.com/amazfit_bip_review_another_shot_at_th... for details but many models have been released in the years since 2018, with higher resolution screens, they last even longer between charges ("up to 45 days") plus allow you to reply with preset messages and control music (sadly lacking from the model I have especially since the Pebble could do that) so perhaps I should treat myself to an upgrade sometime.
> with a 176x176 colour e-ink transflective screen
Citation needed. afaik no such technology as "e-ink transflective screen" exists yet although there were some startups trying to propose such concepts.
I think you mean "transflective lcd screen" which is not e-ink.
> No other smart watch had that feature, and (almost) no other smart watch has it today in 2022.
That's not really true, unless your definition of a smartwatch is limited to Apple/Android devices with LED displays. I use Garmin Fenix with a transflective display which lasts about 2 weeks on a single charge. However, like with Pebble, there are some tradeoffs: the display is not as bright (but clearly visible in the sun), it has less colors, and the screen resolution is lower.
Numerous Garmin smart watches sold since at least 2019 have over week of battery life. Mine would probably last 2 weeks if I didn't use the GPS every day.
I have a Garmin Instinct, the battery life is insane. Using the GPS for on average an hour a day I get a week to a week and a half on one charge. Without using the GPS at all it can go 3-4 weeks.
Personally I think it was a mistake to market the transflective LCD as "E-Paper" when eInk was already an established product. They're very different technologies and people still get them confused.
I agree. I suspect someone at Pebble did that on purpose because I asked specifically about this during their kickstarter and they declined to change their wording.
I often hear about the great battery life of the Pebble watch, and that there is no smart watch with a comparable one. Thats kind of true, depending what one wants from their smart watch.
But there actually is an alternative if you only need basic smart watch capabilites: Sport Watches.
I personally only want notifications from my phone, which my Garmin Forerunner 245 can do perfectly well.
And it has a battery life of up to 2 weeks, depending on how much I use the GPS of the watch.
> I often hear about the great battery life of the Pebble watch, and that there is no smart watch with a comparable one.
My Fitbit Versa 3 has a week long battery life, can do Google/
Alexa Assistant, Google Maps, Spotify, GPS, health montoring, voice response to text messages although it does use its own Pay system. I think what they mean is that Samsung and Apple don't have watches with comparable battery life.
I would still switch back to my Pebble if they made it again.
Yeah but the issue with a lot of sport watches are they have a "tacticool" look that doesn't look very fashionable, the Pebble had the unique aspect of having models that looked stylish while still maintaining their battery life.
Withings wins that particular narrow field handily, their watches do about four things: notify, tell time, track steps, and heart rate.
But they have real hands, and the 'smart' part is subtle enough that most people just see a watch, a couple weeks battery is realistic as well.
Pebble hit a sweet spot in terms of how much you can do with it, while being good looking with a hardy battery. If we limit the comparison to the last two of those things, Withings is in the lead, not to mention still actively sold and supported.
Are you implying Zuckerberg is fashionable? I'm not sure I've ever seen a positive comment about his appearance, in fact he's usually said to not even look like a living human
Oh, that's crazy that it still lasts 7 days. I guess it's had a lot fewer cycles than a smartphone battery typically gets in that time, because of the long battery life.
And looking on eBay, used Pebbles are actually surprisingly affordable, like $20-50.
Same. The Bip has a 30 day battery life. There's no SDK though so it's not as tinker friendly but when used with Gadgetbridge I get the privacy and some neat features on top. Plus there's a pretty big online community around hacking it.
No 3rd party apps for the watch of any kind, it has no ecosystem. I had one, and yes the battery time was good, but everything else about it was sub-par.
And how useful is that on Pebble sized screen? I can read all notifications on Bip (that's reason I bought it for), answer/reject calls, track all my vital signs, use it as navigation, use it as flashlight in night (that's second most used feature besides checking the time/date) and with little hacking I could use it as remote control for music player.
Please list useful apps I am missing and which are usable on small watch screen, because anything requiring typing is certainly not useful and it's horrible experience and I never use some predefined quick replies.
Obviously Bip with open system would be ideal, but if I have to choose between expensive abandoned old thick Pebble with crappy battery life but abandoned dead ecosystem of apps and cheap ultrathin light Bip with amazing battery life in weeks with all basic features one can require, it's easy choice and reason why nobody knows Pebble besides few nerds, why the company failed, but Bip is much more known about ordinary people and its brand still going strong (sadly with transreflective displays and amazing battery life abandoned).
One app I used quite often on the Pebble is a TOTP app, where I could retrieve my code from anywhere, even if I forgot my phone that day. Since the battery life was awesome, it was comforting knowing I wouldn't get locked out of my stuff easily.
I also used an app to see a camera preview from my phone and as a remote shutter, I also relied on NavMe to see the Google Maps direction while walking or while riding a bike.
Another app I was using was to send HTTP requests to toggle some of my IoT stuff, that was quite handy too.
IIRC the quick replies could be entirely customized, and I found myself using them quite often.
Sadly, mine last only a day now, so I switched to the "Bangle.js 2" which I ordered during the Kickstarter. I believe it's based on the SMA-Q3 but with a reverse-engineered firmware (Espruino) and apps are all JavaScript-based.
My Pebble 2 still has 7 days of battery life to this day :-)
I managed to procure a couple of cheap spare Pebbles over the years in case this one ever gives up the ghost but I'm unlikely to ever give the platform up so long as GadgetBridge supports it, I also wrote some software for it that I still use every day to track my working hours (it had a C SDK).
that's pretty horrible battery life, with original Amazfit Bip you can have easily 35-40 days battery life out of the box and even after years 20-25+ days with always readable display, always on Bluetooth, I'm now on my second one since first one fall apart, then I had short stint with OLED smart watch which lasted only few days and had problem to read it outdoors until I gave up and after few months bought used Amazfit Bip for 20USD, which serves me until now
actually main reason why not go for Pebble instead Amazfit Bip would be for me extremely short battery life (and huge bezel mentioned in article) and price, while hardly offering more useful features worth the disadvantages
I'm also stunned at how much better it was at connecting and staying connected to every single phone I've owned.
Every other smartwatch I've tried (a couple fitbits, fossils, etc) has been absurdly flaky. It's common for all of them to just not react to notifications for a couple hours. Or they'll connect to some wifi but not others (why wifi anyway!?? it's insane! it's SO much more complicated!). Or their apps have utterly monstrous installation and/or permissions setups (looking at you in particular, Fitbit) and any connection they use breaks randomly every few days.
If I could just get another, I'd stick with a pebble time for probably a decade. It did almost everything right.
(ex Pebbler here) Pebble had - I believe - the most stable Bluetooth stack out there. This was due to two things:
1. Extremely talented Bluetooth engineers. Chris and Martijn were second to none.
2. Very good diagnostics tools built in house. When a user complained of connectivity issues, we could take a snapshot of the state of their Bluetooth stack. This gave us amazing insights into what was going wrong- more often than not we found that iOS and Android were doing something unexpected (we had lots of workarounds for their bugs).
FWIW a few of us went on to start a company to build more of those hardware debug tools: Memfault (W19).
Now how can we get the all-buying eye of the Garmin acquisition strategy team to look in that direction?
If Memfault ever want to end the standalone external tool supplier gambit and return to being in-house expertise, sounds like they could be very useful there. Not because Garmin's BT is so terrible (it has improved a lot but still far from perfect), but because Garmin seems to be the smallest living company that still builds their own stack down to the lower levels instead of hitching a ride on something like an Android fork.
Ex-Garmin engineer here. There are pockets of the company that use Android, and a bunch of the larger-scale systems have moved to using embedded Linux with Yocto.
The proprietary RTOS that runs on the watches is a super cool embedded system dating back to the earliest days of the company. It grew across all the product lines - watches, nav units, aviation equipment, marine chartplotters/sensors, etc. I remember once stumbling on some code written in the very early days by an engineer who went on to be the CEO while I was there.
It was a fun system to work on, and had an impressive amount of code sharing at the OS-level across platforms as tiny as Cortex M0 systems up to large multi-core ARM SoCs from TI and other vendors.
Thanks for the glimpse! My personal Garmin angle is cycling, which eventually that also "infected" my left wrist. When they first came under pressure in cycling from leaner competitors that are deep into the outsourcing game, I was interested to the point of pre-ordering. But since then I've learned more about the company and have come to respect them in an entirely unexpected way, for being that almost anachronistic twentieth century remnant that just keeps staying in the high tech innovation game. The mix of continuity and openness to change you describe sounds just right for that.
You're right, the connection was rock solid in a way that bluetooth basically never is. And I don't know how that didn't wreck its battery life. Even my Airpods give me grief every now and then, and those are often held up as the exception to the rule that is bluetooth being crap. I think that was why I liked it so much, it was a tool I could trust to just work consistently. Tech doesn't have enough of those outside of Unix CLI tools.
I just looked them up on eBay, looks like you can get another for <$50.
I wonder if there's going to be a Pebble maintenance scene in 20 years, I wouldn't be too surprised if there was.
I really hope so. I wear my Time Steel daily and will probably continue to do so as long as I can get parts for it. I've seen some guides out there on replacing the screen and battery, but so far I haven't had to crack mine open.
I'd estimate I still get about 5 days of battery (depending on how much solitaire I play, or how long I use the speedometer app).
Sort of like how retro IBM Thinkpads have all sorts of modifications from new motherboards to screens? I can see something like that happening, I was on the verge of purchasing a Pebble when they announced their doom ^W acquisition via Fitbit.
No kidding. What's even more amazing is that the Bluetooth is still that reliable today, more than 5 years after support ended, communicating with new devices with new Bluetooth chips and new OS versions. Every time I get a new phone or upgrade my version of Android I expect it to break, and somehow it never does.
Thanks for the link! I actually stopped wearing it at the end of the M&A process, because of how stressful the the M&A process was. As much as I liked the device, I started getting a bit of a negative Pavlovian reaction to the wrist buzzes, because the contents of the emails tended to be pretty stressful. I intended it to be a short digital detox, but since then, I've only worn the dumbest of dumbwatches. But maybe it's time to give it another go, it'd be great to have it help kill off my phone checking habit again. It's truly awesome that the fact that it was so open has allowed it to live past its parent company.
I pulled mine out of storage a few weeks ago to resurrect it as a display for my EUC, and was surprised by it yet again. The fast refresh and good visibility is just so pleasant to use. Rebble was much easier to set up than I had assumed it would be, and isn't missing anything as far as I can tell.
Oh cool! A friend worked at Pebble and I volunteered to run a Pebble hackathon in 2014 (sticker is still on my old macbook) and for my time they gave me a Pebble Time Steel and even a little wood panel sticker for the front. I knew they ceased operations but I did not know about rebble! I will have to check it out. I think I know exactly where my pebble is.
This was the end of both my kickstarter Pebble and my Pebble Steel. I adored my steel - it was such a great watch.
I struggled for years to find a replacement and eventually settled on a Skagen Jorn Hybrid because the long battery life, notifications for calls and always accurate time are the most important features to me. I don't need to read notifications, I just want an accurate and long lasting watch with critical notifications only. They look like classic watches as well, so they fit in very well in corporate environments.
I'd recommend them to anyone else who feels a little lost after their pebble died.
I loved my pebble time, but it has been absolutely infuriating that I can't manually set the date and time on the watch. I no longer have an android phone and I can't use Rebble. I would continue to use this watch if I could change the damn time but alas, another piece of waste in my life. I am going to get rid of it
Same. I was devastated when I broke it. I would probably still be wearing it. My modern smart watch really doesn't do much more - except perhaps keeping track of my heart rate.
Pebble had an incredibly clever design for their watch apps. The watch itself had a limited processor and even more limited RAM but it could hold a few apps and those apps had a lot of capability.
Each app had both a on-watch component and an on-phone component and you could install these apps from their own app store and same app worked on both iOS and Android. They got around both the app install limitations on iOS and the cross-platform compatibility issues by making the on-phone portion run in the platform's JavaScript engine.
You could, for example, create a weather application that fetched the weather from the Internet and displayed it on the watch. The on-phone app would fetch the weather from the Internet using JavaScript code and then transmit that data to the corresponding C-based watch app. Watch apps could even have settings that were just HTML pages.
I always impressed by the cleverness and simplicity of that design.
"We sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales."
So from 0 to 2 million in 4 years?
I was just explaining to my child that many "failures" are only failures from a strange but important angle. They might have been profitable at the time they were canceled, but they were perceived by their maker as less profitable than some other potential product. A venture might net $1m/year and be deemed a wild success. Or it might be deemed a failure if the maker thinks they could net $5m/year on a different venture using the same resources.
Pebble was absolutely a success in the first few years. They failed to sustain the success. Apple and Samsung had entered the markets and invested orders of magnitude more funding than Pebble had.
Pebble probably could have limped on for another 5 years but ultimately their fate had been sealed and it was best to sell and leave on a high note than to go in to decline.
Fossil, Garmin, and (to an extent) FitBit work in different market segments to Apple and Google. Fossil leans heavily on its brand value and aesthetic, while the other two are more fitness centric. The Apple and Google entries are general purpose tools.
Pebble was a different market segment too. Pebble was a low cost, long battery life device. There still isn't anything remotely like the Pebble Time on the market right now. I literally went 2 years looking for a similar device after my old Pebble died and couldn't find anything before giving up and buying an Apple Watch. I do like my Apple watch but honestly, I'd rather have had a new Pebble Time.
There are, Withings makes them (I have another comment you can find on this, don't want to sound like a shill), but there's no ecosystem at all, so the Pebble sweet spot is still unclaimeed.
> Pebble probably could have limped on for another 5 years but ultimately their fate had been sealed
I agree with the point the article makes: if they'd focused in on their niche (hackers) instead of trying to go mainstream, they could have had a tidy, sustainable little business.
It only counts as limping along if you're going toe to toe with the Apple Watch for global marketshare, but there are other ways to define a successful business.
The Pebble was a lot of fun to develop for -- I've subsequently tried developing for other smart watches but it was too much (like) work to be enjoyable.
this is the modern world of monopolies and big money. they either buy you out or crush you. this is why progress is stalled these days so much in hw and sw world. it's just not worth it and requires way too much backing to succeed and be able to compete with these monopolies.
Has progress stalled? The latest generation smart watches are massively better than the last pebble. The hardware that consumers have today is borderline magic. Just because they don't throw in crazy gimmicks in to each years release doesn't mean there was no progress.
Pebble didn't get crushed by a big money monopoly.
Some people are willing to be "niche" and some people aren't. A company that produces 100 laptops per month for $100 profit each is not Apple. But that still means there is $10,000 per month left over after all salaries and other expenses. It's not a path to fame and glory, so few are interested. But it could sustain a very small company for a long time outside the world of monpolies and big money.
But if you've figured out how to produce 5 laptops per day, 20 days every month, you're in a strange space. That's not a garage operation. So why not 50 per day? Then the eternal quest for growth leads you back into the world of monopolies and big money.
> The underlying problem was that we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted.
How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? What kind of market research/methods goe into this? How do you trust opinions from people? I'm surethere's a whole industry around this, but it seems that what people say and where people actually put their money are usually pretty different, especially if the product is somewhat "quirky".
For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
> How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence?
One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role.
This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it!
Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.
Pre-order is reliable signal. How does one go about software services though?
For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money.
Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?
Ideally, you don't start building any software until you have a validation. "Soft" validation would mean having people that want to try it, "hard" validation would be preorders. A middle ground might be what Buffer did [1], where they added a fake preorder screen just to see whether people will click on it.
Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner.
Definitely read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It goes over why you shouldn't spend ages on market research and instead just get an MVP out of the door as soon as possible.
One way to validate demand for SaaS without risking too much development time, is to just make a landing page with a sign-up button. If someone clicks the sign-up button, just present them with page that says it's coming soon. Then you can track whether people even click to sign up.
One way to do it is to start small, build something, ship it to customers, get feedback and then iterate from there. This is a bit harder with hardware, though, but not impossible. We actually built an entire smartwatch called inPulse before Pebble, sold and shipped it to 1000 early customers, then got feedback from them. This is how we learned which features to put into Pebble.
I am a proud user of the pebble time round since a year (60$) and proudly wear it every day - especially on business trips were all have their bulky apple watch.
> I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.
I have a theory that if they had named the 12 mini just "iPhone 12", people would've bought it so much more because it would've appeared as The Default iPhone. Not sure if so many bigger variants would've existed in that imaginary world though.
I have no research on this of course. I just have an anecdote that my mom didn't even consider the mini (and just bought the regular 12) even though a few years back she did complain how big all the phones were. I guess an average person just gets used to everything and aren't as nit-picky on all the details and ergonomics as myself.
I still long for one-handed flagships. Maybe I'm just a weirdo for whom 5" phones from a few years back (e.g. Pixel 1) were perfectly operable with one hand. For a lot of the population those phones were already two handed devices in most use cases I guess? Couple this with how phones are the main computing and media consumption devices for most people nowadays... why not have it remarkably bigger I guess.
Yeah, for me (YMMV with your hand size), Nexus 5 was the ideal maximum size. (I even ended up removing the perimeter protection I bought because it made it cross the threshold into "too big".)
Bought a mini. Also guided a friend's wife to the mini when she surprised him with a new phone for Christmas, because he had told me he hated how big phones had gotten (iPhone X maybe?) and his next one was going to be the smallest one available. We're both very happy with them.
It's a great phone. Bummed to hear rumors than the 14 will drop the mini form factor.
I also had a Pebble Time and loved it, so I guess I'm just a fan of great-but-not-quite-popular-enough electronics...
I don't really care about ProMotion on my phone, if I could steal any of the Pro features it'd be the zoom lens and lidar. Unfortunately two parts that take up a lot more room than ProMotion does.
I don't think there's a winning way to do that, in order to add the "Pro" features you have to make a battery tradeoff, and then instead of reviewers saying "Battery life isn't great, but at least it's cheaper" you'll get a whole bunch of "IPHONE PRO MINI COSTS SO MUCH AND BATTERY STILL SUCKS?!?"
Not really. Apple plans their phone line ups well in advance, and given that it's hardware it might be very difficult to change it on short notice. The mini significantly undersold expectations, leading to Apple even cutting production [1]. If you want further proof that the mini bombed, consider that every rumour has it gone from this year's lineup.
I actually think they’re carving out an odd model line with their small iPhones. They’ve gone back on the larger is better meme twice to make the first SE and then the Mini. I suspect we’ll get another mini model after enough demand has backfilled enough. I’m guessing it really is a size preference for certain people and budget for others.
The model line of “cheap enough for the people who absolutely have to wait until price drops to their level to upgrade.” And also whose numbers swell just enough every 3-5 years.
And there’s lag unaccounted for in the anecdote. I’m one of those apparent hypocrites who asked for a mini but doesn’t have one—because I haven’t purchased any new phone yet; my current one still works fine.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some correlation between preference for a less obtrusive phone and avoiding superfluous consumption.
In that case, the reason I know people who didn't get the 12 Mini was it competed with the new SE, and they didn't want to upgrade during the pandemic when they were trapped at home. They're thinking about the 13 mini or the new SEs now that they are available.
I have a regular size iPhone13Pro (which I really only bought for the depth camera), but I regularly leave it at home and just carry my iPod Touch, which is a much more svelte size, and does almost everything I need from a phone (so long as I can get wifi or tethered cellular wifi connection for it).
User feedback is not about taking what they say at face value, it’s about all the other nuanced things they do when you present them a solution to their problem. You have to understand all the minutia like their facial expressions…stuff like that. Most people don’t do it well from what I’ve seen. From my experience, you ask people if they like something and they say yes a lot, and that it’s wonderful. It’s still about solving something / doing something better - to discover that, you really need to understand humans. Lots of quick iteration and more user feedback is important until you get it right. You will know when you get it right.
Then…well, try to build a team that can actually iterate quickly, deliver on time and without tons of bugs (good luck) - startup life. I guess lots of investors are like, well, 1/100 people will do product discovery and execute on the product properly and get a return for everyone, and that’s good enough. It’s not easy. And a side note, you outsource it and those firms are sharks knowing that 99/100 startups will fail and they’re happy to do product discovery services which are trash, build your product with tons of bugs so you can’t get off the ground, and when you fail - do it all over again with the next funded startup. Bottom line - you need some very talented folk to execute all of what you are asking…it’s kind of next level in my opinion. Like, think of it this way - to be very successful I feel that this product person must not only understand themselves well, but other people individually, and society as a whole. How many people do you know like that? Please provide more insight / correct me if I’m wrong…
Apple has both a sixth sense about this stuff and deep enough pockets to be wrong for quite a while before they have to give up.
If Pebble had kept true to their original design, they might have done better, or they might have just left people hungry for the Apple Watch. It's hard to tell in these scenarios, and very easy to make predictions about the past.
I know that for me the apple watch is what I wanted the pebble to be. I can often leave my phone behind but still have music, podcasts, email, twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and a variety of news apps all available.
There is a whole group of learning around Lean Customer Development[1]. Those processes (and a bunch more) help you identify, with reasonable confidence, that folk will pay for your solution. This process is one part of "The Lean Startup" process
Travel and surround yourself with new experiences and different kinds of people and build intuitions for things people want by becoming like these people. Share experiences, needs, wants, outlooks.
Then dogfood your own ideas. You will be bringing in others' needs and wants into your idea-generation process unconsciously.
If you are a billionaire you will never ride the bus and never understand the common struggle, and will never be able to dogfood a real solution.
the canonical YC advice is to make something that you want, then to go find people like yourself and see if they want it too. whether that turns into a real market or not has a lot of luck, but it's often surprising how promising being your own user can be, especially when you solve a hair-on-fire problem for yourself!
That's funny, I was one of those people, bought one, and now I see them everywhere. I chat with coworkers and random people about it and we're all in the same boat. Always wanted a mini phone, bought it as soon as they made it. I find it hard to believe that they're not selling any of them because of how often I meet enthusiastic users of them.
I did eventually buy an iPhone 13 mini. Still somewhat disappointed by it. What I really wanted is something like an iPhone 13 mini pro. I used the zoom on my iPhone 12 pro and never the wide angle, if they only pick two cameras, please give me the zoom.
It also would have been nice to have the better screen.
I was excited to iPhone mini but FaceID was a really serious deal breaker in pandemic. Some people may just bought iPhone SE with TouchID. Finally I bought it in 2022 with iOS 15.4, but it's too late for Apple not to stop future mini line.
> Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I assume these people either bought another Apple phone in the lineup, or choose to delay purchase until the next phone announcement or their current phone breaking ?
If they switched to android altogether I'd see it as a clear change in what they wanted, but if they stayed with Apple, the onus was on Apple to make the mini attractive enough to have these people buy it. Blaming the customer for not buying what they expected to be a better proposition feels weird.
It doesn't help that wether Apple fails or succeeds to make that pitch, users will probably buy another Apple device anyway.
>> For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE.
They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2.
The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.
As one of those people who said up-and-down that they wanted an iPhone Mini, but also was one of the few who bought one, the key thing I saw that turned people off was the battery life compromises for active screen-on usage. People have become used to 8 hours screen-on time, and the iPhone 12 Mini's 5 hours just isn't enough for a tech-y crowd, I think.
I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.
> many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.
I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.
Same boat, I wish they had announced it earlier, I would have gladly waited and paid for it.
I couldn't be happier with my SE 2020 though, I've had it for 2 years now and I plan to keep it for 2 more, and recommend it to anyone who will listen!
I have a 12 mini. Love, love the size, but batt life hurts and I miss the 2x lens more than I expected. I hope it lives another generation or two to resolve camera and batt trade-offs.
iPhone mini: price and battery life. Outside USA there is a huge market of great value Android phones. iPhone mini was an opportunity for a small screen affordable iPhone, but it was not delivered as such. Not everybody wants a 6" phone, not everybody wants a $1000 phone, but the opposite is also not true.
For those who don't know - Eric's new company, Beeper [1], is a proprietary Matrix chat client with hosted Matrix bridges to other chat platforms. The bridges are open sourced which is a huge contribution to the Matrix ecosystem.
Surprised the FAQ doesn't say anything about encryption/privacy.
The big selling point for Signal et. al. is knowing that corps/govs/etc can't spy on my conversations. If I was going to give another app permission to use my Signal, I'd need assurances I'm not sacrificing my security.
You are, by design. Beeper gets around the e2e encryption by just running WA themselves on their side; there is no other way for them to be doing what they say they are doing…
I run several bridges from my home. With End-to-Bridge Encryption enabled this gives you about the same security guarantees as E2EE with a second device added (Signal Desktop, etc). With Beeper you can do the same, IIRC.
Their value proposition then hinges on how good their clients can aggregate conversations and different chat networks, I guess.
Sorry to hijack the thread, but from the above link:
> Yes, iMessage works even on Android, Windows and Linux!
How could this be sustainable long-term? I've hacked together tools to forward iMessage content before and it's very unappealing.
I suspect they must be using a makeshift solution. I hope it works (and would sign up if there was a way on the landing page), but this seems like building on sand.
From my understanding, they use a Mac the same way you would, and they forward the messages over by sheer force of will and also money.
It works fine for me so far, though there's no out-of-the-box solution for forwarding iMessages that go to your phone number. That requires extra hackery.
I'm using Beeper! The app is solid, feature set meets my needs, and overall works quite well. It's still rough around the edges in a few spots. I'm waiting for the e2e protocol to have a self hosted bridge option, but once that's rolled out I'm a happy camper.
Some smart people are running this, that's for sure.
Beeper is based on Matrix and the bridges they use are almost all open source. It's an amazing Matrix client (including on Android and, reportedly, iOS) and that makes it pretty great at everything else. Though the Discord integration could use a bit of work still.
Texts looks entirely proprietary and the FAQ says they're working on an iOS app.
Mobile app is the big one. iMessage too. Texts iMessage solution is wanting. It requires leaving messages open on the computer you have it installed on. Might be Mac only.
Texts was too buggy for me to keep using. I still think it has potential though.
What is it that you are looking for with this comment? If you already know texts.com is there a degree of comparison you cannot glean from reading beeper.com?
I'm a bit surprised to not see Jabber on there; surely there's a Matrix/Jabber bridge? Or perhaps I'm the only one of their potential customers that still uses jabber...
I love the idea of paying for hosted bridges but I'm not willing to switch my main ID to one they own. (And I don't want to have two accounts because that sort of defeats the the whole point.) If they would allow accessing the bridges with an arbitrary matrix account I would have been paying months ago.
That's disappointing, but I guess it's the reality of today if you want a cross-platform application with full design freedom. I mean personally I think application developers should just pay for and hire development teams for native platforms, with one small team per platform you can do a lot.
But it also means compromising on your designs, I think, because I'm fairly sure it's a lot more difficult to implement a custom design on a Linux app. And Apple MacOS apps have certain design guidelines and Expectations as well.
I wonder if they could make this into more of a client-server architecture; a crossplatform server that runs as the back-end on the user's machine (or an embedded core), and a native client implemented for the specific OS. With an open protocol so that the community can build alternative clients, e.g. CLI based, or native with less bells and whistles, or more compact.
I dislike electron apps a ton. But if an app is going to take over for a bunch of messaging apps, many that have bloated apps themselves, I don’t see it as a major problem.
Three ex-Pebblers went on to found Memfault(YC W19, https://memfault.com), taking what they learned about managing a fleet of IOT devices and building a suite of monitoring and OTA tools to support other hardware companies.
Answering questions like "did fleet battery life get worse with yesterday's update?" get really really hard when you start managing thousands of devices. Memfault is all about making it easier to create the next Pebble.
> Answering questions like "did fleet battery life get worse with yesterday's update?" get really really hard when you start managing thousands of devices.
To me that only seems like a question you could answer by managing thousands of devices. Not that it would be easy, just that you couldn't really answer that very accurately with only a handful of devices.
It’s primarily about the number of hours. At Pebble, we’d be able to get a pretty good gauge on battery life with about 10-20 devices and about 24 hours worth of data. We recorded the battery’s percentage drop over the course of each hour, averaged all samples together, and then used that to estimate how long the battery charge would last.
Of course it’s better with thousands of devices, but we were always surprised how accurate it was (as long as we had a few Android users in the office - it reliably got worse battery life due to worse Bluetooth performance)
Is there a single startup success story in the consumer hardware space? The best case scenario is to exist long enough to get a billion dollar exit from a major tech company, who will then immediately gut parts of your product that don't support their own business goals. The more likely one is to be sold for parts (like Pebble) or just cease to exist entirely.
It is sad that there is so much innovation being left on the table in that space because the market simply doesn't allow it.
You have to look outside of mass-market consumer products.
The problem with mainstream tech is that it's a race to the bottom. Consumers have extremely high expectations for both the product and the ongoing support. Only the biggest companies can afford to amortize the R&D costs across enough units to compete.
Step into niche hardware and hobbyist domains and there are small companies everywhere. The smaller markets are too small for big companies to play in and the users are savvy enough that they're willing to pay for high margin products instead of picking whatever is cheapest at Best Buy.
Some other companies that are tracking towards sustainable success that we look at are:
* Oura
* Wyze
* Peloton (though they made some growth mis-steps)
All three of those follow a subscription model to get off of the "‘consumer electronics’ release cycle" that Eric calls out in his post. That's not the model that we're following, but we do have an alternate strategy to avoid falling into that same trap.
I'm surprised to see Oura mentioned here as a success. They don't have a single customer currently paying for a subscription (everyone would still be within the six month free trial) and haven't released most of the features included in their subscription offering. It's doubtful that most of their users would pay for the subscription.
The feedback was presumably so bad that their CEO left the company less than two months after the announcement of the new product and subscription model.
Wyze isn't doing so hot, after just forcing everyone onto a subscription to maintain the functionality they thought was included with the product they purchased. To their credit, they let you 'subscribe' at $0/mo, but the pressure to pay was quite strong. They also didn't message it well — my brother got email warnings, but I (a longtime customer) received none.
Also I think these three companies founders are not typical SV founders but have like strong executive background from Amazon, Nokia and Barnes & Nobles.
Problem is, there are plenty that don't get headlines because a single-product category company isn't going to generate profits like a conglomerate like P&G. You also can't simply just throw tech into every product category.
A lot of these IoT applications (home security, thermostats) feel like they're re-inventing the wheel over and over again, without any one providing any major benefits over the other - for one, they all want to sell you a subscription to your face, and sell your data behind your back.
I have been doing some covert market testing of IoT devices that are pay-up-front and offer privacy as a feature. Nobody is biting. The market doesn't seem to mind surveillance if they get a discount.
> Is there a single startup success story in the consumer hardware space?
Epiphan Video ([1], [2])? They are fairly successful at selling their hardware to video streamers (both, b2c and b2b). They didn't do IPO as there was no pressure to do so - they primarily bootstrapped themselves. It's not a well-known story, but the market did allow them to exist & succeed.
What is success to you? If success means customer success and probable longevity of the company (and growth and valuation are secondary factors) then Niche Coffee’s espresso grinder is a consumer hardware success.
Thinking about it a lot of third wave coffee products fit the bill. The Decent espresso machine is another and makes the “should buy an Italian machine” argument no longer apply.
There are also successful coffee scales. Lots of new stuff!
Fully automatic machines that are better than a great barista are probably coming. Maybe an upstart could do it.
Of course the sales volumes might be too low to be consider a success on HN or even shark tank for that matter. But i would be happy to have that much success in a new product.
I imagined the second part modified the claim as well. Oculus wasn’t gutted and repurposed - Meta is building itself around it. Oculus was a successful company - selling hella units. Being bought didn’t result in a shutdown or anything. I would call it a huge success.
Then again Apple is the canonical consumer hardware startup and that’s the problem with these things. A successful startup just becomes a big company. No one would call Dyson a startup but it was one.
VR enthusiast here, Oculus was absolutely gutted of its core morals, its core goal, and the majority of its original talent. Oculus insisted they'd never require a Facebook account, and now they do. They've fully rebranded to Meta. They were focused on PC VR gaming, and now they're focused on mobile based social experiences with some garbage laggy interface to get PC VR if you're outlandish enough to want that. They only retain compatibility with other VR standards to appease their customers, but it just results in additional lag and a messy experience.
Facebook purchased Oculus before they sold a single consumer unit. Any headset that wasn't sold by Facebook was a dev kit you had to apply for. (edit: looked up the original kickstarter, they did sell 6-7k dev kit units, which was mostly targeted towards game devs. After the KS the DK2 was sold on an application basis. The consumer versions that moved 10mm+ units were 2 years after Facebook's acquisition.)
I've clocked 10k+ hours with silly screens strapped to my head and I am deathly afraid of what Facebook has done and continues to do to the VR industry. The "metaverse" existed long before Zuckerberg set his sights on it, and he's already killing it.
It is an amazing piece of tech at a price lower than the BOM. I own one myself and can't blame anyone else that likes it too. The dissonance is still too strong.
I don’t get it. Most people. The vast majority, won’t ever spend $700-ish on any thing that isn’t proven, incredibly popular, and has limited functionality. On top of that, as you stated, the higher priced VRs required a high end PC (maybe Windows?). Then a bit below that I think some were or are available for the latest Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Isn’t very other VR set up not too cheap with no external requirements?
The average person in first word countries doesn’t have a ton of spare money. The majority of people don’t. How is being financially elitist about VR better than what FB did?
Gopro has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for many years now. Its stock fell from $87 in 2014 to $2 in 2020 (has recovered somewhat to $8 now). They started looking for buyers for the company in 2018 but still haven't found one. Hardly what I'd consider a major success.
iRobot has a somewhat better story, but is overall not worth too much more than Gopro (~$1.5B). It is also not a recent startup but has its roots in DARPA grants and defense contracts from the 90s.
Gopro is the default pop-name for what I can only describe as a Gopro form factor camera (tiny, hi res, easy to mount). While their company might not be successful, their brand very much is.
Glowforge? Higher price point than most consumer gadgets, but their crowdfunding campaign set a record at the time. (The founding team spent tons of effort on getting the product-market fit right)
If you're reading this, Eric, you and your team kicked ass with your product line (well, most of them) and tooling and I still tout Pebble as the best smart watch ever and it's a shame it went under.
The biggest quality it had IMO was battery life due to eInk. As a hacker I loved your tooling as well.
I'm happy I was part of your space by creating and submitting a watchface. I see tooling like Playdates latest effort and it reminds me of Pebble's.
Thanks for that sweet period of watches. Still waiting for something to do better.
I'm still sad about the Gen 2 Pebble Time not being released. It solved the (few!) issues I have with the V1 Time. And I use the word have - present tense - purposely because I still wear my Time daily and have 3 in reserve in case it dies. The Rebble project and battery replacements have kept these devices relevant and for what I want out of a smart watch I still haven't found a better device.
The tech community likes to imagine that Pebble would still be going strong if they stuck to their early product vision, but I'm not so sure that would have helped:
> Sales for our version 2.0 (Pebble Time) in 2015 didn’t hit forecasts and the oversupply in inventory put us into a major cash crunch (targeted ~$100m in sales, we did $82m).
That $82m in sales is still 8X higher than their 1st kickstarter sales and 4X higher than the 2nd kickstarter. They actually did ramp up sales and sell a lot, but they built and spent as if they were going to sell even more than they actually did.
The unclear half-pivot into different spaces didn't help, but I don't see how they would have done better if they had ignored the fitness space altogether. The market for people who want lo-fidelity hackable wristwatches is going to saturate quickly.
honestly my impression even at the time before the sale was that Pebble hired _loads_ of people.
I honestly think that there was an alternate universe where they slowed down, paid people "normal" salaries, really tried to not scale up... I dunno. They had a perfect spot in the market where they could rely on older tech, but every company wants to become the biggest company controlling everything all the time.
There are companies that survive without having 100% of the market share in something, or even 20%. Selling products at retail are hard and you have way thinner margins in theory. But it felt like there was a sweet spot they could have stayed in for a long time
Yes, the article identified the scaling issue. Since they received minimal VC they were perfectly positioned for “organic growth”, but being part of YC, may have led them to follow the pack and try to hire their way into 10x growth. The original model was made in a garage and then they took on a large staff which burdened the company to produce a higher volume of products. They could have chased more VC money or debt to keep the lights on, but facing up against the Apple Watch behemoth isn’t such an attractive proposition.
That's what I noticed as well. If they had targeted 50M in sales, would they still be around today? I'm not sure what to take away from this except hardware startups are hard - you can make a wildly successful product and get bankrupted because you failed at supply chain management.
The problem is that $50M in sales is only about 500K units.
That's the consumer electronics Valley of Death. You have enough units to get all the downsides of volume but not enough units to get the discounts of volume.
Electronics volume discounts really don't kick in until about 1M units. So, it looks like Pebble stretched for the 1M mark, fell short, and died.
It's honestly hard to see what they should have done instead. Scaling organically in consumer electronics from 100K to 1M is just absolute murder.
naw that's not true. The valley of death is >1k units but <10k. Not enough money to pay back your hw tooling. There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics. Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.
Tooling for injected plastic crosses over somewhere about 50K units. Before that you have to think hard about whether you can use advanced 3D printing to get where you need to go.
> There are no real discounts in volume for consumer electronics.
My FAEs and sales reps beg to disagree even in this mess. The first useful discount on microcontrollers I can get hold of generally starts at about 250K units annually (generally that's the first point where I can even get manufacturer attention--and even that's not great) and normally increases until about 1M units annually. The discounts increase from 1M to 10M annually but very slowly.
> Just look at the supply chain crunch, sometimes it's actually harder to buy components in bulk and you end up dual sourcing chips just to meet demand.
Right now is very different from when Pebble was producing product. Right now, I've actually had pricing revoked on me. However, that is not normal behavior in the semiconductor business.
We started Wit.ai from Pebble's offices in 2013 in Palo Alto. We didn't know anyone in the Valley, but Eric had read our "Show HN" and kindly offered us to hang out there.
We grew to a 6-people team and stayed there for 6 months -- Eric never asked us to pay $1. He helped us a lot and he also pushed us to join YC (W14). We wouldn't have made Wit.ai without him and I'll be thankful forever.
I had the pleasure of meeting the CRO of Bento[1] last year, and one thing she said has really stuck with me. She said that guilt is an attribute she looks for in team members. It shows that you care, learn from your mistakes, and want to do better. As I've grown as a manager, I have a lot of guilt over how I (mis)managed teams in the early days, but I had never thought of the guilt itself as a positive thing before.
Anyway, good on Eric for fully owning what went wrong here, and vowing to do better.
ALL they had to do was continue with the original idea and not get greedy.
I was a high(ish)-tier backer of the original, still got my 2 sitting in a drawer, and wore them until they wore out. I absolutely loved the idea of a MINIMAL e-paper watch with easily customisable faces and basic notifications. I’m still a fan of the idea, and would love to see more use of e-ink in smart watches. All the fans wanted was that, iterated and improved upon. Better development tools for faces, some other styles of physical watch, etc. Instead the entire brand got hand-grenaded and now we get nothing but some unsupported old e-waste.
Meh, I know that we did not get greedy. Greedy implies we were driven by a selfish goal of making more money for ourselves. As the founder, I can truly state that it was not our intention.
We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people and started scaling up. As I outlined in the post, we (poorly) tried to target a larger market segment and also scaled up our team. We were mostly right - smartwatches are objectively a major industry right now, but our strategy to do so was pretty bad. I don't think I would have changed anything, but looking back of course I see what would have been a more successful (but smaller) path.
> We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people
I think you were right.
I remember when my Time2 Kickstarter refund came, I was seriously considering using that money to buy an Apple Watch. But I didn't like the plasticy look/feel of the base models, and wasn't prepared to spend twice as much to get one with the nice metal mesh strap. I then spent about half that money on three 2nd hand Russian mechanical watches on eBay, and that was the start of a small but very enjoyable collection and hobby.
Now I'd guess 70% of my friends have a modern smart watch on their wrist, while I'm usually rocking my (poorly faked) Yuri Gagarin Sturmanskie replica, or my Raketa Big Zero, or my Amphibia. And I've got half a dozen eBay alerts waiting for a few interesting mechanical watches I want to add to my collection...
I’m gearing up to do so. I have bought a (cheap) watch repair toolkit and a degausser. I have an Amphibia that’s losing about 8 or 9 mins a day that I’m prepared to risk damaging by futzing with it myself, and a second Big Zero where the second hand has fallen off. There’s a local ish guy here who will service just about any old Russian watch, and most,y charges a flat $150 for pretty mush anything (I assume that wouldn’t hold if difficult t9 get it expensive parts are needed) But I’ve rarely spent as much as $150 for one of these, so having a shit at opening/repairing one myself doesn’t seem too much of a risk. I have a list of YouTube videos and blog posts queued up first though…
Honestly it never even crossed our minds at the time of picking a 'smaller' path. The natural path was to continue scaling. It's only obvious with hindsight that there was another path.
If it makes you feel any better amazfit carry’s the torch now for long battery e-ink smartwatches, I still think the pebble did it better but at least there’s something out there.
Can you explain what you mean by "the entire brand got hand-grenaded" and "not get greedy"? Is this in reference to them selling to Fitbit? Or something before that?
I purchased a Pebble Time Steel fairly late in the company's lifetime, so I was surprised and kind of confused about the whole situation.
But in the end, with so many users that still loved the product, it's not completely clear why they had to sell the remaining assets instead of scaling waaay down and make watches for geeks again?
Was it financially impossible, or were they simply exhausted? It seems the market was still there (and probably still exists today).
Counterpoint: you were always going to fail in the long run without full platform integration that you cannot have. The Apple Watch is a seamless experience and you can't replicate it. Although Google hasn't managed to produce an Android ripoff with any staying power, so maybe there's a market there.
Agreed. It was impossible for us to deliver an amazing notification and call experience for iOS users because Apple did not (and still doesn't) expose APIs for sending iMessage, starting calls or talking to Siri.
Counter counterpoint: Samsung, Fitbit, Garmin and dozens of other players are still selling smartwatches. The majority of phones in the world do not run iOS, so you can't pair a Apple watch with them.
There is a still active market for 2nd hand Pebbles. There are things you can do with a Pebble that you can't do with an Apple Watch (e.g.: use it in a barcode reader, make your own watchface, etc).
At this right moment I have a Pebble in my left hand. I don't want to use an iPhone or Apple Watch.
> Over the next few years, we sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales.
According to Wikipedia: The Apple Watch was released in April 2015 and quickly became the best-selling wearable device: 4.2 million were sold in the second quarter of fiscal 2015.
In a single quarter, Apple sold twice as many watches as Pebble did in total. Pebble was doomed once Apple entered the market to be anything but a niche product.
"Apple sells millions of iPhones, therefore Android phones (samsung, Xiaomi, etc) are doomed"
I have a Garmin watch, an apple watch, whoop, etc (not all on at the same time of course). Different people want different things, ex: apple watches should be charged daily, but the pebble could be charged weekly. That in itself is a big selling point. I'm sure there were many such differences that could make for a successful product.
As you say, there are essentially only two mobile platforms today, and only one of them has really been successful extending that platform to a watch. If none of the Android device makers have been successful selling a smart watch, what hope did Pebble have?
So again, Pebble's only hope was to remain a niche product. They were never going to compete in Apple's market.
It's fine to remain a niche product, but I don't think that was Pebble's aspiration.
(I too have a Garmin watch and I gave my Apple Watch away to my sister because it didn't fit my use case. I hope you recognize that having multiple smart watches makes you not just a niche user, but a niche niche user.)
I had the Garmin first, and a colleague recommended whoop specifically for sleep / recovery tracking. I got the apple watch as a gift, which has since taken over most things because of the wonder WorkOutdoors app :)
You can't be a small player with hardware when big players exist in the same category. Customers start to ask why the watch costs as much as an Apple Watch but contains an 8th of the features.
Often a competitor entering the market increases the overall market for everyone. Pebble definitely could have survived as the high-battery life minimal alternative to the Apple watch and obviously be well ahead of whatever was going on with Android watches.
This is a bit of a difficult comparison. Apple also spent orders of magnitude more on marketing the product. Probably an order of magnitude more developing it.
My point was you had to take those factors together. Yes, they had a smaller market, but they were also spending far less to have that market. It may have been doable.
Edit: consider, by market size alone, fountain pens probably shouldn't exist anymore; per that argument.
1. They supported 3rd party watch faces based on a file. There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file and, if done from your phone, upload it right to the watch. Once, when out at midnight beer launch, I made a custom face for the beer and won a little keychain from the brewery. My apple watch is nowhere near this functionality.
2. Once time in 2014, I ran into some Pebble engineers at an ice cream shop in Palo Alto, they spotted my watch, they bought my scoop! Fun, weird little Silicon Valley moment.
Interesting. I just came across an old email from Eric this morning, looking for something else in my inbox, telling me I was the first official customer. This was before the kickstarter I think, when it was announced on HN. It was a fun thing to tinker around with at the time.
Have a Pebble 2SE on my wrist right now. Have more in storage as spares, unfortunately the buttons on these start to disintegrate after a few years.
I was hoping something better would come along and dethrone it by the time I ran through them all or decide to replace the buttons completely, but nothing has. PineTime might do it, should order one and help move it along.
Pebble has always done exactly what I wanted out of a smartwatch with a terrific community hitting all the hackery and FOSS things.
Sadly, it's not really in the same category, since it has a touchscreen and an emissive liquid crystal screen that has good visibility inside, but bad outside.
But looks like that's what we have to settle with, unless someone tries to copy Pebble and also makes an open ecosystem that doesn't consider the "Linux Phones" developers as 2nd class citizens.
> Around this time Apple came out with the Apple Watch and we thought the smartwatch market was about to explode. So in a quest for big sales growth, we figured our 2015 strategy would need to shift focus to a broader market, away from our core early adopter market positioning.
> In 2015, we had the option to narrow our focus to a smaller but more distinct market positioning. Looking back, this is one of my biggest regrets. We could have been the smartwatch for hackers but we tried to grow our volumes and market share (and failed).
I think that this is the big take here. You can define your mission to make a hacker-friendly device (or different from the status quo), and when you see Apple, Samsung, Google or whatever big brand try to get a similar product, you double down on that hacker-friendliness. They will sure get more appeal to mainstream users, but nerdy "I want a gizmo I can deal with" won't want that. The problem is surveying the real size of that nerdy market, and if it is enough to help you earn a living.
Pebble Time is still my favourite smart watch ever. And mine is working without problems 7 years now. The battery life went down from ~10 days to 5-6 but still much better than any other I tried using.
Built-in compass, always-on display and physical buttons are just great.
A major client executive, who was a huge Pebble fan, essentially forced us to connect the mobile apps we were doing for them (iOS, Android, and even Windows Mobile) to the Pebble. The Pebble SDK was C based, so it was rough finding experience from anyone on the existing mobile platforms. Eventually we got it bridged from the Pebble mobile app. Along the way we learned a bizarre fact about the C compiler used by the SDK: it didn't support conditional short circuiting, so there were a variety of bizarre bugs that we had to go back and find once we figured it out.
"*But our main issue was that I did a terrible job at defining our long-term vision*...
My personal vision was that Pebble would become a brain-computer interface company, with the smartwatch as the first always-on, always-worn gateway between computers and our bodies. But I rarely discussed this with the team, or even the exec team...
I never invested time in building out a structured plan to actually make the brain-computer interface our company’s vision." [emphasis was in article]
So he thinks somehow Pebble would have been better off if they focused on brain-interface technology? No one has done anything with that.
No, he wanted some wearable that people could get so much use out of that they’d use it basically 24/7.
Personally, not a bad idea. I could see this being how AR glasses “done right” eventually take off (say with tech not yet generally available at scale). Maybe if the display were retina scale in the glasses and able to be transparent or opaque as needed. It’s not a crazy idea for that to start with a watch.
It's also tackling a lot of the right adjacent problems, both in terms of electromechanical constraints (miniaturization, heat, battery life), and also the usability piece, which is earning your place as their 24/7 device by being overwhelmingly useful rather than an annoyance, distraction, or addiction.
When you see how Pebble fans talk about their devices, it's not hard to imagine that enthusiasm translating into a willingness to try a BCI. Certainly there was far more trust built up there than companies like Google or Apple have ever been able to earn.
The pebble was not epaper. It just had one of those old style reflective LCDs like the gameboy. Low power usage but they look unacceptably bad to the average consumer who would rather a vibrant display with daily charging.
I loved my Pebble. Had the first edition in Black with a watchface that you could only read if you knew how, used it until it broke years down the line. (The little plastic on the sides revealed the electronics, closed it with bluetac, but at some point water got in and ruined the internals) Got the Garmin Instinct Solar Tactical now, and am very happy with it. 1 month of battery life is just mindblowing to me. It also looks sleek as hell (I've got a techwearish style irl)
His conclusions seem correct, but this is how I see the general anti-pattern:
- Envision a product that seems great in fantasy and on paper, and the product category is still undefined
- Invest into realizing this product before sufficient technology is available to meet expectations
Arguably, Apple Watch is also not "good enough" to fulfil the fantasy of what a smartwatch could be, but their brand is strong enough to define the market. People want to wear something that fulfils the image of "Apple Watch", and that is enough.
A product without brand power built from cheap and premature technology will be niche, and not enough to "define the category". The valuable question is "what do people expect from our brand", rather than "what fantasy products can we imagine". Until it's realistic to build something that fulfils the expectation of an Apple product, they will not attempt it. The iPod vs mp3 players is a similar story.
Thinking that Pebble "defined a product category" is a misunderstanding of the mechanisms. The fantasy of what a smartwatch can be is obvious. The question is how to realize to the standard required to meet expectations. Understanding these expectations is the valuable insight.
Fuck I love how raw and unpolished this was. I also LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVED my Pebble, both the original and the Time Steel. I was so sad to see them get acquihired, though happy to see some of its guts make it into the Versa line.
Also, stupid excited for Beeper. I hope they can figure out the cohesion problem without getting sued into the next millennium :D
My Pebble Time Round was one of my favorite gadgets, and its slow descent into a very light paperweight, due to not being able to hold a charge, broke my heart. I'm now a happy owner of an Apple Watch, but it's definitely much closer to small-computer-on-your-wrist than the watch-first design of the Time Round.
Could have been an alternative to watches running WearOS and watchOS, but it wasn't meant to be, other than a hackers toy that was killed by being squeezed out of the market with high operating costs and we are now left with the same old Apple and Google duoploy once again.
It's time to stop with this 'world's first' marketing. Apple entered the market late and were around the corner, came in and changed everything (Again). Not acting and moving quickly enough to when a giant enters the market and brushing it off as nothing also contributed to this failure as well.
I had high hopes for Pebble to go further than their current market, but it seems that it just became another Amiga-like product. Forgotten in the graveyard of many other failed products only to be used by hackers and hobbyists.
I still have my beloved Pebble Time Round sitting in a drawer, somewhere. I blame the Apple Watch for the downfall/unpopularity of smartwatches like Pebble.
People for some reason would rather have a $500 or more watch packed with over the top features and one day's battery life.
Apple Watch isn't really a competition - AFAIK Pebble never worked that well with iOS anyway (because of the usual iOS issues with third party hardware and software).
Still wearing my Pebble Time Round every day. The form factor is unmatched by any other smartwatch before or since. I don't think anyone else is even trying to make a watch this thin and it's a damn shame.
I just released an episode of a podcast in which I was trying to remember the name of Pebble, talking about a company that was "making smart watches in like 2011/12".
Such a shame they didn't make it as it was a very cool device and company.
I loved my Pebble Time too. I was going to give it to my dad but when I went to fetch it, the battery had bubbled. Anyone know of a place that sells reputable battery replacement?
Ifixit has some guides. [1] Others commenters in past threads have said it's not quite as easy as it looks, so I haven't pulled the trigger yet. But I'll probably give it a try when the battery life is down to 3 days. Right now I'm at 4-5, depending on if I remember to enable Airplane Mode at night.
My fallback option right now is the Fossil hybrid smartwatch, which has the same basic functions and better battery life (10+ days), but is much harder to read. The screens also apparently get messed up by sun exposure...so I'm not anxious to jump on that bandwagon.
If anyone else has tips on replacing the battery, please share with the rest of us!
I've been using a Fossil HR since it came out and I love it. Battery life is indeed 10+ days, probably depends on how often it has to show notifications.
I live in northern europe so the sun exposure does not compare to places like SF but so far so good. I never even heard of the sun exposure thing before now.
App support has progressed so I really have no complaints about it anymore.
If anything I think it's better than my old Pebble Time because it looks more like a classy watch. Oh and because it has actual hands instead of a screen to show time.
I've replaced the strap though, it broke after a while.
The app from Fossil is a hot mess but I rarely go into it.
My use case is mainly show time, show notifications, control music. I bike everywhere so it makes things more safe to have a watch and not have to fiddle with my phone. But at the same time I think charging a smartwatch every day is ludicrous.
For me, the biggest downsides were text readability and UX for scrolling through notifications (center button then lower button, unintuitively). Triggering the backlight was also surprisingly tricky. I did like the look though!
Yeah I agree with those points, but it works for me because I just need to see if it's important enough to stop and get the phone out. And reject calls.
This is a cool story. I loved my Pebble and still have my Kickstarter Edition. I bought it because it was a geeky thing and I could write code and deploy that code to the Pebble.
Why didn't they go back to their backers and ask if they'd be willing to pay a higher price? I would have been happy to pay 2x what I had pledged. When the Kickstarter launched I anticipated (based on how much I'd paid at Target for my Time Steel 1) that the price for the much more capable Time Steel 2 would have been significantly higher, like $350-$400.
I'd have been willing to pledge that much, and if it meant keeping the company alive I might have paid even more.
I have a Pebble Time in my pulse now. Have one more in a box for the day this one fails and a Pebble original in a drawer. I also keep spare batteries to fix them.
I make my own watchfaces and customized some apps to my needs: authenticator (for 2 factor authentications), skunk (with bar codes to use in place of physical cards), ...
Pebble was a brilliant product that didn't succeed. When so many horrible products succeed in this industry it is sad that being good is not enough.
I was obsessed with the idea of smartwatches in 2011-2012 and was involved in a few early efforts that, while exciting, were more complex than what I was really dreaming of.
When the pebble kickstarter launched it was so close to what I had in mind, it was pretty disheartening. It's possible I even reached out on the website to seeing about joining the team :). I can't remember.
Anyway, what an inspiring product and team. Thanks for sharing the story, and for the honesty.
What else would you want? Notifications and calling were pretty much solved on day one. Things like NFC payments were a nice post pebble addition but after that, extra fitness tracking is the only feature consumers desire which isn't fully being met.
I'm new to the scene (got a FitBit Luxe for Christmas) and it's been pretty positive for me, but I really hate how closed off the ecosystem is. Not having more access to the data, much less the live data, is such a bummer.
I am not necessarily sure I agree with this analysis. Will fleshing out the long term vision necessarily win you more customers?
I just think that this was a sad case of a very good company that made a wrong guess - efficiency tools instead of sport/fitness. It does not even sound like a mistake. Maybe the size of the bet on a risky guess was too big, and that is what caused the failure.
After reading through 500 comments and myself only liking the pebble time (maybe steel for bat life) and the pebble time round, I wonder why pebble didn’t stop at two models.
One for the formfactor and slim design fans and one for the general users.
With that money spend all effort developing that long awaited pebble time 2 and double the price.
I had Pebble and then Pebble Time. So many great memories. To this day there are things I could do in my Pebble that I can't find how to do in modern watches. Amazing community, SDK, development environment, watch faces, apps. Revolutionary product.
But then Pebble 2, Pebble Time 2, Pebble Core (!?). Why Pebble Core?
I loved my Time. Always on screen, awesome 8 bit color watch face, wonderful battery life.. I was pretty disappointed when fitbit decided to void all the warranties however, mine failed before the one year mark but after fitbit purchased them and shut it all down.
There are lots of smallish e-paper displays intended for use as dynamic price tags. It's one of the main formats for the medium. Could you use them to make a largeish wrist computer device that might be more useful than the Pebble?
Wearing a Pebble Time right now. Works and looks great, but not 100% even with Rebble. Shame the company failed, the product was perfect for Android users.
I really wonder why there hasn't been a reboot or kickstarter campaigns for a successor to Pebble, especially since there has been years of development in smartphone-sized components (CPU's, batteries, displays) since then. There IS a market; the two million that bought a Pebble when it was still around, and millions more that missed out on the Pebble but would still pay money to have one now.
I had the pebble time steel which had a 10 day battery, and interestingly I felt like it was always going flat on me mid day because I'd get the charge warning away from home and forget about it causing it to go flat. While my current 1.5 day watch has never gone flat on me because I put it on the charger every night. I have a feeling this is a big part of why phones and accessories have not moved past the daily charge schedule.
Amazfit Bip and Bip Lite (the latter is preferable unless you need standalone GPS) consistently does 22-23 days of battery life (8-10 days if you use a watch face with seconds).
shame what happened to pebble. article is on point for my personal experience; I had both the original and a Time and preferred the original. the new capabilities were not compelling and the aesthetic was worse imo.
I loved the pebble time steel and wore it for years. But then when I compared it to the Apple Watch I got later, the pebble looked like a child's toy watch.
>Our goal is to build the best damn chat app. In the process, it’s likely that Beeper will become the underlying communication system for everyone on earth.
That's an audacious bet. I'm intrigued at what it would mean for it to become "underlying."
Had to laugh that he jumped into a paid chat service, I get combining all these services into one app is a way to "solve" this problem, but no one is going to pay $10 a month for it.
I know I'm probably a rare user here but I pay monthly for the hosted element account which I hardly use. I consider it more like a donation to FOSS and I check back every few weeks to see how the project is going.
