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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Intel took it a step further and shut down the Peak’s software support (including cloud storage), effective by year’s end.

And thus the reason I stick to companies like Garmin for my "wearables". If Garmin up and pulls out of the wearables market, then the market is well and truly screwed and my choice won't make any difference. But a company like Intel or Microsoft can just up and go "well, that hobby project didn't work out. Back to our core business. Oh, and pull the servers down." and you the consumer are left holding the bag.

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> you the consumer are left holding the bag

Not in this case. They're issuing MSRP refunds, no questions asked, in exchange for returns whose shipping they also cover.

Full disclosure: I've just shipped back my own Basis Carbon Steel - a device not even implicated in the overheating issue, but one for which they're still accepting returns and providing refunds. I paid ~$150 for it a few years back; they've said they'll be sending me a $234 check. Obviously, since I haven't yet received the check, I don't yet know with certainty that they'll live up to that claim, but they've given me no reason to doubt that they will. Overall I'm very favorably impressed with the way they're handling the issue.

They will. I made nearly $10k buying up used (and new) ones on eBay and other places and sending them back. I've gotten paid for everything so far.

I also learned about the recall around June, around two months before it started hitting the media, which gave me an advantage. Although my most recent purchase was within the last month, there's still a small opportunity.

Also someone else seems to have cornered the eBay market, items that go on sale now tend to be bought relatively quickly (looking at sold items) before I see them. I probably could have done better by setting up instant alerts and sniping auctions, but I'm pretty happy with what I did get for the level of effort.

Nice! Next time I'll have to think of that first.

Tell the sellers that their product is worth more in returns than on eBay instead of taking advantage of them.

I think there might be a culture clash between you and the grandparent.

As I understand it, no one is getting taken advantage of by the grandparent. eBay's a marketplace and the seller put their items up for bid. Fair dealing does not require a buyer to tell a seller what their item is worth to someone else. When a buyer gets a bargain, we celebrate.

Fair dealing does require sellers to be truthful about the quality of their goods though. Lying about a lemon and pawning it off onto someone then profiting off that lie is a bad deal.

I'm speaking as an American, and that's my understanding of how we trade. Your word is your bond, handshake deals are as good as a written contract - that sort of honor code is pervasive.

You should mind your own business. I mean that to be taken politely and not as a slam. There's just no better way to say it, so I said it. There is not enough information in your sentence for me to guess at what your thought process was, so I'm going to assume you were just expressing empathy and trying to be nice.

I'd like to hear a moral justification for how you came to judge the grandparent.

As would I.

It's not my job to tell other people how to make money. They all got good prices from me that they were happy with.

If I had a model for stock trading that was better than the people I was trading with, is it unethical to use it since I could just tell people the stocks are worth more and they shouldn't sell it to me?

I buy products for resale all the time, and I don't need to tell the people I buy from how much more I plan to sell it for.

(Plus, some of the product was bought from larger companies that would never have bothered to get the refund themselves. One person I bought around 20 peaks, I'm pretty sure they were selling them on Amazon before they banned the listing and needed to liquidate. Some stuff I bought from Amazon directly, where it would clearly be impractical to tell them.)

I'd like to be in a position where such altruism had no downside, but I have one family member who requires round-the-clock care and another being laid off at the end of the year with no meaningful prospect of reemployment. Picking up ten thousand dollars that someone else is leaving on the table would do them a great deal of good right now.

Ah, yeah, you gotta do that. Sorry for jumping to conclusions -- I shouldn't transmute the moral failings of our economic order into personal immorality so carelessly.

So I get the impression that you find something generally immoral about capitalizing on unequal distribution of information.

I can't help but be reminded of the time years back when an Internet rando told me, in all earnestness, not only that I should not profit from my knowledge of how to write saleable software and the sale of my labor in so doing, but that in a truly equitable society I would not be allowed to do so, because not everyone knows how to do that and it's wrong of me to privilege my own interests over those of people who lack the knowledge I possess. In that case there's a slight difference of detail in the origin of the unequal distribution, but the general concept seems very much the same.

I would be interested to hear whether and how you see a meaningful distinction between the cases, and in general to see some expansion on the nature of the moral calculus which moved you to make the comment to which I and several others responded.

A fair risk they will just plan to do it themselves, then forget about it or rather postpone it because they can't find return address or something and then lose everything.

I do that kind of thing for friends but not for everyone.

Not in this case. They're issuing MSRP refunds, no questions asked, in exchange for returns whose shipping they also cover.

Kudos to Intel, and I've obviously incorrectly prejudged them.

That said, I still would like to avoid migration to a new platform, even with a full refund. It's why some of us stick with Apple. :-)

It's true that you'll get your money back, but it's still a pain for the consumer since this isn't an optional recall. They're shutting down the servers that enable the client-side apps, so the Peaks won't sync anymore. This means consumers have to deal with the hassle of returning the unit and move to another platform, after taking the time to move to this one.

Business units and companies sometimes cease to operate. It's less than ideal, but a fact of life all the same. In this case, they're doing so in a fashion that's as consumer-friendly as possible. I think it's more worthwhile to laud that, in hopes other IoT businesses will find it worth their effort to do likewise, than to fuss about something that can't be changed in any case. But of course that's just my view of the matter.

The Peak was recalled for safety issues, so you can't really blame them for that.

I can confirm I got a full MSRP refund for my Basis Peak.

Intel in particular has a pretty long record of making itself more directly relevant to consumers and just as long a history of mostly not having much success in that regard. (See ViiV/Digital Home for example.)

In general, though, wearables probably have to be considered a relatively underwhelming market so far. Yes, there are various fitness bands and smart watches that are mostly sold for fitness-related reasons and... Well, pretty much just fitness bands.

It's probably related to a lack of compelling capabilities in unobtrusive products that "just work" and don't require a lot of ongoing care and feeding.

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