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Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

> The days of consumer hardware company's access to startup capital is over.

So I haven't worked at a hardware start-up but it seemed pretty difficult even before these companies to raise funding versus a pure software play. I'm not necessarily convinced this makes it easier or harder. Is there a specific reason you think it will be harder now?

Also, for what it's worth, Fitbit and GoPro are still going. I'm convinced Fitbit can get back on the growth curve as long as they can get a new product out the door that consumers want. Tall order for sure but I don't count them as a failure yet.

GoPro want to move to doing software more so than hardware. Considering their software has always considered to be lackluster to borderline terrible I'm less convinced they will turn it around but also not yet willing to say they're a failure.

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I worked at a VC funded hardware start up for the first eight years of my career. You'll never read about it here though; we made digital pathology scanners. When I left we had sold the company for ~300M and were bringing in about ~30M / year in revenue.

I guess my point is that there is more going on in the VC space then you'll read about on HN.

It would be really fantastic to hear more if you're willing to share!

I'll look at the article at some point, Jawbone had multiple best selling products -- bluetooth speakers being one -- no idea how that covered investment. Hell, A16Z gave all of Skype one of the speakers 6 years ago as a thank you. They did some nice hardware.

What I do know, per your point, investment in and around hardware startups is not publicized. I wonder how some of the networking hardware startups that started the carriers of those I know (and benefited me) would be taken now.

Cisco / Nokia / etc. hardware acquisitions apparently aren't HN sexy.

This goes well with the great-grand parent's comment on consumer hardware not being as attractive to investors. I think a lot of it lies in the complexity of the product. A smart watch or rugged video camera seems trivial to replicate and commoditise from an investment and technology standpoint compared to digital pathology scanners.

That's hardly consumer hardware...

In 2014, there was piles of "success stories" for VCs to look at and the market was hot. Most of those successes have turned into down rounds or complete shutdowns in the last year.

It seems like the problem is whoever pointed them as successful... successful ideas, maybe, but not companies.

Fitbit lost me when they refused to support HealthKit. As it stands I'm not sure they can escape their demise as the market transitions from limited function devices to multi function devices like the Apple Watch. They strike me as getting rolled over the same way Diamond, Archos, and Creative got crushed by the iPod.

GoPro has a similar problem. Outside of special circumstances most smartphone cameras are now good enough for most consumer needs and will only get better. I think they could survive if they target the extreme sports type niche but otherwise I don't see them achieving escape velocity.

Both could be good acquisition targets a la Withings and Nokia. But the number of possible buyers is limited. Microsoft is possibly the only one that comes to mind that doesn't have anything in either space although given the failure of Windows Phone I'm not sure they have the desire to try something similar in a different market.

Actually the iPod was not a multi-function device. Palm Pilot was. But it turned out the specialized device was the one that transitioned into the multi-function device people wanted.

The iPod touch is essentially an iPhone without a cellular connection.

But the iPod Touch didn’t crush Archos, diamond, and Rio. It came about after the iPhone was in the market...

According to Wikipedia both Diamond and Archos players were DOA by 2005, two years before the iPhone was released. Creative struggled on for a few years post iPhone. 2005 was the year of the iPod Photo and the iPod Video, although the beginning of the iPod as multi-function device started in 2002 with addition of the PDA functionality.

By 2006 Apple had 72-74% of the MP3 player market, with SanDisk, Creative, Zune, Sony, Samsung, and other accounting for the remainder. I seem to recall most of the damage was done by the iPod Mini.

Mini wasn't a multifunction device though.

Correct, all those MP3 players were killed by the mini and the nano, some by the big iPod. None of them competed with the iPod Touch which was a post-iPhone product.

GoPro is still going, but it's not going well. Its stock peaked at $86.97 in Oct 2014 and it's at $8.00 today.

It's so easy for Shenzhen to just copy them though. There's nothing defensible about hardware.

honest question: why then did no one copy the iPod, and no one has copied the iPhone with any success?

as soon as the iPod came out way back in the day, the criticism was that it would soon be copied. No one ever did, and I worked in the music business at the time and was familiar with everything on the market. nothing ever came close, apple made a ton of money.

it's a common thing to say that it's not defensible/can be copied, but I don't see that happening always.

Because the magic in the iphone and ipod come primarily from software (and for the ipod, the music licensing relationships that apple alone had in the beginning.) Android hardware can be pretty good; the app ecosystem, the ecosystem in general, the clear love that Apple has for the iphone, and the control that is (generally) used in user-beneficial ways all make the iphone superior to android.

in the case of the iPod I'm not sure that was true. remember, these were the days of everyone having a bunch of mp3s on their hard drive. The actual iPod software was extremely rudimentary, and basically barely integrated with iTunes. this was still in the days of windows, keep in mind, and before apple actually launched iTunes for windows. and still, it was immediately a dominant player and not one company was able to launch a competitor _before_ apple built iTunes for windows.

Rhe iPod had demand.

The iPod wasn't that popular before Apple launched iTunes for Windows, though. So I imagine competitors were considerably less interested in it as a target.

Also, one of the iPod's major interface innovations was the click wheel - IIRC they've patented the hell out of that, so no one was about to launch a competitor.

Samsung cloned the clickwheel within 6 months.

White earphones.

I'm under the impression Google/Android had pretty good success in copying the iPhone.

Samsung too.

Having good software stack is invaluable isn't it? Having Shenzhen clone and crank out a similar piece of hardware which has the worst minimally functional app isn't going to help anybody? It's also hard: see Samsung's crappy attempts at replacing the Google apps that no one uses and/or is poorly coded. Also see Bixby failing at English so far.

While factually true, I think that misses GP's point?

If you take a look at the context of their question, they are asking why no one has killed the iPod by copying it.

I suppose the answer is probably as said by rokhayakebe elsewhere in this thread, "Copying the hardware is easy. Copying the ecosystem is a different challenge."

I am asking the question about hardware, not software. if it's so easy to copy hardware, how do you explain apple's dominance with the iPod for such a long period?

Billions of dollars to put into branding.

I think the simplest answer is that apple simply kept innovating at a pace that shenzen couldn't match. Back in the iPod's hey-day, every new release was a groundbreaking improvement in miniaturization. The other OEMs were racing to copy the iPod mini while Apple was developing the iPod nano, or the iPod Colour while apple was working on the iPod video.

and, of course, as another reply says the software has always been a big part of the iPod.

Though it seems counterintuitive, I think it's the lack of a patent system in China that prevents its people from being innovative. Without a guaranteed monopoly, people are less likely to take risks and just turn to methods that are known to turn a profit (replicating foreign products and/or focusing on lowering manufacturing costs).

But now, the economy of Shenzhen has matured to the point where squeezing every ounce of production is no longer sustainable, and thus is forced to innovate. Perhaps that explains the number of hardware startups there: it's an advantage to be closely located to the manufacturer of your parts. That was also once true for Silicon Valley.

Maybe the failure of many hardware startups now can be attributed to manufacturing jobs being outsourced.

I don't think it's counter-intuitive at all.

I think the patent durations of hardware should be shorter, just like many here think that they should be shorter (if existant at all) for software.

Part of the issue with durations in hardware is development time. It would be nice if the duration could take into account the date of first sale rather than just the inception of the idea.

In 2006, China was not at the stage of development where it could innovate and create brands. Today, it is Apple that can't keep up.

Superior hardware is not why people buy Apple products. The reason why it's hard to copy the iPod and iPhone is because it's hard to replicate the Apple brand. That's why there exists a lot of products that have the same functionality but not the same market revenue.

Copying the hardware is easy. Copying the ecosystem is a different challenge.

Wasn't the iPod successful because you could get music online legally and easily for it?

Memory is hazy, but I seem to recall that without the iTunes store/application you had to either mess around ripping CDs, or use illegal downloads.

The one hardware innovation the iPod had was to use the teeny hard drives just coming on to the market at the time, when everyone else was using flash. Flash was the right solution ultimately, but for a while the HD worked around the problem that Flash was too small for a decent set of songs. Reputedly Jobs decided to take most of the volume supply of the small drives initially, preventing copycats from executing.

I think the interface was way more important. Archos beat Apple to market with little harddrives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series#Jukebox_... ) but the player is pretty something or other looking and has a bunch of chincy buttons. Even the mechanical clickwheel was vastly better than pressing a little button a couple dozen times.

I had an archos with a 20gb hard drive in way back when. Loved that little machine, and it worked great as an external drive too.

why then did no one copy the iPod

Apple had complete control of the small form factor harddrives. Noone else could get their hands on them. There were other MP3 players before iPod, but they were either too big, or couldn't hold enough music.

By the time flash storage caught up, it was more about fashion.

In broad strokes, you're pretty spot on, besides not mentioning the simplicity + usability of the software. Apple absolutely made portable music sexy (again) and reaped the benefits all the way to the iPhone juggernaut of today.

Not sure why you got down voted, but here's an up vote.

Well it was copied by zune and probably others. The part of the equation that is glossed over is iPod provided a soup to nuts media product. You didn't have to mess around MP3 or aac encoding stuff, they have a portal with a staggering amount of content that you could just click and download to your iPod.

Well in a way the iPhone was "copied" in that it obviously influenced the design of competitive smart phones.

Apple, however, hasn't rested on their laurels. They have kept innovating. If they had slowed down at all, the others would have eaten their lunch.

The ipod was really a story about iTunes, I think, rather than the hardware.

I hate iTunes and I'm glad to be rid of it, but I really miss the iPod hardware. Driving that clickwheel by feel was so much more convenient than looking down at a touchscreen.

Samsung had a clickwheel clones within 6 months.

Note that if Shenzen companies started publishing proposals on Kickstarter, they could make a success: Compared to SV products which get delivered in a year or two, they could churn prototypes in a few weeks, build confidence with investors and repeat. I hear people screaming "but they're not reliable/trustworthy!", but you can build trustworthiness by delivering bigger and bigger products, and, actually, Kickstarter would benefit from working in an environment which doesn't entirely rely on the producer's good will.

They already do, see uArm. At one point they were listed as a US company, but they seem to have updated their page. I have nothing bad to say about the experience - my robot arm arrived on time, it pretty much works, some niggles with the software but they seem to be fixing it.

No problems with Shenzhen companies running Kickstarters, after all they can probably have much better relationships with the factories than Westerners are likely to.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ufactory/uarm-put-a-min...

We're still doing Kickstarter? Thought we all got burned on that AR/wifi deal and never went back.

The what?

That depends on what you make. Some things are still really hard and have things you cannot copy. In my field the hardware alone is very difficult so just copying will not work but even if you are persistent and get it done, you need a lot of external factors to go along as well which takes years. And explains some of the failures we have seen.

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