The worst part to me is knowing that they had 5000 completed units, and without the battery issue, mine would probably be at my door already by now since I was one of the first orders.
I know this verbatim sounds like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." or "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem", both famously wrong assessments of hit products. But in this case, it's different -- the masses already have video games. If you want to make a 320x200 black-and-white game, fire up your editor, open up an OpenGL canvas at that resolution, and start coding. You can have your game available to billions of users tomorrow morning.
They could easily say "we switched from the STM32F4 series to RP2040s because there is actual availability right now" and not alienate a single potential customer.
For example, being observably irked by insufficiently technical PR copy.
But I wouldn't have recognized either of those without going to look up more information, skim the specs or possibly manuals to understand whether or not I care about the change.
The communication from Panic is simple, straight forward, and gives me a bit of context without making me go spend more time on research. They did exactly what they needed to do to help me feel more informed and less frustrated by the change.
On your implication that this is an unnecessary overpriced product, then I suspect this product was not built for you. Sure, someone could purchase those parts and have their own thing up and running in no time. But no one would care.
The PlayDate builds a defacto community all participating in the same product and the hype surrounding it, and this is what people buy into.
I also take issue with this only targeting the HN crowd. There has been plenty of hype in other circles, and the Playdate team will be shipping a no-code project so they're clearly trying to make this accessible to enterprising kids (young and old).
Everyone, including Playdate, knows this. Nobody is thinking this is the next Switch. People who aren't the target audience of the Playdate always seem to think this is the intention and I'm not sure why.
I've said it before, but to me it looks more like a kind of physical Pico8. Again, Pico8 isn't meant for the mass market, but its certainly not useless
But I would say this is probably a bigger market than you seem willing to accommodate in your argument.
Panic deserves every ounce of goodwill they’re getting.
But when people boast about their amazing products to reek in VC money I actually get upset. I'm not sure if I'm more upset at the founders or the VCs though.
For example recently they have been raving about oxide, how amazing it is, how amazing the founder is, how amazing the idea is. But if you look at the website with all the ambitious goals and an estimate of early 2022[1] I can already see this company burning money like no other without ever getting close to that estimate. Either they have zero clue about supply chain or their wilfully misleading investors or a little bit of both.
But I guess that's the world we live in.
Panic is existing Mac software company, that sold (arguably, niche) software at not-that-small prices (well, usual for Mac OS ecosystem, at least in 2000s/2010s), and had a modest success being a distributor of Untitled Goose Game; and PlayDate is made in relatively small numbers; I would think they are self-funded and not backed by VCs.