Success and Failure at Pebble
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- having a wide set of capabilities
- being sufficiently open so that an "ecosystem" of third party developers can form
I assume that Garmin Fenix succeeds at the first one, but fails the second ?
Pebble didn't use eInk. It used transflective LCD.
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.
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.
Also, maybe a customer will remember the sporty watch contrasting with the formal suit, and call you instead of a competitor.
Also, Zuckerberg wears t-shirts and jeans.
And looking on eBay, used Pebbles are actually surprisingly affordable, like $20-50.
https://hackaday.io/project/175577-hackable-nrf52840-smart-w...
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).
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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'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).
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.
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.
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 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.
Yet there still isn't any a) good looking watches with b) great battery life. There's still room for something Pebble-like.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/sports-fitness/fashion-hybrid...
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.
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.
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.
Does anyone have some insight?
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?”.
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?
Beware that any kind of "soft" validation may evaporate once you'll try to charge money, so start charging sooner.
[1] https://blog.tally.so/how-to-validate-your-idea-with-tally
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.
Somewhat, but not quite!
I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.
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.
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 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?!?"
I have a 13 mini myself and am very happy with it.
The fact that they updated it recently tells me that there were more than a few who bought it.
1: https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-12-mini-sales-reported...
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some correlation between preference for a less obtrusive phone and avoiding superfluous consumption.
If so, I have one too. Closest thing to the iPhone 4, which I consider the peak of the line.
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…
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-d...
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.
Just an example.
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.
It also would have been nice to have the better screen.
The 12 had bad battery life is what I heard.
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.
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.
I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.
I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.
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!
But, it happens that my anecdote is somewhat valid, since the 12 mini was cancelled (which is the phone I was referring to): https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-p...
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.
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.
That's the bridge Beeper uses. I've got it running on a 2011 MacBook Air on MacOS 10.13, almost zero issues.
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.
Some smart people are running this, that's for sure.
Anyone know?
Texts looks entirely proprietary and the FAQ says they're working on an iOS app.
Texts was too buggy for me to keep using. I still think it has potential though.
Matrix.org also has an XMPP implementation (see https://disroot.org/en/services/xmpp), but it was quite unreliable when I tried it.
I'm digging it so far.
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.
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.
We're hiring! https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/memfault
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.
This strategy is covered here: https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/device-heartbeat-metrics...
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)
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for trying! You have an amazing product and provided much needed innovation in this space.
(Written from my Framework Laptop)
- Thermostats (nest, ecobee)
- Home wi-fi (eero)
- Sonos
- I think Whoop and Oura will get there
- Beats headphones
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.
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.
1. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/epiphan-video
2. https://obj.ca/article/techopia/kanata-based-epiphan-videos-...
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.
- Fitbit
- Raspberry Pi (I suppose this is not really consumer)
- Withings
- Peloton
- Tonal
But the biggest success is definitely Oculus. Definitely a hard thing to get right.
But I would say the Raspberry Pi is an excellent example.
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.
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.
Roomba?
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.
Sheesh, seems hardly worth it.
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.
Pebble didn't use eInk. It used a Sharp transflective display.
> 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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
Thanks for the valuable retrospective!
Could you expand a bit on the pros and cons of going smaller -vs- going bigger in that situation, and what motivated you to choose the way you did?
Also, do you feel the ambient culture/advice on that decision tried to push you in either direction?
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.
That's way too harsh. While Timeline is gone, rebble still works. This is waaaay better than your typical device that stopped being made !
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).
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.
2015-05-24: Pebble 2.0 (Pebble Time) release
One month to the day. That's some truly unfortunate timing.
I can only guess what messenger platform they will push on their next phone.
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.
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.
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.)
Samsung, Huawei, etc. have quite successful smart watch lines. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartwatch-marke...
I’m assuming you are training for something serious/seriously training since Apple Watch is usually sufficient for more steady state working out.
I think the same people maybe don't even understand why someone might want a high quality product, and be willing to pay for it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Built-in compass, always-on display and physical buttons are just great.
A bit of history rewriting going on there...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Programmable, week-long battery, e-ink, ecosystem, microphone with speech to text incorporated, and pretty much defined the category...
I can only hope to see another one like it.
- 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.
Also, stupid excited for Beeper. I hope they can figure out the cohesion problem without getting sued into the next millennium :D
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.
People for some reason would rather have a $500 or more watch packed with over the top features and one day's battery life.
Such a shame they didn't make it as it was a very cool device and company.
Jonny and Simon's Reel Tech Talk: https://share.transistor.fm/s/39e1935b
Around 15m20s for those interested (we watch a film and the talk about the tech in that film and have some fun)
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!
1: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Pebble+Steel+Battery+Replacemen...
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.
I'd have been willing to pledge that much, and if it meant keeping the company alive I might have paid even more.
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.
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.
For health monitoring device, I'd like to have on my ankle.
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.
But then Pebble 2, Pebble Time 2, Pebble Core (!?). Why Pebble Core?
I somewhat found a spiritual replacement for it with the Bangle JS 2, but the experience isn't as polished and it feels a bit slow.
Especially since for a wrist computer, touchscreen input would actually become better than a row of buttons).
Wonder why they killed that one...
That's an audacious bet. I'm intrigued at what it would mean for it to become "underlying."