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Comment by WanderPanda | Hacker News Reader

Tbh I got exactly what I expected when buying the R1, build quality is actually even better than expected.

I was wanting to reply to another comment to this, but I keep getting an error from HN:

>jsheard 14 minutes ago | parent | next [–]

>They contracted Teenage Engineering to do the industrial design so that part at least was done competently. TEs involvement brought them a lot of attention, which has now backfired on TE since there will probably be a lot more skepticism of their partnerships after this.

My reply is that I am curious if TE has anything put in place so that this doesn't happen again, and what projects they're currently launching that took place before any procedures to prevent it. Generally, I enjoy TE's gear, but this has given me pause.

But it wasn't a product sold by TE, it was a consultancy. And they delivered - the actual hardware is pretty great. What's the problem?

The problem is obvious, I'm a customer of theirs and now I'll sit out the next few releases and be more cautious in buying their hardware on the chances that there are more projects like this working their way out of the pipeline as they learn from it. This has damaged their brand. I am only one person, but I would be surprised if I'm the only one who feels this way.

TE lives to damage their brand in the strangest ways.[0] They survive off of niches and influencer hype cycles. There is no stopping the average TE customer because they are there for the aesthetics alone even if the value proposition gets worse all the time on many of their products. The OP-1 went from $699-1400 over time before they even put out a significant hardware revision for even more money.

That being said I still want a ep-133, because I'm weak.

[0]https://teenage.engineering/store/field-desk

Jesse is on the board of Teenage Engineering and the founder is the Chief Design Officer at Rabbit:

https://www.rabbit.tech/newsroom/teenage-engineering-jesper-...

This is far more than just a consultancy job.

Interesting. I still don’t see how it discounts future TE products. The presumption that Jesse being CDO is intertwined with over promises underdelivered AI to me is unlikely to be related; it’d be different in a CTO role. The actual design is quite good, both hardware and the software is pretty cute even if anemic. They have a fairly unique aesthetic that’s tied to the hardware, and they’re experimenting in a new space.

We’ll see what happens to rabbit but they did raise $30M from fancy folks. Because everything from now is just software it can and should improve — we’ll see if LAM eventually makes it. But personally having real world experience in AI, there’s a huge gap between a compelling demo and production quality delivery. Just look at AI overviews at Google, and no one sensible would claim that Google is made up of grifters.

Teenage Engineerings design language is so unique, that it is deeply intertwined with their brand. That is a pretty rare thing, only Apple and (Rams) Braun come to mind, and I think TE is the most extreme of them. Because their design language is essentialy their brand, any product that was designed by them will automatically be associated with them by customers.

This is good for them with a product like Panics PlayDate, but can be really bad in cases like the Rabit R1. Customers will see their consultancy as endorsement, and any publicity good or bad will reflect onto to them.

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