It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.
I see it a lot in practice especially when discussing early-stage business ideas.
You're talking if guys pitching overpriced and underquality gear is completely unheard of, or if flawed business ideas are a rare occurrence.
I get it, support and enthusiasm is always nice to have. But if you descend into the real world you'll see that more often than not you'll see a mix of fraud and overconfident people pitching undercooked ideas that they under deliver, and you're criticizing those who might as well have experienced that first-hand for a few times.
But from here, floating in the imaginary clouds, the error of the cynics was pretty easy to spot. It was that there are different types of wheelchairs and the cynics were just googling up the bargain-basement mass produced ones. I guess in the real world everything (including medical devices) is one-size-fits-all?
It's not like these people are providing a valuable service, steering everyone away from the dumb scams. They're just pattern matching and assuming everything they doesn't seem to make sense (in their generally not-well-informed opinion) must be bad.
It's unnecessary, and is noise just as often as it's not.
Unfortunately that recommendation is also pushed by snakeoil salesmen.
The word you're looking for is "arrogance." HN comment sections are no better than reddit, if not worse, with people arrogantly making all sorts of statements that are demonstrably false with a simple google search.
Seems insane to assume that but we see it in tech all the time where someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.
There are a couple of reasons for that. The most obvious is that they did not do their research prior to embarking on the project. The less obvious is they did extensive research before embarking upon the project. Plenty of tech popped up in the 70's and 80's that flopped or only found a niche market, that later turned out to be quite popular. Sometimes the tech wasn't ready, other times it was just too expensive when it was introduced, yet other times he market simply wasn't ready for it.
I think it’s worse than than. Amongst the people doing the work, someone usually knows that there is a product out there that already does the job, but the higher ups think they know better.
Somethings the higher ups don't know anything in detail, and just believed the new hire guy who said "I can't believe you're still using jQuery! We need to throw this all out and re write it in Angular!".
And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using Angular - they screwed up the 2.0 to 3.0 migration so badly how can we trust them any more? We need to throw this all out and re write it in React!".
And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using React, Facebook are awful! We need to throw this all out and re write it in Flutter!".
And then believed the next new hire a few years later who said "I can't believe you're still using Flutter - Google are bound to graveyard it any day now! We need to throw this all out and re write it in React - its new features are _amazing_!".
And today they're 2 years into the latest rock star new guy's 6 month rewrite of the entire front end using Rust and wasm. He's _almost_ got it working on his laptop, it'll be ready for testing with the staging backend platform any day now.
Meanwhile the company's B2B sales team are doing several million dollars of MRR from clients using the "legacy" jQuery front end from 2012. And the backend Java guys are all WFH and haven't had a single bug fix of feature request ticket in 3 years. They cosplay "scheduled maintenance" every 3 months by sending out notification emails to all customers and then just writing reports to management claiming successful updates with zero downtime and no measurable increase in latency or error rates. Half of them have second jobs or side gigs that pay more than their salary there.
Instead I conclude that likely my understanding is lacking, and maybe educating myself a little bit would be beneficial. Either I find out something new and potentially useful about the world, or finally see through a swindle and understand how it works, which is always a good skill to exercise.
You nailed it. If I could go a bit deeper, I think the drive-by cynicism comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of people.
Statistically, you are probably not significantly smarter or dumber than most people you meet. In other words, someone who has spent months or years on a problem probably knows more about it than you do if you’re just now reading about it. So if someone with more experience is doing something you think is dumb, your first reaction should be to ask why rather than dismiss.
I don’t get the negativity.
This guy claims to be different in that he has enough money already and he's just trying to make the world a better place, but pretty much every startup makes claims about how they're different and therefore they're going to succeed. They can't all be right. I'd prefer to hear unbiased opinions about viability from intelligent people on HN/reddit/twitter rather than biased opinions from the guy who's trying to market his company.
I'm not saying that this wheelchair is going to flop, I'm just defaulting to skepticism of new ideas in general.
It's the epitome of current state of the internet. We're on a social platform with coins to be gathered, which doesn't induce a deep, well though discussion, rather short snarky comments that gets clicked.
The piece raises at least a half-dozen possible answers, not all of which are compatible. The author pushes the "low cost" angle quite heavily at the start, so there being much cheaper options is reason enough, IMO, to ask the question what the point of the project is.
They say the chair won't make money, but it's a for profit company. They say they want it to be employee owned and to make their employees lots of money.
The author basically says 'it's a good second chair' (not a quote) that lacks in some features their own chair has. The piece also talks about cutting out expensive considerations like assessment by a physio and assessment of pressure points - that doesn't sound great, although if it's just a second chair, maybe those matter much less.
It seems more like the YouTubers decided to make a $2M wheelchair - real estate, machinery, employees, etc. Then see if they could spin it out to a short lead-time, online customer-specified production.
Good luck to them. Hopefully it will turn into a great example of a cooperative that's producing well-engineered affordable wheelchairs.
It's not asking questions though there's a lot of saying 'how is this cheaper? I found this crappy thing on amazon [that's clearly a completely different design] . why are they making this?!'.
I've yet to see a cheaper option that's the same type of chair. The ones I keep seeing posted are collapsible ones that are used in hospitals which are much heavier and way worse than the product in the article, they're not fitted to the user and much more likely to cause issues. When comparing to a similar product these chairs actually are much cheaper than what's out there.
I am right handed, but overused it and switched to a left-handed mouse.
There are basically infinity right-handed mice, but basically zero left-handed mice, most of which are hedged ambidextrous mice.
so looking at office chairs and standing desks and all kinds of ergonomics oriented towards healthy sitting, it seems amazing that there isn't more competition for people who sit more than anyone.
It seems like a massive pain though. Rebuilding a non-symmetrical mouse the other way would take electronics tinkering as well as 3d printing, and probably a ton of work to get all the connections and tolerances right.
I am left handed, and I use trackpads with my left hand, but I gave up on lefty mice years ago and use an ergonomic one right-handed.
My sister used to use a neutral mouse, with her left hand, on the left side of the keyboard but in "normal" or "right handed mode". Now she has a laptop with a big touch pad in the middle.
Even game that way. Started using it that way as a kid, by the time I learned it was possible to switch the buttons that seemed less natural than leaving it as default.
Also made it much easier to use shared computers in school labs and the like.
It's specific to each task but I can normally get the left handed version as good or better than the right. I am willing to bet most people could do this, you just have to spend a bit of time awkwardly re-learning.
The Logitech G300s has been solid as a lefty. They used to be cheap enough that replacing them every couple of years (depending on usage) was feasible, but I'm not sure if the market has driven up prices since then.
Yes, there are different kinds of wheelchairs, there's no reason a premade, presized wheelchair has to cost thousands and they don't. The premade chairs certainly serve a need - for those who can sort of walk but need the chair to go distances (etc).
But the reason for custom wheelchairs is they are for people who spend all day, everyday in the chair. And that's where the need and the pain is greatest and so exhibiting a "ready made" chair just isn't going to impress them.
We sorta have that with everything though, you can source direct from china for a fraction of the cost, but the often pay several multiples of the actual cost for someone else to import it and provide the level of support and QA you expect from products.
Only because bikes are made up of commodity parts from many suppliers which drive the costs down, whereas this is mostly bespoke.
It is hilarious that people keep throwing out prices of $200 or $500, when $200 might get you close to the cost of one of the wheels on this.
>IMO the disconnect is this looks like such a rudimentary/basic product
Only to someone that's not familiar with what this is and what its competitors are.
I think that's what people are missing.
His competition is $5k wheelchairs that are often pictured with another $10k + of customizations.
I don't think that most people realize that $5k wheelchairs don't come with so much as a seat cushion as standard.
It's also far less like bikes than you're thinking. They have 5 major adjustments for a total of about 25k different configurations. And those don't seem to be majorly exclusive to each other either.
[0] Check out the number of tweaks available in their configurator: https://notawheelchair.com/pages/configurator
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-your-eyeglasses-cost...
Frames have crazy 100x markups and the market is dominated by a small number of companies. They interviewed people from Warby Parker (a newer, more inexpensive brand) and even they said they had to raise prices so they didn’t seem like knock-offs.
A $10k bike designed for racing has the same kind of components as a $100 bike from Walmart, but every single one of them is far, far better - better materials, higher tolerances, a geometry finely tuned to the rider. None of that is really obvious until you look closely. A rally car looks kind of like a road car, until you realise that it only shares a few body panels - every other component is built to a far higher spec.
Maybe this would be a $200 product if he was mass producing them to the same dimensions. But he's not, they're custom made on order to the dimensions of the user.
I've owned a few low cost Chinese bikes, and while they're OK, there's always parts on them that fail because they're clearly made to be as cheap as possible. If I depended on a wheelchair for moving about every day, I'd be damn sure it was well built and reliable. That's the market he's operating in.
It's an endemic problem in many fields but you see it a lot with programmers. It's the same class of cognitive bias that births ideas like "the law should be like a program, that would be much simpler" that were (still are?) big in tech circles. Lazy pattern matching and thinking that understanding one complex thing (programming) makes one automatically better at unrelated fields (complex manufacturing).
[0] The type most people are most familiar with, large wheels, collapsible, handles for assistance from others. Generally not used by people who are able to move under their own power.
[1] similar to "medical" but without the large back wheels so they're only mobile with another persons help or by scooting around using your feet.