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Comment by Zamiel_Snawley | Hacker News Reader

Isn’t it valuable to Google to keep potential competitors from getting expensive IP for free?

“PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Reproducing that for new hardware would take a long time.” [0]

[0] https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back

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It's 12 years old. They put good work in. But it's missing an absurd amount of stuff the mass market considered mandatory a decade ago. Consumer electronics, for better or worse, is mostly about spending enough money to get your product name in front of hundreds of millions, and Google knows that well.

I don't think Google understands hardware given its lack of success in it.

The lack of success in hardware is intentional. Hardware is a low margin business that will hurt their bottom line.

Right, like this world's largest company called Apple, which gets most of the revenue from its hardware sales. Pixels are not cheap either and given its low specs (Tensor SOC), the per-unit margin has to be quite decent. OTOH, there are significant fixed development costs which you want to spread over as many devices as possible to increase the net margin.

The lackluster value and sales of Google hardware is no master plan, it's a simple incompetency.

When did you write this in 2005? Apple would like a word with you.

No, it's not

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