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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure how I feel about it being a throwaway device for $100. I get they say you can send it back to be recycled, but this feels like you’re just proactively creating e-waste.

Not even an attempt to make a replaceable or chargeable battery?

Also they point out oura rings need to be charged every few days, but that’s because they’re constantly chewing through battery monitoring your health stats. I’m willing to bet if they were in a constant state of deep sleep and only woken up to record short audio clips they’d also last for months at a time.

I know folks around here love pebble, but this feels like a miss to me.

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> No charging: The battery lasts for up to years of average use. After the end of its life, send your ring back to us for recycling.

That's a pretty long life, TBF. I appreciate your concerns, though, and do wonder if there was a better middle ground (maybe a micro sterling engine leveraging the heat gradient from my finger to ambient, ha!).

People are buying Fitbit charge6 products today and those probably have an 18 shelf life and cost more.. so maybe it's not totally left field - although the charge6 isn't advertised to fail so soon lol.

That lifespan is based on the user recording for 12 to 15 hours over those two years. It's a $100 device that can record 12 hours of audio and then you throw it away. You could expend the battery on your first day by holding down the button.

Honestly I can see a niche use but this device strikes me as quite weird and I'm not sure why it isn't a button on their new watch.

Their Oura comparison really didn't sit well with me because of that. The device clearly uses a fraction of the power that the Oura is using. If it had a rechargeable battery you would not have to charge it that frequently.

Agreed. Brave to launch disposable tech with the current environmental awareness. e-waste in 12-15hours, when people are pushing for more and more for repairable devices just feels very out of touch.

this is a device that would potentially last years though, not months — if you're in the niche of needing something like this you're paying less than $10 a month (maybe as low as $5)... doesn't net out too terribly in exchange for not charging

We did it guys, we made physical devices usable only if you treat them as a SaaS otherwise you're sol when battery runs out

that's a pretty lame take, all I did was break down the cost to the lifespan of the device

it's useful to think of a lot of things this way, I also justify clothing purchases on a rough estimate of cost per wear

Right, and an Oura would be usable for a decade because it has a rechargeable battery.

sure but the Oura does a bunch of unrelated stuff specific to health and also has to be charged twice a week? they're not even comparable products

I don’t understand what you don’t understand. The oura comparison is one they made and used “charging every day” as a reason to not use a rechargeable battery. If they took the oura hardware model and applied it to their voice recorder ring, you would be charging monthly if not longer.

TL;dr - There’s no reason to not have a rechargeable battery other than to create e-waste and “a revenue stream”.

That's total nonsense, you have to make it larger to include a charging mechanism (which would need to be proprietary to fit) and it's more difficult to manufacture in a water-tight way. They're spending significantly less on developing and building this than Oura has. Keep in mind Oura has raised over a billion dollars in funding.

The e-waste here is negligible. If you've ever tossed a laptop or phone you've effectively produced more e-waste than a lifetime of these little things. A single disposable AA battery is more waste by weight.

I know exactly how I feel: I'll never buy a disposable electronic device.

The ring weighs approximately 1/1000th what a MacBook pro does. If it really lasts for years it's a tiny, tiny amount of e-waste.

Every company should be responsible for the lifecycle of their product, big or small. You can't just point fingers at others.

How much of it is even recyclable?

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