GoPro warned it may not survive | Hacker News Reader

GoPro warned it may not survive

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85 pointsmmh000076 comments

The issue with GoPro was that they did not know what business they were actually in. They created a new camera hardware segment and became experts at it. Then they decided that they had to pivot to a media platform. That was a dumb move that destroyed shareholder value. They also failed to differentiate from smartphones and cheaper cameras by innovating and/or moving upmarket.

This is also a lesson in failed leadership. Woodman is a CEO who founded the company. He has a controlling share and has never had to answer to a real board in his tenure. The company lost 99% of its value from its peak under him. The brand might still have value but his legacy is basically a Greek tragedy.

Curious parallel to iRobot (Roomba): first mover in new product segment, became genericized name for things in that segment, in the end, (possibly in GoPro's case) could not compete in that segment

it's not the first nor the last case. Another excellent similar case was Nokia.

I got a Insta 360 go 3S camera recently and damn the tech is amazing. What's sus is the mandatory phone activation/allowing permissions. Once I activated the camera I deleted the app.

Yes, I have X4. It has amazing hardware, but the activation thing is such a shame. I really wish it were illegal.

And the proprietary video format. I want an open source converter but chances are unlikely.

insv files? there are plenty of tools on github that can interact with these files and convert them to standard formats

Did more or less this with my mother-in-law and her Echo Dot.

I just bought an x5 to use with my moto and play around with.

Right now trying to figure out the aesthetics of 360. For one, everything that in real life looks huge, is not so impressive with 360 until you get really close. But at close distance even a beer can looks like a building.

Ha funny I see those on cars eg. Mustang GTs playing around in the streets

I think it's useful if you have that chase view where you pan around and show the other cars/motorcycles around you

Like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D65gz3UfvhE

It's interesting because in software it's usually the opposite. First to market is the winner even with an inferior product. See whatsapp and telegram

Not a great comparison; those apps have serious network effects.

>First to market is the winner even with an inferior product. See whatsapp and telegram

I don't think so. We use Excel not Lotus 1-2-3. iOS and Android, not Palm and Blackberry OSes or whatever mobile shit MS had first. We use Gmail not AOL. Google not Lycos or Altavista. Chrome not Netscape. Facebook and co, not Friendster or MySpace. Word not WordPerfect. Access not dBase. And regarding WhatsApp it's not ICQ or MSN Messenger that we use.

I’d suggest that a whole bunch of those were not improvements.

Which is orthogonal to what I'm responding to, which was that:

"First to market is the winner even with an inferior product. See whatsapp and telegram"

My point is that this not true, and that "first to market" usually losses.

If anything, what you suggest, reinforces it even more, since it implies that not only "first to market" often loses to a superior product, but even to players an inferior one.

I worded that inarticulately. Some of those first movers were absolute trash, though I agree that later and more commercially successful products are not always better.

Basically the problem with American corporate thinking.

Make a great product, stop innovating, and then spend the rest of the life of you company trying to extra as many dollars as possible from the first mover goodwill. Spend as few of those dollar possible innovating or improving the product. Or if you are innovating, it's in ways to break your old products to try and trick your customers into buying more.

The core of the problem is that those who own businesses only care about extracting money from stock and investment. The best way to do that isn't making a good product. In fact, it's practically the opposite.

American corporate thinking is mostly about acquisitions to innovate. So this is more or less _not_ American corporate thinking.

No sympathy from me. I have a GoPro Hero11 Black and it's easily the worst camera product I've ever used.

Damn thing overheats constantly. 4K60 never works for more than 15-or-so minutes even with an AC vent aimed directly at it. 1080p60 is its limit for any long-duration recording, and even then it still overheats from time to time if I'm in a particularly hot environment. Made me realize why so much of their marketing shows it being used underwater and skydiving lol

> overheats

This is the biggest thing that I've constantly heard about GoPros... I get that they're small and portable, but what good are they if you can almost never use them?

They even made them a little bigger, and they still overheated...

All because they had to have the top line specs for video, pushing the little SoC to the limit while recording. The heat makes battery life worse, too.

Ironically, cold also trashes their battery life.

I hate physics and chemistry.

As a diver, if you jump into moderately warm water (the Great Barrier Reef for instance), that won't save you either. Mine overheats and dies after 15-20 minutes. It took diving near Seattle to keep it going continuously.

Good riddance, GoPro squandered their market lead for many years and shipped bafflingly mediocre software that seemed to add more bugs with every generation.

I hope Insta360, DJI, and many more competitors spring up out of their ashes. Assuming fast microsd cards for writes, how much DDR RAM do they really need to buffer videos during recording? 4gb? 8gb?

So US Ai schizophrenia kills an American company and you’re hoping two Chinese companies (one of which the US has banned on fabricated accusations) take its place. Man, what a timeline

GoPro has been squandering their lead for like 15 years.

I feel like I heard this same rumor a decade+ ago.

Not a rumor when announced on a public market, but it's not the first time they've been perceived as a precarious has-been.

They've been a has-been for the last 5 years at least. They didn't go under, but still lost the title and tons of market share to DJI and 360

They can be a precarious has-been without being actually bankrupt.

> the free market is amazing, I love the free market

> wait no not like that

Americans slowly discovering this isn't the 80s anymore and that China is beating them at their own game, delightful

> US Ai schizophrenia

I bought an Insta360 before the AI mania because the software was simpler, price cheaper and reviews around build quality more positive.

Not everybody on HN is from US or takes patriotic loyalty over tech. Purely on tech, those are better. In 2015 GoPro was better - for a while the only real game it town. But they did stupid moves, and missed obvious plays.

I don't care what country they are from if after 15 years they cant figure out how to make a camera that doesn't reset its clock every time you recharge it.

Yeah, I've heard a lot of bad stuff about GoPro, and most of the GoPro footage I've seen has been pretty shitty in my opinion, so I've never thought about getting one.

GoPro has had two years of falling revenue. While I’m sure the memory shortage isn’t helping their profits I’m not sure it is entirely to blame for continued falling revenue.

Looking forward to no firmware updates and getting locked out of cloud hosted features.

The physical buttons on a GoPro are frustrating to use: hold down or continuously press or press once. No thanks.

The software is bad too: WiFi hotspot that disconnects from your usual phone WiFi. Now sync to the app. Nag about a cloud subscription. Now choose photos and sync to your phone gallery. No thanks.

I bike commute with an old Hero 8 on my handlebars, and I never bother controlling or setting it up or anything: just power on, press record (which dismisses the nag dialog to connect it to your phone). That does mean the timestamps are always nonsense, but I am not too worried (I guess if I get run over again the lawyers can argue over if the one video on the card that shows me being run over is in fact from the day in question...)

Can anyone explain the financials involved why this brand, worth so little in market cap, but brand value definitely a lot more than that assumes it is; isn't just swallowed up like a Fitbit?

It seems to me that they went from being a device making company to a marketing company. Their marketing budget looks like it could dwarf their R&D budget. Or they got a really good deal on all of their promotional stuff.

Lots of bashing here so I feel compelled to say my piece that GoPros, despite their flaws, are still the best action camera in the market for many people, including me. They have a powerful set of customizations simple not possible on the their competitors via the Labs firmware. Not that DJI couldn't do that if they wanted to, but to this day, they don't.

And they just released a cool camera too one with detachable lens

I assume you refer to the Go Pro MAX2...I bought one because per reviews it was actually pretty solid. Costco sold it so I could return if I didn't like it. My prior camera was the Samsung 360 - which is discontinued. Been fairly happy with the Max 2 - I do mostly outdoor shooting. I can't compare it to the Insta360 or DJI but the reviews says Go Pro MAX2 is superior in outdoors, daylight which is my main use case.

Since everything is processed on camera/phone I hope I can still use it even if they go under.

No it's Mission 1 Pro ILS it's like a DSLR/mirrorless (as in metal locking ring) pretty legit

But there's no autofocus support from the camera, so there's a lot more work to get/keep things in focus.

True, there are modding groups that take apart action cams to be able to attach a cool cine lens on it for example, now you don't have to mod.

ex. https://youtu.be/7qTvllQMTMA?si=ruhj2BwYqa_efFBu&t=250

Weird case of the software letting the hardware down. You did the hard part guys!

Quik is an abomination. I have 3 cameras including the Mission 1 Pro and am satisfied with them. I go on long mucky country dog walks and they've never let me down. Getting the content off the cameras is horrible though: no, I don't want to upload 16Gb of data to your cloud using a poor, 2-bar 4G intermittent phone connection. No. I don't want special editing effects that an only be done in app. Ultimately I pop the card out and use a USB adapter to transfer for editing, but what a pain: surely they could have produced something more user friendly?!

I don't like the app either, but it's not too hard to transfer the files directly to the phone over WiFi without using any of the cloud/editing things.

What's annoying is you have to do it in three steps: first transfer it to the app's internal storage, and then save it out to actual files, then delete the internal storage; and you need 2x the disk space.

(Another annoying thing is in some countries they just disable the 5 GHz WiFi, so transfers end up taking forever. Very annoying when traveling, and if I lived in one of those countries I would have definitely returned it)

I don't care so much about GoPro. I am worried about Fujifilm though, they seem on the cusp of a golden era.

I wish they'd update their model lines at the same time. Frustrating how they are all at uneven paces in terms of getting sensor or AF upgrades. You might want an x-pro body but it is what two generations behind the xt-5 now. xt-5 gen upgrades didn't trickle to the xe line until like 3 years later.

I hope they are working hard on the xpro4!

Retro styled cameras are only gaining in popularity; the competition is increasing, but Fujifilm has a big head start.

And still many concepts to try out. We have yet to see true manual focus confirmation in stills mode (something a retro nikon zf has been praised for), or an autofocus capable lens with a distance scale (leica q style).

Wishing hard alongside you. I still love my XPro3 <3. I talked to one of their brand reps at Samy's Camera Santa Ana 2 months back and he said it's definitely on their radar but the manufacturing is a bottleneck.

Curious what defines a retro camera for you? You mean a digital camera that imitates some analog feel?

They may need to expand their marketing past red bull. Perhaps gardeners, home builders and landscapers. Maybe come up with a marketing package where you can buy a gopro and get a youtube video boost via a YouTube GoPro + Creator video drop (one per purchase).

Yeah, people look down on meta glasses, but my instagram feed is full of tradesmen using them and building channels with 5 or 6 figure followings. Something calming about watching well executed tradecraft I find.

How have they not competed in the cop bodycam space?

Yeah well as soon as I started seeing it reported that GoPro's were requiring a mobile phone to be used (or at least making it inconvenient to use a camera without one) I lost all interest in getting one.

Unfortunately I feel this was inevitable as GoPro did not stay on top of hardware design.

DJI and Insta360 offer compelling products. And budget, lower quality 1080p-4k action cams got eaten by Akaso and other clones.

Given how underwhelming (photo/video influencer ad "reviews" aside) the new over-hyped models they released are, they should not survive.

realistically most gopros ever sold are collecting dust in some drawer, and if you have a GoPro 5 from 10 years ago that does 4K video, there isn't really a need to keep buying new ones ...

I use a GoPro Hero Session on a motorcycle helmet mount and it's perfect. I bought it nearly 10 years ago. Still works great!

But people want a GoPro, and people hate AI. It's like the market isn't listening or something.

RN the market is not you. The amount of investment being pushed to AI dwarfs what you collectively spend. So the market now is driven by the IPO dream where you'll hold the bag, jobless.

Investment is not demand. You are describing the problem. That irrational exuberance is why the AI money pit is going to implode.

GoPro issue is that memory chips are too expensive. And new memory chip factories are not being created, because that is long term investment.

Yes, the product the market wants will be unavailable or less available. The one consumers hate is superabundant.

Right now, consumers spend much more money on AI than GoPros. More on AI than GoPro's entire product category (including all their competitors). That's not even counting businesses' AI spending. So it seems like the market is listening closely.

I honestly thought GoPro and FitBit had both been stomped out a long time ago, and we were just watching new companies brand-squatting.

They certainly wouldn't survive if capitalism was working as intended. GoPro is one of the most institutionally arrogant companies around, they seem unable to understand that they have competition. (Which to be fair they absolutely didn't for the first few years of their existence). In 2026 they make a mediocre product with horrible software, and even worse customer service.

In contrast, I've smashed the absolute shit out of my insta360 lenses 3 times now (total cost to replace lens 3x $50), and when I smashed the screen to smithereens, they fixed it, OUT OF WARRANTY, for $50 including parts and labor, and they paid for shipping.

There is zero reason to buy a gopro, they don't have a single compelling product and HOLY FUCK the software is bad compared to insta360.

It's amazing how a company doing something for you that they don't have to do triggers loyalty.

One time, I bought a couch online, and the company kept stringing me along with "we're behind but it's definitely coming soon" emails until I was well past my credit card's chargeback deadline. But when I eventually called the credit card company, they happily refunded me anyway. Now I will always, always use American Express for large purchases unless I have no other choice.

Amazon used to tell their employees a story about how a customer had his PlayStation stolen off the porch. He called Amazon, and they immediately shipped him a new one, overnight, with no hassle. The customer was a prominent New York Times business columnist, and he immediately wrote a glowing article about how amazing Amazon was, which was hugely impactful to Amazon. It informed the company's "customer obsessed" view for years (until eventually there was just too much money to be made in becoming a marketplace for whatever fake stuff people want to sell).

"Underpromise and overdeliver" is bad marketing advice, but it's fantastic customer retention advice.

I grabbed the mission 1 pro, the menu is different from their hero line up and actually smooth and usable. Not to mention the GoPro Labs QR settings that make setting up a crazy recording profile or trigger easy.

I used my friends Ace Pro 2 and the menu was great but kinda clunky compared to GoPro.

No allegiance to any brand, but the Mission series software is fast and the footage, especially slowmo, is breathtaking

> GoPro is one of the most institutionally arrogant companies around > even worse customer service

Hahahahahahahhahaha. It's rotten fish heads all the way to the top.

When I was a pimply face youth I used to take calls for a multi-tenant call center in bumfuck nowhere and we somehow were given the contract to take tier 0 catch-and-throw calls for some MSP out in Florida that did contracted things like call center software solutions. (Puzzle piece for a logo. Out of Miami.)

Holy hell, the people that called from GoPro were awful. Absolutely rude, arrogant management. (And the MSP client themselves weren't a walk in the park either, and I swear they had it in for us alongside GoPro.)

I'm curious as to what they could have done at what point in time to avoid this? Or was it "unavoidable"?

Apple managed to stay ahead of the competition for years now, but I guess the iPhone and Macs are just more complex products and revolve around an ecosystem, so not really comparable I guess. Still, I'm fascinated by the GoPro "case". I had a Hero 3 back in the days and loved it!

I think comparing companies to Apple is kinda silly as they're unique. They're in a position of such market dominance that they can afford institutional arrogance.

However, it's very illustrative in this situation because I think GoPro made the mistake of thinking they were Apple, and at their outset they were compared to whatever other dross was on the market. Unfortunately it went to their head (almost certainly they were run by MBAs instead of product people or engineers, or anyone who would actually use an action camera seriously) and they completely lost sight of what their product even was.

I think it's completely avoidable, they could have just kept trying to make good products instead of whatever subscription service bullshit they attempted. They saw they had market dominance and so they tried to rape their customers as best they could because they didn't see the customers as having a choice. Don't do that. They cashed in on their market position for short term gains and it destroyed their future.

I participate in a niche sport that uses specialized software for data. Go pro is one of few cameras supported by that software for automatically syncing video to your data so you can judge what happened in context with data. Not to say you're wrong about most of that, just that there are still valid reasons to get a go pro for some people. We also hate on go pro for their failures, overheating, and just straight up not working, but they're the best option we have.

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