Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, this kind of reminds me of the Flip video camera. Great little device, inexpensive. I bought one. Shortly after, cell phones became just as capable of being fits-in-a-pocket video recorders. Maybe not HD, but good enough. (Though some would argue cell phones had nothing to do with the demise of Flip. [0])

I see a similar pattern with FitBit. It's a 3-axis accelerometer with some firmware and software. Someone smarter than me could probably get something working in a weekend (though weekend prototype to production is admittedly a long road). Worse, plenty of things have accelerometers in them. My iPhone. Your Samsung phone. My Pebble watch, which uses the Misfit app to count steps and track sleep without requiring that I actually buy a Misfit device. Some garage outfit may not put Fitbit out of business, but larger device manufacturers might be just one software update away from doing so.

Fitbit will have to have some serious value-add to stave off competitors, I think. Maybe I'm wrong, probably am. But I won't be buying their stock.

[0] http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/the-tragic-death-o...

FitBit has a brand. You can't build that in a weekend.

In fact, you don't need to build one at all. AliBaba returns over 14k results for "fitness tracker", and I imagine many of them are exact FitBit clones.

However, consumer product businesses are about way more than just the product itself. Marketing matters. Distribution matters. Apple bought Beats not because they couldn't create headphones, but because they wanted the brand. FitBit is Beats for "3-axis accelerometers with some firmware and software that you wear around your wrist".

Honestly I thought Apple bought Beats because they wanted Dr. Dre for future marketing purposes. Is that not the case?

It's been 9 months since the acquisition. If they don't do something soon it will start looking like Cook's first flop.

As far as I can understand, they wanted a few other things more:

The manufacturing process. I don't know much about this, but apparently beats can produce colour and shine in plastic of a very high quality in high volume.

It's a team that have manage to not only build a valuable brand, but create a whole new, high-end market segment. That kind of skill is definitely something Apple wants.

They also have a music service and Apple wants in on streaming and their other streaming acquisitions weren't good enough (or they had launched using them)

I'm no expert, but these are the value propositions of Beats that I've gathered as a regular on HN.

A separate fitness tracker is the PDA-and-flip-phone combo of 2015. Once there are popular and mainstream wearable computers, I have no need for a separate fitness tracker. And that will happen as surely as things will continue to get smaller.

It already exists. Apple watch does what fitbit does along with plenty of other useful stuff. I can't imagine why anyone would use a fitbit instead, other than perhaps cost. That's not a great thing to be your only way of competing.

As it happens, while typing this comment, my watch let me know it was time to stand up and move around :-P

> I can't imagine why anyone would use a fitbit instead, other than perhaps cost.

Battery life. Apple Watch will improve over time, but it's nowhere near there yet when it can't be worn overnight.

For the sleep tracking component, or just in general?

Personally I have no problems charging my watch daily, just like my phone. But it does present an issue if you want to wear it while sleeping. I've never wanted to wear a watch sleeping though...

As a complete side note, i've been impressed by the battery life. I haven't gone below 50% in a day yet, and I have so little concern that I will I took battery percentage off of my watch face.

hmmm, not sure. fitness trackers could evolve to be 25 (100?) sensors all over your body with data flowing to a backend that could comprehend all sorts of things a single cellphone in your pocket cannot.

fitbit's current product is v 0.5 of that future. all of their energy as a company can be put to improving health through their product line ..much different than the ingrained processes and motivations of cell phone makers.

edit : s/cellphone/wearable/ ..same comment applies.

If I would have gotten to the comments section before you I would have written your post (though with probably more mistakes).

I don't understand what their next device or app is because I can't see them staying and competing for the exact reasons you said. Yet I even use their devices right now.

Curious what the future holds for them. I feel like they have to pivot or innovate and I haven't seen any hints of that yet. Then again I could be horribly wrong.

I wear FitBit for 2 years 24/7, including sleep tracking. It works for a week on a single charge. Can you do this with iPhone or Pebble?

Chances are, you already have a smartphone/smartwatch that you need to keep constantly charged. The device's battery life is irrelevant.

Not only does my Pebble stay charged regardless of whether I use the fitness options or not (because step tracking is not the main reason I wear a Pebble), it will also last 5 days on a charge, which is close enough to the referenced week.

Another commenter put it much better than my original post with the PDA/flip phone analogy. I'm going to wear my Pebble anyway, why would I add a Fitbit to my wrist? Cell phones didn't put Canon and Nikon out of business, but they sure gutted their low end market. And I don't see a Fitbit as offering a fitness tracker that's equivalent to a DSLR. If they did, I'll guess it would start to look a lot like a Garmin or Suunto product. Good luck going up against those folks.

The device's battery life counts for a lot if I want to use it to track my sleep. Can't do that if I have to take it off so I can charge it overnight.

I have smartphone but I don't carry it everywhere, it lives on my table most of the time. Battery life is not irrelevant because why care about keeping stuff constantly charged when I can charge it once a week?

Thank you for the link, I haven't read it before. Interesting part for me was

"That is, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you’re filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you’re seeing, in real time — thousands of people at once."

That's wow for me as this is almost exactly what Periscope is doing, which is popular around me right now. I had to check the date of article, 2011. Wow. 4 years earlier is a lot :)

Yesterday I heard a woman saying to another woman "I don't want to walk over there, it's too far, I don't have any incentive since I left my fitbit at home" ...

Maybe they've got something else going other then being a 3-axis accelerometer.

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