@marcprecipice not that I’m implying that people like you and I are requirements for a hit product, but I can’t help but notice that a lot of early-adopter/enthusiast folks like us passed on this and while correlation does not imply causation, I do think the absence of some of us folks, especially those of us who aren’t particularly price sensitive, was a bad sign from the beginning.
@danhon@marcprecipice oh, to be clear, it was my main barrier, but less the dollar figure and more the lack of perceived value. I spent over $5000 on a 14” MBP in November. A stupid amount of money on a laptop (I sold my 2021 M1 Max for $2000, but still!), but I could justify that. Even with free financing and some ability to write it off, I just couldn’t find the value and I’m not rich enough to buy it as a toy.
@danhon@film_girl@marcprecipice It's like they deliberately create products where early adopters can skip the "hype" cycle, and go straight into the trough of disillusionment, as if it means they'll cross the chasm sooner.
@secretgeek@danhon@marcprecipice I genuinely and truly think that if it had been framed as a dev kit from the beginning, this would not be happening this way. You wouldn’t have the wave of stories of returns and eBay sales and not a single one sold in weeks. Instead, you’d prob have people actively trying to build more cool stuff for it. But the positioning as a ready to market device set expectations the launched product cannot match. And maybe that changes at wwdc, but momentum is lost.
@film_girl yeah, I totally agree. I spent a lot of time reading reviews and basically looking for a reason to be excited about it, and came up empty. It has both a high dollar cost and a high social cost, even just at home, and neither of those seemed worth the benefits.
@marcprecipice@film_girl the social cost is the part I really can't get over. They can drive the price down by 90% and it'll still be an ad about connecting with your child in your own home through goggles. Whoever greenlit that deeply dystopian ad should be fired.
@freediverx it was a gamble. I knew as soon as I used it that it was a great tech demo — one of the best I’ve ever seen. It was also clear that for me, there was no way to justify its price at this point in time. Maybe if I were richer and $4000 was equivalent of what $400 is to me now. I hope most of the people who bought it were in a position to afford it or to write it off.
@paul didn’t buy that either. I did get the Rabbit R1 which I should get this week. But that was $200. My 404 AF1s cost more than that. $200 for a toy I use a handful of times and got free Perplexity AI out of, I’m fine with.
@film_girl@paul Curious to your thoughts on a product that has a cloud back-end but doesn't have subscription. I have alarm bells ringing in my head about the lack of a business model here, particularly when the product is nothing without servers to connect to.
@jeffkibuule@paul I mean, for $200 that doesn’t phase me, but I think that is a correct thing to point out. That said, when I bought it I also got a year of Perplexity AI Pro for free, which I quite like, and that was $200 so this is all a wash for me. I certainly wouldn’t encourage anyone who wasn’t buying it as a toy and didn’t have the disposable income, to bother with it based on what I’ve seen.
@jeffkibuule@paul I always YOLO and spend the VC money on shit like this. It will almost always die, even the best engineered and executed stuff (RIP, Pebble). So I most certainly set my expectations to zero she decide if the money is enough for me to risk.
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