Success and Failure at Pebble

https://medium.com/@ericmigi/why-pebble-failed-d7be937c6232

by zsid • 4 years ago

557 311 4 years ago

m1gu3l• 4 years ago

Ha I had one of these and used it for like a day before it went in to the junk drawer. Cool idea though.

nomel2• 4 years ago

The underlying problem was that we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted.

How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence? What kind of market research/methods goe into this? How do you trust opinions from people? I'm surethere's a whole industry around this, but it seems that what people say and where people actually put their money are usually pretty different, especially if the product is somewhat "quirky".

For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.

Does anyone have some insight?

hinkley• 4 years ago

Apple has both a sixth sense about this stuff and deep enough pockets to be wrong for quite a while before they have to give up.

If Pebble had kept true to their original design, they might have done better, or they might have just left people hungry for the Apple Watch. It's hard to tell in these scenarios, and very easy to make predictions about the past.

mulderc2• 4 years ago

I know that for me the apple watch is what I wanted the pebble to be. I can often leave my phone behind but still have music, podcasts, email, twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and a variety of news apps all available.

erohead8• 4 years ago

One way to do it is to start small, build something, ship it to customers, get feedback and then iterate from there. This is a bit harder with hardware, though, but not impossible. We actually built an entire smartwatch called inPulse before Pebble, sold and shipped it to 1000 early customers, then got feedback from them. This is how we learned which features to put into Pebble.

girvo3• 4 years ago

Thank you for making the Pebble Time Round. It's still the single best smartwatch I have ever used. I miss it every day.

drBonkers• 4 years ago

I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.

I was one of those people, and I bought the mini. Now you know at least one person.

_jal• 4 years ago

Are we talking about the SE?

If so, I have one too. Closest thing to the iPhone 4, which I consider the peak of the line.

yumraj• 4 years ago

Now you know at least one person.

The fact that they updated it recently tells me that there were more than a few who bought it.

ianai6• 4 years ago

I actually bought a second phone just so I’d have a mini and a max. Serves its purpose well (backup to main phone and for when space constrained).

wlesieutre2• 4 years ago

Bought a mini. Also guided a friend's wife to the mini when she surprised him with a new phone for Christmas, because he had told me he hated how big phones had gotten (iPhone X maybe?) and his next one was going to be the smallest one available. We're both very happy with them.

It's a great phone. Bummed to hear rumors than the 14 will drop the mini form factor.

I also had a Pebble Time and loved it, so I guess I'm just a fan of great-but-not-quite-popular-enough electronics...

aendruk• 4 years ago

And there’s lag unaccounted for in the anecdote. I’m one of those apparent hypocrites who asked for a mini but doesn’t have one—because I haven’t purchased any new phone yet; my current one still works fine.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some correlation between preference for a less obtrusive phone and avoiding superfluous consumption.

nunez3• 4 years ago

add me to the list. i would have a mini today if it had three cameras and the promotion display. absolutely hate large phones.

h3mb3• 4 years ago

I have a theory that if they had named the 12 mini just "iPhone 12", people would've bought it so much more because it would've appeared as The Default iPhone. Not sure if so many bigger variants would've existed in that imaginary world though.

I have no research on this of course. I just have an anecdote that my mom didn't even consider the mini (and just bought the regular 12) even though a few years back she did complain how big all the phones were. I guess an average person just gets used to everything and aren't as nit-picky on all the details and ergonomics as myself.

I still long for one-handed flagships. Maybe I'm just a weirdo for whom 5" phones from a few years back (e.g. Pixel 1) were perfectly operable with one hand. For a lot of the population those phones were already two handed devices in most use cases I guess? Couple this with how phones are the main computing and media consumption devices for most people nowadays... why not have it remarkably bigger I guess.

evanfarrell• 4 years ago

the canonical YC advice is to make something that you want, then to go find people like yourself and see if they want it too. whether that turns into a real market or not has a lot of luck, but it's often surprising how promising being your own user can be, especially when you solve a hair-on-fire problem for yourself!

eli• 4 years ago

That’s also how you have a market oversaturated with products competing for the same upper middle class 20-somethings.

redmen• 4 years ago

Travel and surround yourself with new experiences and different kinds of people and build intuitions for things people want by becoming like these people. Share experiences, needs, wants, outlooks.

Then dogfood your own ideas. You will be bringing in others' needs and wants into your idea-generation process unconsciously.

If you are a billionaire you will never ride the bus and never understand the common struggle, and will never be able to dogfood a real solution.

Just an example.

djbusby• 4 years ago

There is a whole group of learning around Lean Customer Development[1]. Those processes (and a bunch more) help you identify, with reasonable confidence, that folk will pay for your solution. This process is one part of "The Lean Startup" process

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18492257-lean-customer-d...

Permit• 4 years ago

How the heck do you know what people will want, with any sort of confidence?

One way is to ask them to pay you for it (pre-order) before you make it. For the original Pebble I imagine Kickstarter helped fill this role.

This worked for a startup of mine as well. For our first product we spent ~8 months building and polishing something we thought (hoped) people would like. No one was willing to pay for it. For our second product we spent 3 weeks building an MVP, shot a short video and took preorders. This time enough people put up money to pay for it so we built it!

Personally, I hate pre-ordering things but many other people do not and it’s a really practical way to answer the question “Will people actually pay us money for this thing?”.

maxwelldone• 4 years ago

Pre-order is reliable signal. How does one go about software services though?

For the past 2 weeks I've been analyzing a problem & I think my target segment desperately needs a solution (based on discussions on online forums, including HN.) I'm about to begin market research to validate my assumptions & to check if my userbase can actually shell out money.

Presently, I'm thinking of getting some pilot users & offer my service for free (or a small fee, since I'd be doing some non-trivial work for them). If the results seem promising, I'll pitch my idea to others. I've been part of few early stage startups but this is the first time I'm doing something of my own. Is there a better way to do this validation?

pensatoio• 4 years ago

I was one of those people, and I didn't buy it because of battery life. Unrealistic expectations, perhaps, but that's the reason.

marcellus232• 4 years ago

I and my entire family are buying minis. Just goes to show anecdotal evidence is utterly meaningless.

nomel2• 4 years ago

And, that's my point!

But, it happens that my anecdote is somewhat valid, since the 12 mini was cancelled (which is the phone I was referring to): https://tech.hindustantimes.com/mobile/news/iphone-12-mini-p...

AdrianB1• 4 years ago

iPhone mini: price and battery life. Outside USA there is a huge market of great value Android phones. iPhone mini was an opportunity for a small screen affordable iPhone, but it was not delivered as such. Not everybody wants a 6" phone, not everybody wants a $1000 phone, but the opposite is also not true.

who_cares• 4 years ago

User feedback is not about taking what they say at face value, it’s about all the other nuanced things they do when you present them a solution to their problem. You have to understand all the minutia like their facial expressions…stuff like that. Most people don’t do it well from what I’ve seen. From my experience, you ask people if they like something and they say yes a lot, and that it’s wonderful. It’s still about solving something / doing something better - to discover that, you really need to understand humans. Lots of quick iteration and more user feedback is important until you get it right. You will know when you get it right.

Then…well, try to build a team that can actually iterate quickly, deliver on time and without tons of bugs (good luck) - startup life. I guess lots of investors are like, well, 1/100 people will do product discovery and execute on the product properly and get a return for everyone, and that’s good enough. It’s not easy. And a side note, you outsource it and those firms are sharks knowing that 99/100 startups will fail and they’re happy to do product discovery services which are trash, build your product with tons of bugs so you can’t get off the ground, and when you fail - do it all over again with the next funded startup. Bottom line - you need some very talented folk to execute all of what you are asking…it’s kind of next level in my opinion. Like, think of it this way - to be very successful I feel that this product person must not only understand themselves well, but other people individually, and society as a whole. How many people do you know like that? Please provide more insight / correct me if I’m wrong…

freeopinion2• 4 years ago

Faster horses.

girvo3• 4 years ago

As one of those people who said up-and-down that they wanted an iPhone Mini, but also was one of the few who bought one, the key thing I saw that turned people off was the battery life compromises for active screen-on usage. People have become used to 8 hours screen-on time, and the iPhone 12 Mini's 5 hours just isn't enough for a tech-y crowd, I think.

I still adore mine. I'll use it and repair it until I can no longer.

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.

I assume these people either bought another Apple phone in the lineup, or choose to delay purchase until the next phone announcement or their current phone breaking ?

If they switched to android altogether I'd see it as a clear change in what they wanted, but if they stayed with Apple, the onus was on Apple to make the mini attractive enough to have these people buy it. Blaming the customer for not buying what they expected to be a better proposition feels weird.

It doesn't help that wether Apple fails or succeeds to make that pitch, users will probably buy another Apple device anyway.

jldugger• 4 years ago

many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.

I would have bought a 12 mini, except I had just bought a 2020 SE six months earlier.

jmoak3• 4 years ago

Same boat, I wish they had announced it earlier, I would have gladly waited and paid for it.

I couldn't be happier with my SE 2020 though, I've had it for 2 years now and I plan to keep it for 2 more, and recommend it to anyone who will listen!

mpalczewski• 4 years ago

I did eventually buy an iPhone 13 mini. Still somewhat disappointed by it. What I really wanted is something like an iPhone 13 mini pro. I used the zoom on my iPhone 12 pro and never the wide angle, if they only pick two cameras, please give me the zoom.

It also would have been nice to have the better screen.

The 12 had bad battery life is what I heard.

fomine33• 4 years ago

I was excited to iPhone mini but FaceID was a really serious deal breaker in pandemic. Some people may just bought iPhone SE with TouchID. Finally I bought it in 2022 with iOS 15.4, but it's too late for Apple not to stop future mini line.

mrexroad• 4 years ago

I have a 12 mini. Love, love the size, but batt life hurts and I miss the 2x lens more than I expected. I hope it lives another generation or two to resolve camera and batt trade-offs.

mulderc2• 4 years ago

13 mini already solved the battery and I believe has improved camera

ngngngng• 4 years ago

bought an iPhone mini.

That's funny, I was one of those people, bought one, and now I see them everywhere. I chat with coworkers and random people about it and we're all in the same boat. Always wanted a mini phone, bought it as soon as they made it. I find it hard to believe that they're not selling any of them because of how often I meet enthusiastic users of them.

lostgame• 4 years ago

> For example, I knew many people who said they wanted an iPhone mini, and were super excited about the rumors at the time, and said they would get one. Not a single person I know, directly or not, bought an iPhone mini.

People wanted an iPhone mini in the footprint of the 5S/original SE.

They got something virtually the same size as an iPhone 6/7/8/SE2.

The market offering did not match what a lot of people were looking for.

dawnerd• 4 years ago

Oh man I loved my Pebble! I still have it but lost the charger. Had no idea there was a project to bring them back to life.

51Cards2• 4 years ago

Google Rebble, they have full guides and software updates to keep your devices going. It's not a huge community but it's pretty dedicated.

will02• 4 years ago

Check out rebble.io/howto to get started. If you have any questions we're on Discord[0]

[0] https://rebble.io/discord

kevinwang• 4 years ago

The Pebble Time was great!

sen• 4 years ago

ALL they had to do was continue with the original idea and not get greedy.

I was a high(ish)-tier backer of the original, still got my 2 sitting in a drawer, and wore them until they wore out. I absolutely loved the idea of a MINIMAL e-paper watch with easily customisable faces and basic notifications. I’m still a fan of the idea, and would love to see more use of e-ink in smart watches. All the fans wanted was that, iterated and improved upon. Better development tools for faces, some other styles of physical watch, etc. Instead the entire brand got hand-grenaded and now we get nothing but some unsupported old e-waste.

slabity• 4 years ago

Can you explain what you mean by "the entire brand got hand-grenaded" and "not get greedy"? Is this in reference to them selling to Fitbit? Or something before that?

I purchased a Pebble Time Steel fairly late in the company's lifetime, so I was surprised and kind of confused about the whole situation.

erohead8• 4 years ago

Meh, I know that we did not get greedy. Greedy implies we were driven by a selfish goal of making more money for ourselves. As the founder, I can truly state that it was not our intention.

We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people and started scaling up. As I outlined in the post, we (poorly) tried to target a larger market segment and also scaled up our team. We were mostly right - smartwatches are objectively a major industry right now, but our strategy to do so was pretty bad. I don't think I would have changed anything, but looking back of course I see what would have been a more successful (but smaller) path.

vxNsr• 4 years ago

If it makes you feel any better amazfit carry’s the torch now for long battery e-ink smartwatches, I still think the pebble did it better but at least there’s something out there.

bigiain3• 4 years ago

We honestly thought that smartwatches were about to be a big thing for a lot of people

I think you were right.

I remember when my Time2 Kickstarter refund came, I was seriously considering using that money to buy an Apple Watch. But I didn't like the plasticy look/feel of the base models, and wasn't prepared to spend twice as much to get one with the nice metal mesh strap. I then spent about half that money on three 2nd hand Russian mechanical watches on eBay, and that was the start of a small but very enjoyable collection and hobby.

Now I'd guess 70% of my friends have a modern smart watch on their wrist, while I'm usually rocking my (poorly faked) Yuri Gagarin Sturmanskie replica, or my Raketa Big Zero, or my Amphibia. And I've got half a dozen eBay alerts waiting for a few interesting mechanical watches I want to add to my collection...

ssivark• 4 years ago

looking back of course I see what would have been a more successful (but smaller) path.

Thanks for the valuable retrospective!

Could you expand a bit on the pros and cons of going smaller -vs- going bigger in that situation, and what motivated you to choose the way you did?

Also, do you feel the ambient culture/advice on that decision tried to push you in either direction?

BlueTemplar9• 4 years ago

now we get nothing but some unsupported old e-waste

That's way too harsh. While Timeline is gone, rebble still works. This is waaaay better than your typical device that stopped being made !

will02• 4 years ago

Timeline is a (mostly) supported feature on Rebble!

wycy• 4 years ago

I loved my OG Pebble. It really was revolutionary in the wearables market.

bllguo• 4 years ago

shame what happened to pebble. article is on point for my personal experience; I had both the original and a Time and preferred the original. the new capabilities were not compelling and the aesthetic was worse imo.

Gigachad9• 4 years ago

I loved the pebble time steel and wore it for years. But then when I compared it to the Apple Watch I got later, the pebble looked like a child's toy watch.

InsaneOstrich• 4 years ago

RIP Pebble. I still wear my Pebble Time Steel every day

51Cards2• 4 years ago

I'm still sad about the Gen 2 Pebble Time not being released. It solved the (few!) issues I have with the V1 Time. And I use the word have - present tense - purposely because I still wear my Time daily and have 3 in reserve in case it dies. The Rebble project and battery replacements have kept these devices relevant and for what I want out of a smart watch I still haven't found a better device.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

There are lots of smallish e-paper displays intended for use as dynamic price tags. It's one of the main formats for the medium. Could you use them to make a largeish wrist computer device that might be more useful than the Pebble?

BlueTemplar9• 4 years ago

You're going to have lots of issues with the very slow refresh rates.

Especially since for a wrist computer, touchscreen input would actually become better than a row of buttons).

rvz• 4 years ago

What a shame.

Could have been an alternative to watches running WearOS and watchOS, but it wasn't meant to be, other than a hackers toy that was killed by being squeezed out of the market with high operating costs and we are now left with the same old Apple and Google duoploy once again.

It's time to stop with this 'world's first' marketing. Apple entered the market late and were around the corner, came in and changed everything (Again). Not acting and moving quickly enough to when a giant enters the market and brushing it off as nothing also contributed to this failure as well.

I had high hopes for Pebble to go further than their current market, but it seems that it just became another Amiga-like product. Forgotten in the graveyard of many other failed products only to be used by hackers and hobbyists.

ohyoutravel• 4 years ago

This is a cool story. I loved my Pebble and still have my Kickstarter Edition. I bought it because it was a geeky thing and I could write code and deploy that code to the Pebble.

paxys2• 4 years ago

Is there a single startup success story in the consumer hardware space? The best case scenario is to exist long enough to get a billion dollar exit from a major tech company, who will then immediately gut parts of your product that don't support their own business goals. The more likely one is to be sold for parts (like Pebble) or just cease to exist entirely.

It is sad that there is so much innovation being left on the table in that space because the market simply doesn't allow it.

mr-ron• 4 years ago

Gopro?

Roomba?

paxys2• 4 years ago

Gopro has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for many years now. Its stock fell from $87 in 2014 to $2 in 2020 (has recovered somewhat to $8 now). They started looking for buyers for the company in 2018 but still haven't found one. Hardly what I'd consider a major success.

iRobot has a somewhat better story, but is overall not worth too much more than Gopro (~$1.5B). It is also not a recent startup but has its roots in DARPA grants and defense contracts from the 90s.

krasin2• 4 years ago

Is there a single startup success story in the consumer hardware space?

Epiphan Video ([1], [2])? They are fairly successful at selling their hardware to video streamers (both, b2c and b2b). They didn't do IPO as there was no pressure to do so - they primarily bootstrapped themselves. It's not a well-known story, but the market did allow them to exist & succeed.

1. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/epiphan-video

2. https://obj.ca/article/techopia/kanata-based-epiphan-videos-...

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

You have to look outside of mass-market consumer products.

The problem with mainstream tech is that it's a race to the bottom. Consumers have extremely high expectations for both the product and the ongoing support. Only the biggest companies can afford to amortize the R&D costs across enough units to compete.

Step into niche hardware and hobbyist domains and there are small companies everywhere. The smaller markets are too small for big companies to play in and the users are savvy enough that they're willing to pay for high margin products instead of picking whatever is cheapest at Best Buy.

bsuvc• 4 years ago

Peloton and Roku come to mind. But yeah, most seem to be acquired at some point, if successful.

renewiltord2• 4 years ago

- Oculus

- Fitbit

- Raspberry Pi (I suppose this is not really consumer)

- Withings

- Peloton

- Tonal

But the biggest success is definitely Oculus. Definitely a hard thing to get right.

HWR_143• 4 years ago

How is Oculus not "The best case scenario is to exist long enough to get a billion dollar exit from a major tech company"

But I would say the Raspberry Pi is an excellent example.

mbesto• 4 years ago

- Home Security systems

- Thermostats (nest, ecobee)

- Home wi-fi (eero)

- Sonos

- I think Whoop and Oura will get there

- Beats headphones

Problem is, there are plenty that don't get headlines because a single-product category company isn't going to generate profits like a conglomerate like P&G. You also can't simply just throw tech into every product category.

Cthulhu_4• 4 years ago

A lot of these IoT applications (home security, thermostats) feel like they're re-inventing the wheel over and over again, without any one providing any major benefits over the other - for one, they all want to sell you a subscription to your face, and sell your data behind your back.

nrp• 4 years ago

We're not there yet, but we're trying :)

Some other companies that are tracking towards sustainable success that we look at are:

* Oura

* Wyze

* Peloton (though they made some growth mis-steps)

All three of those follow a subscription model to get off of the "‘consumer electronics’ release cycle" that Eric calls out in his post. That's not the model that we're following, but we do have an alternate strategy to avoid falling into that same trap.

antupis• 4 years ago

Also I think these three companies founders are not typical SV founders but have like strong executive background from Amazon, Nokia and Barnes & Nobles.

gnicholas4• 4 years ago

Wyze isn't doing so hot, after just forcing everyone onto a subscription to maintain the functionality they thought was included with the product they purchased. To their credit, they let you 'subscribe' at $0/mo, but the pressure to pay was quite strong. They also didn't message it well — my brother got email warnings, but I (a longtime customer) received none.

jfkimmes2• 4 years ago

We're not there yet, but we're trying :)

Thank you for trying! You have an amazing product and provided much needed innovation in this space.

(Written from my Framework Laptop)

jerlam• 4 years ago

I'm surprised to see Oura mentioned here as a success. They don't have a single customer currently paying for a subscription (everyone would still be within the six month free trial) and haven't released most of the features included in their subscription offering. It's doubtful that most of their users would pay for the subscription.

The feedback was presumably so bad that their CEO left the company less than two months after the announcement of the new product and subscription model.

luisfmh• 4 years ago

What about teenage engineering. Though it's kind of niche?

krasin2• 4 years ago

For those who have not heard about Teenage Engineering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Engineering with their primary product being OP-1 synthesizer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Engineering_OP-1

subroutine2• 4 years ago

"The best case scenario is to exist long enough to get a billion dollar exit"

Sheesh, seems hardly worth it.

subroutine2• 4 years ago

Apple is not doing too bad. It has a $2.8 trillion market cap, and is the most valuable company in the world. Started in a garage.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

What is success to you? If success means customer success and probable longevity of the company (and growth and valuation are secondary factors) then Niche Coffee’s espresso grinder is a consumer hardware success.

Thinking about it a lot of third wave coffee products fit the bill. The Decent espresso machine is another and makes the “should buy an Italian machine” argument no longer apply.

There are also successful coffee scales. Lots of new stuff!

Fully automatic machines that are better than a great barista are probably coming. Maybe an upstart could do it.

Of course the sales volumes might be too low to be consider a success on HN or even shark tank for that matter. But i would be happy to have that much success in a new product.

nunez3• 4 years ago

eero and meraki come to mind.

reneherse• 4 years ago

Glowforge? Higher price point than most consumer gadgets, but their crowdfunding campaign set a record at the time. (The founding team spent tons of effort on getting the product-market fit right)

ericd4• 4 years ago

I loved, loved, loved my Pebble Time. It did everything I wanted out of a smart watch, especially eliminating my phone-checking habit, because I was always on top of whether new emails were worth reading, it was a sanity saver during an intense M&A process. Also, it somehow had a super long-lived battery, and it had so much more personality than most electronic devices, with its little 8-bittish animated icons, reminded me of a Gameboy Advance or something. Thanks for making one of my favorite devices of the last decade, Eric.

jszymborski• 4 years ago

You can always still run you Pebble Time with Rebble [0] :) I still use mine to this day!

[0] https://rebble.io/

jimmux• 4 years ago

I pulled mine out of storage a few weeks ago to resurrect it as a display for my EUC, and was surprised by it yet again. The fast refresh and good visibility is just so pleasant to use. Rebble was much easier to set up than I had assumed it would be, and isn't missing anything as far as I can tell.

ericd4• 4 years ago

Thanks for the link! I actually stopped wearing it at the end of the M&A process, because of how stressful the the M&A process was. As much as I liked the device, I started getting a bit of a negative Pavlovian reaction to the wrist buzzes, because the contents of the emails tended to be pretty stressful. I intended it to be a short digital detox, but since then, I've only worn the dumbest of dumbwatches. But maybe it's time to give it another go, it'd be great to have it help kill off my phone checking habit again. It's truly awesome that the fact that it was so open has allowed it to live past its parent company.

TaylorAlexander• 4 years ago

Oh cool! A friend worked at Pebble and I volunteered to run a Pebble hackathon in 2014 (sticker is still on my old macbook) and for my time they gave me a Pebble Time Steel and even a little wood panel sticker for the front. I knew they ceased operations but I did not know about rebble! I will have to check it out. I think I know exactly where my pebble is.

happymellon2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately only if they still work. I went through 3 of them that failed due to the screen corrupting.

jakecopp2• 4 years ago

And the battery life!! My first Pebble still had about 7 days of battery life after ~6 years of use, just unreal. I think it was rated for 10 at launch. Seeing 10% battery usually means I'm good for a day, maybe two.

I'm on my second Pebble Time Steel now - I only had to get a new one because the waterproofing failed while I was surfing!

I've had two separate instances of strangers (in Sydney) coming up to me and bumping their wrist to my wrist, because they also had a Pebble and recognised mine. Really lovely community.

ericd4• 4 years ago

Oh, that's crazy that it still lasts 7 days. I guess it's had a lot fewer cycles than a smartphone battery typically gets in that time, because of the long battery life.

And looking on eBay, used Pebbles are actually surprisingly affordable, like $20-50.

akersten• 4 years ago

I'm actually shocked that battery life wasn't mentioned at all in this article. A watch that you don't have to charge for a week+ was Pebble's #1 differentiator. No other smart watch had that feature, and (almost) no other smart watch has it today in 2022.

The super lightweight C-based runtime and eInk display combination was a genius move. But I'm not sure they realize it, even in hindsight, other than alluding to the "geeky/hacker user base." As one of those geeky hackers, I didn't buy the watch because it looked like an off-brand Casio calculator, I bought it (and came back to buy the Pebble Steel and Time 2) because I don't have to plug the damn thing in every night. And I'd buy another one today if I could.

Deganta• 4 years ago

I often hear about the great battery life of the Pebble watch, and that there is no smart watch with a comparable one. Thats kind of true, depending what one wants from their smart watch. But there actually is an alternative if you only need basic smart watch capabilites: Sport Watches. I personally only want notifications from my phone, which my Garmin Forerunner 245 can do perfectly well. And it has a battery life of up to 2 weeks, depending on how much I use the GPS of the watch.

Markoff5• 4 years ago

that's pretty horrible battery life, with original Amazfit Bip you can have easily 35-40 days battery life out of the box and even after years 20-25+ days with always readable display, always on Bluetooth, I'm now on my second one since first one fall apart, then I had short stint with OLED smart watch which lasted only few days and had problem to read it outdoors until I gave up and after few months bought used Amazfit Bip for 20USD, which serves me until now

actually main reason why not go for Pebble instead Amazfit Bip would be for me extremely short battery life (and huge bezel mentioned in article) and price, while hardly offering more useful features worth the disadvantages

m-p-35• 4 years ago

Sadly, mine last only a day now, so I switched to the "Bangle.js 2" which I ordered during the Kickstarter. I believe it's based on the SMA-Q3 but with a reverse-engineered firmware (Espruino) and apps are all JavaScript-based.

https://hackaday.io/project/175577-hackable-nrf52840-smart-w...

https://www.espruino.com/Bangle.js2

hobo_mark• 4 years ago

My Pebble 2 still has 7 days of battery life to this day :-)

I managed to procure a couple of cheap spare Pebbles over the years in case this one ever gives up the ghost but I'm unlikely to ever give the platform up so long as GadgetBridge supports it, I also wrote some software for it that I still use every day to track my working hours (it had a C SDK).

Groxx2• 4 years ago

I'm also stunned at how much better it was at connecting and staying connected to every single phone I've owned.

Every other smartwatch I've tried (a couple fitbits, fossils, etc) has been absurdly flaky. It's common for all of them to just not react to notifications for a couple hours. Or they'll connect to some wifi but not others (why wifi anyway!?? it's insane! it's SO much more complicated!). Or their apps have utterly monstrous installation and/or permissions setups (looking at you in particular, Fitbit) and any connection they use breaks randomly every few days.

If I could just get another, I'd stick with a pebble time for probably a decade. It did almost everything right.

ericd4• 4 years ago

You're right, the connection was rock solid in a way that bluetooth basically never is. And I don't know how that didn't wreck its battery life. Even my Airpods give me grief every now and then, and those are often held up as the exception to the rule that is bluetooth being crap. I think that was why I liked it so much, it was a tool I could trust to just work consistently. Tech doesn't have enough of those outside of Unix CLI tools.

I just looked them up on eBay, looks like you can get another for <$50.

I wonder if there's going to be a Pebble maintenance scene in 20 years, I wouldn't be too surprised if there was.

fra• 4 years ago

(ex Pebbler here) Pebble had - I believe - the most stable Bluetooth stack out there. This was due to two things:

1. Extremely talented Bluetooth engineers. Chris and Martijn were second to none.

2. Very good diagnostics tools built in house. When a user complained of connectivity issues, we could take a snapshot of the state of their Bluetooth stack. This gave us amazing insights into what was going wrong- more often than not we found that iOS and Android were doing something unexpected (we had lots of workarounds for their bugs). FWIW a few of us went on to start a company to build more of those hardware debug tools: Memfault (W19).

modeless2• 4 years ago

No kidding. What's even more amazing is that the Bluetooth is still that reliable today, more than 5 years after support ended, communicating with new devices with new Bluetooth chips and new OS versions. Every time I get a new phone or upgrade my version of Android I expect it to break, and somehow it never does.

stepanhruda• 4 years ago

Curious, have you owned an apple watch? I’ve had exactly zero problems with connectivity, never even occurred to me until now.

animal_spirits• 4 years ago

I loved my pebble time, but it has been absolutely infuriating that I can't manually set the date and time on the watch. I no longer have an android phone and I can't use Rebble. I would continue to use this watch if I could change the damn time but alas, another piece of waste in my life. I am going to get rid of it

jccooper• 4 years ago

At least resell it. Plenty of people out there still using them.

andrelaszlo• 4 years ago

Same. I was devastated when I broke it. I would probably still be wearing it. My modern smart watch really doesn't do much more - except perhaps keeping track of my heart rate.

workerdrone451• 4 years ago

Had to laugh that he jumped into a paid chat service, I get combining all these services into one app is a way to "solve" this problem, but no one is going to pay $10 a month for it.

Gigachad9• 4 years ago

I know I'm probably a rare user here but I pay monthly for the hosted element account which I hardly use. I consider it more like a donation to FOSS and I check back every few weeks to see how the project is going.

sn41• 4 years ago

I am not necessarily sure I agree with this analysis. Will fleshing out the long term vision necessarily win you more customers?

I just think that this was a sad case of a very good company that made a wrong guess - efficiency tools instead of sport/fitness. It does not even sound like a mistake. Maybe the size of the bet on a risky guess was too big, and that is what caused the failure.

jakecopp2• 4 years ago

For those who don't know - Eric's new company, Beeper [1], is a proprietary Matrix chat client with hosted Matrix bridges to other chat platforms. The bridges are open sourced which is a huge contribution to the Matrix ecosystem.

[1] https://www.beeper.com/

wallawe• 4 years ago

I'm pumped for Beeper but have been on the wait list 6 months now, and am wondering if they're having implementation issues.

erohead8• 4 years ago

We're working through our waitlist, talking to customers, getting feedback and iterating: https://blog.beeper.com/p/beeper-update-4-out-of-beta?s=w

donatj• 4 years ago

I've been using it and loving it for a couple months now. I honestly didn't realize it wasn't open yet.

striking3• 4 years ago

Happy customer here. I prepaid to reserve a username and the invite came through pretty shortly thereafter, but ymmv.

skinnymuch6• 4 years ago

If you pay $120 for a year, you’ll be let in relatively quickly.

aquaticsunset• 4 years ago

I'm using Beeper! The app is solid, feature set meets my needs, and overall works quite well. It's still rough around the edges in a few spots. I'm waiting for the e2e protocol to have a self hosted bridge option, but once that's rolled out I'm a happy camper.

Some smart people are running this, that's for sure.

bleachedsleet• 4 years ago

How does this compare to https://texts.com/

Anyone know?

stitched2gethr• 4 years ago

What is it that you are looking for with this comment? If you already know texts.com is there a degree of comparison you cannot glean from reading beeper.com?

striking3• 4 years ago

Beeper is based on Matrix and the bridges they use are almost all open source. It's an amazing Matrix client (including on Android and, reportedly, iOS) and that makes it pretty great at everything else. Though the Discord integration could use a bit of work still.

Texts looks entirely proprietary and the FAQ says they're working on an iOS app.

skinnymuch6• 4 years ago

Mobile app is the big one. iMessage too. Texts iMessage solution is wanting. It requires leaving messages open on the computer you have it installed on. Might be Mac only.

Texts was too buggy for me to keep using. I still think it has potential though.

grishka• 4 years ago

Is it an electron app? The 150 MB macOS download certainly suggests so, and that's unfortunate.

Cthulhu_4• 4 years ago

That's disappointing, but I guess it's the reality of today if you want a cross-platform application with full design freedom. I mean personally I think application developers should just pay for and hire development teams for native platforms, with one small team per platform you can do a lot.

But it also means compromising on your designs, I think, because I'm fairly sure it's a lot more difficult to implement a custom design on a Linux app. And Apple MacOS apps have certain design guidelines and Expectations as well.

I wonder if they could make this into more of a client-server architecture; a crossplatform server that runs as the back-end on the user's machine (or an embedded core), and a native client implemented for the specific OS. With an open protocol so that the community can build alternative clients, e.g. CLI based, or native with less bells and whistles, or more compact.

skinnymuch6• 4 years ago

I dislike electron apps a ton. But if an app is going to take over for a bunch of messaging apps, many that have bloated apps themselves, I don’t see it as a major problem.

el_dev_hell2• 4 years ago

Beeper looks pretty awesome!

Sorry to hijack the thread, but from the above link:

Yes, iMessage works even on Android, Windows and Linux!

How could this be sustainable long-term? I've hacked together tools to forward iMessage content before and it's very unappealing.

I suspect they must be using a makeshift solution. I hope it works (and would sign up if there was a way on the landing page), but this seems like building on sand.

striking3• 4 years ago

From my understanding, they use a Mac the same way you would, and they forward the messages over by sheer force of will and also money.

It works fine for me so far, though there's no out-of-the-box solution for forwarding iMessages that go to your phone number. That requires extra hackery.

seizethegdgap• 4 years ago

https://github.com/mautrix/imessage

That's the bridge Beeper uses. I've got it running on a 2011 MacBook Air on MacOS 10.13, almost zero issues.

kilroy123• 4 years ago

I've been using it for the last two months. Literally just sent a message on there a minute ago.

I'm digging it so far.

aidenn0• 4 years ago

I'm a bit surprised to not see Jabber on there; surely there's a Matrix/Jabber bridge? Or perhaps I'm the only one of their potential customers that still uses jabber...

zaik• 4 years ago

There is: https://aria-net.org/SitePages/Portal/Bridges.aspx

Matrix.org also has an XMPP implementation (see https://disroot.org/en/services/xmpp), but it was quite unreliable when I tried it.

kevincox• 4 years ago

I love the idea of paying for hosted bridges but I'm not willing to switch my main ID to one they own. (And I don't want to have two accounts because that sort of defeats the the whole point.) If they would allow accessing the bridges with an arbitrary matrix account I would have been paying months ago.

KerrAvon• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: you were always going to fail in the long run without full platform integration that you cannot have. The Apple Watch is a seamless experience and you can't replicate it. Although Google hasn't managed to produce an Android ripoff with any staying power, so maybe there's a market there.

taeric3• 4 years ago

I'm guessing that Google will seem to do everything they can to not have a coherent story here. :(

I can only guess what messenger platform they will push on their next phone.

runlevel1• 4 years ago

2015-04-24: Apple Watch release

2015-05-24: Pebble 2.0 (Pebble Time) release

One month to the day. That's some truly unfortunate timing.

erohead8• 4 years ago

Agreed. It was impossible for us to deliver an amazing notification and call experience for iOS users because Apple did not (and still doesn't) expose APIs for sending iMessage, starting calls or talking to Siri.

diego_moita3• 4 years ago

Counter counterpoint: Samsung, Fitbit, Garmin and dozens of other players are still selling smartwatches. The majority of phones in the world do not run iOS, so you can't pair a Apple watch with them.

There is a still active market for 2nd hand Pebbles. There are things you can do with a Pebble that you can't do with an Apple Watch (e.g.: use it in a barcode reader, make your own watchface, etc).

At this right moment I have a Pebble in my left hand. I don't want to use an iPhone or Apple Watch.

modeless2• 4 years ago

Still wearing my Pebble Time Round every day. The form factor is unmatched by any other smartwatch before or since. I don't think anyone else is even trying to make a watch this thin and it's a damn shame.

gigel82• 4 years ago

I liked my Microsoft Band 2 much better than my Apple Watch (it's been gathering dust for the past ~2 years, but even before than I rarely used it).

Wonder why they killed that one...

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

The tech community likes to imagine that Pebble would still be going strong if they stuck to their early product vision, but I'm not so sure that would have helped:

Sales for our version 2.0 (Pebble Time) in 2015 didn’t hit forecasts and the oversupply in inventory put us into a major cash crunch (targeted ~$100m in sales, we did $82m).

That $82m in sales is still 8X higher than their 1st kickstarter sales and 4X higher than the 2nd kickstarter. They actually did ramp up sales and sell a lot, but they built and spent as if they were going to sell even more than they actually did.

The unclear half-pivot into different spaces didn't help, but I don't see how they would have done better if they had ignored the fitness space altogether. The market for people who want lo-fidelity hackable wristwatches is going to saturate quickly.

nemothekid• 4 years ago

That's what I noticed as well. If they had targeted 50M in sales, would they still be around today? I'm not sure what to take away from this except hardware startups are hard - you can make a wildly successful product and get bankrupted because you failed at supply chain management.

bsder2• 4 years ago

The problem is that $50M in sales is only about 500K units.

That's the consumer electronics Valley of Death. You have enough units to get all the downsides of volume but not enough units to get the discounts of volume.

Electronics volume discounts really don't kick in until about 1M units. So, it looks like Pebble stretched for the 1M mark, fell short, and died.

It's honestly hard to see what they should have done instead. Scaling organically in consumer electronics from 100K to 1M is just absolute murder.

rtpg• 4 years ago

honestly my impression even at the time before the sale was that Pebble hired _loads_ of people.

I honestly think that there was an alternate universe where they slowed down, paid people "normal" salaries, really tried to not scale up... I dunno. They had a perfect spot in the market where they could rely on older tech, but every company wants to become the biggest company controlling everything all the time.

There are companies that survive without having 100% of the market share in something, or even 20%. Selling products at retail are hard and you have way thinner margins in theory. But it felt like there was a sweet spot they could have stayed in for a long time

twobitshifter2• 4 years ago

Yes, the article identified the scaling issue. Since they received minimal VC they were perfectly positioned for “organic growth”, but being part of YC, may have led them to follow the pack and try to hire their way into 10x growth. The original model was made in a garage and then they took on a large staff which burdened the company to produce a higher volume of products. They could have chased more VC money or debt to keep the lights on, but facing up against the Apple Watch behemoth isn’t such an attractive proposition.

js23• 4 years ago

Over the next few years, we sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales.

According to Wikipedia: The Apple Watch was released in April 2015 and quickly became the best-selling wearable device: 4.2 million were sold in the second quarter of fiscal 2015.

In a single quarter, Apple sold twice as many watches as Pebble did in total. Pebble was doomed once Apple entered the market to be anything but a niche product.

COGlory• 4 years ago

What's wrong with being a niche product?

HWR_143• 4 years ago

In the electronics field, a niche project means less economies of scale, a much high COGS and a higher final pricepoint.

js23• 4 years ago

Nothing, but I don't think that was the company's aspirations.

headsoup• 4 years ago

Nothing. People just expect things to be magically cheap, fast and high quality or it's somehow unviable, unless Apple (or other massive brand) do it.

I think the same people maybe don't even understand why someone might want a high quality product, and be willing to pay for it.

Gigachad9• 4 years ago

You can't be a small player with hardware when big players exist in the same category. Customers start to ask why the watch costs as much as an Apple Watch but contains an 8th of the features.

xmaayy2• 4 years ago

"Apple sells millions of iPhones, therefore Android phones (samsung, Xiaomi, etc) are doomed"

I have a Garmin watch, an apple watch, whoop, etc (not all on at the same time of course). Different people want different things, ex: apple watches should be charged daily, but the pebble could be charged weekly. That in itself is a big selling point. I'm sure there were many such differences that could make for a successful product.

darkwizard42• 4 years ago

Gotta ask… what is the whoop giving you that Garmin + TrainingPeaks or some other workout program isn’t?

I’m assuming you are training for something serious/seriously training since Apple Watch is usually sufficient for more steady state working out.

js23• 4 years ago

As you say, there are essentially only two mobile platforms today, and only one of them has really been successful extending that platform to a watch. If none of the Android device makers have been successful selling a smart watch, what hope did Pebble have?

So again, Pebble's only hope was to remain a niche product. They were never going to compete in Apple's market.

It's fine to remain a niche product, but I don't think that was Pebble's aspiration.

(I too have a Garmin watch and I gave my Apple Watch away to my sister because it didn't fit my use case. I hope you recognize that having multiple smart watches makes you not just a niche user, but a niche niche user.)

taeric3• 4 years ago

This is a bit of a difficult comparison. Apple also spent orders of magnitude more on marketing the product. Probably an order of magnitude more developing it.

Gigachad9• 4 years ago

No one is suggesting Pebble did anything wrong. But that they had been rapidly crushed by Apple and it was clear the company had no future.

wvenable4• 4 years ago

Often a competitor entering the market increases the overall market for everyone. Pebble definitely could have survived as the high-battery life minimal alternative to the Apple watch and obviously be well ahead of whatever was going on with Android watches.

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

I don't see why. There are billions of people around the world who own phones, and certainly not all of them are iPhones.

brk• 4 years ago

Interesting. I just came across an old email from Eric this morning, looking for something else in my inbox, telling me I was the first official customer. This was before the kickstarter I think, when it was announced on HN. It was a fun thing to tinker around with at the time.

glenstein• 4 years ago

Our goal is to build the best damn chat app. In the process, it’s likely that Beeper will become the underlying communication system for everyone on earth.

That's an audacious bet. I'm intrigued at what it would mean for it to become "underlying."

otachack• 4 years ago

If you're reading this, Eric, you and your team kicked ass with your product line (well, most of them) and tooling and I still tout Pebble as the best smart watch ever and it's a shame it went under.

The biggest quality it had IMO was battery life due to eInk. As a hacker I loved your tooling as well.

I'm happy I was part of your space by creating and submitting a watchface. I see tooling like Playdates latest effort and it reminds me of Pebble's.

Thanks for that sweet period of watches. Still waiting for something to do better.

erohead8• 4 years ago

Thanks for the kind note! I think there are a few Pebblers working on the playdate ;)

robinsoh4• 4 years ago

The biggest quality it had IMO was battery life due to eInk.

Pebble didn't use eInk. It used a Sharp transflective display.

Lamad123• 4 years ago

7-day charge!!! WTF, how come I never heard of this!!!

Gigachad9• 4 years ago

I had the pebble time steel which had a 10 day battery, and interestingly I felt like it was always going flat on me mid day because I'd get the charge warning away from home and forget about it causing it to go flat. While my current 1.5 day watch has never gone flat on me because I put it on the charger every night. I have a feeling this is a big part of why phones and accessories have not moved past the daily charge schedule.

TMWNN• 4 years ago

Amazfit Bip and Bip Lite (the latter is preferable unless you need standalone GPS) consistently does 22-23 days of battery life (8-10 days if you use a watch face with seconds).

leros• 4 years ago

So many $10m-100m companies kill themselves in the quest to become a $1b company.

wanderr• 4 years ago

I had the pleasure of meeting the CRO of Bento[1] last year, and one thing she said has really stuck with me. She said that guilt is an attribute she looks for in team members. It shows that you care, learn from your mistakes, and want to do better. As I've grown as a manager, I have a lot of guilt over how I (mis)managed teams in the early days, but I had never thought of the guilt itself as a positive thing before. Anyway, good on Eric for fully owning what went wrong here, and vowing to do better.

[1] https://www.trybento.co/

silveira• 4 years ago

I had Pebble and then Pebble Time. So many great memories. To this day there are things I could do in my Pebble that I can't find how to do in modern watches. Amazing community, SDK, development environment, watch faces, apps. Revolutionary product.

But then Pebble 2, Pebble Time 2, Pebble Core (!?). Why Pebble Core?

shmoe• 4 years ago

Loved my original pebble -- then the Apple Watch came along.

freeopinion2• 4 years ago

"We sold 2 million watches and did over $230m in sales."

So from 0 to 2 million in 4 years?

I was just explaining to my child that many "failures" are only failures from a strange but important angle. They might have been profitable at the time they were canceled, but they were perceived by their maker as less profitable than some other potential product. A venture might net $1m/year and be deemed a wild success. Or it might be deemed a failure if the maker thinks they could net $5m/year on a different venture using the same resources.

Gigachad9• 4 years ago

Pebble was absolutely a success in the first few years. They failed to sustain the success. Apple and Samsung had entered the markets and invested orders of magnitude more funding than Pebble had.

Pebble probably could have limped on for another 5 years but ultimately their fate had been sealed and it was best to sell and leave on a high note than to go in to decline.

02020202• 4 years ago

this is the modern world of monopolies and big money. they either buy you out or crush you. this is why progress is stalled these days so much in hw and sw world. it's just not worth it and requires way too much backing to succeed and be able to compete with these monopolies.

xorcist• 4 years ago

Say that to Fossil, Fitbit, Garmin, Suunto and a bunch of other smartwatch makers today.

Yet there still isn't any a) good looking watches with b) great battery life. There's still room for something Pebble-like.

gregoriol• 4 years ago

Selling and leaving on a high note is actually betraying users.

spiffytech• 4 years ago

Pebble probably could have limped on for another 5 years but ultimately their fate had been sealed

I agree with the point the article makes: if they'd focused in on their niche (hackers) instead of trying to go mainstream, they could have had a tidy, sustainable little business.

It only counts as limping along if you're going toe to toe with the Apple Watch for global marketshare, but there are other ways to define a successful business.

ErikVandeWater• 4 years ago

"*But our main issue was that I did a terrible job at defining our long-term vision*...

My personal vision was that Pebble would become a brain-computer interface company, with the smartwatch as the first always-on, always-worn gateway between computers and our bodies. But I rarely discussed this with the team, or even the exec team...

I never invested time in building out a structured plan to actually make the brain-computer interface our company’s vision." [emphasis was in article]

So he thinks somehow Pebble would have been better off if they focused on brain-interface technology? No one has done anything with that.

ianai6• 4 years ago

No, he wanted some wearable that people could get so much use out of that they’d use it basically 24/7.

Personally, not a bad idea. I could see this being how AR glasses “done right” eventually take off (say with tech not yet generally available at scale). Maybe if the display were retina scale in the glasses and able to be transparent or opaque as needed. It’s not a crazy idea for that to start with a watch.

mikepurvis2• 4 years ago

It's also tackling a lot of the right adjacent problems, both in terms of electromechanical constraints (miniaturization, heat, battery life), and also the usability piece, which is earning your place as their 24/7 device by being overwhelmingly useful rather than an annoyance, distraction, or addiction.

When you see how Pebble fans talk about their devices, it's not hard to imagine that enthusiasm translating into a willingness to try a BCI. Certainly there was far more trust built up there than companies like Google or Apple have ever been able to earn.

bambax• 4 years ago

Great, clear and honest write-up.

But in the end, with so many users that still loved the product, it's not completely clear why they had to sell the remaining assets instead of scaling waaay down and make watches for geeks again?

Was it financially impossible, or were they simply exhausted? It seems the market was still there (and probably still exists today).

h4waii• 4 years ago

Have a Pebble 2SE on my wrist right now. Have more in storage as spares, unfortunately the buttons on these start to disintegrate after a few years.

I was hoping something better would come along and dethrone it by the time I ran through them all or decide to replace the buttons completely, but nothing has. PineTime might do it, should order one and help move it along.

Pebble has always done exactly what I wanted out of a smartwatch with a terrific community hitting all the hackery and FOSS things.

jazzabeanie• 4 years ago

How does the PineTime stack up against the Pebble? My Pebble died years ago and I miss it a lot.

BlueTemplar9• 4 years ago

Sadly, it's not really in the same category, since it has a touchscreen and an emissive liquid crystal screen that has good visibility inside, but bad outside.

But looks like that's what we have to settle with, unless someone tries to copy Pebble and also makes an open ecosystem that doesn't consider the "Linux Phones" developers as 2nd class citizens.

fomine33• 4 years ago

Recent smart watches too much focused on healthcare/fitness, but it seems that it's the only way to upselling (with sacrificing battery life).

ianai6• 4 years ago

Wish they had a glucose monitor built into it somehow. Somehow that didn’t feel like a permanent needle into my wrist, of course…

fomine33• 4 years ago

Agree, quick harmless glucose monitor is what I'd like to try. Current metrics like heartbeat, SpO2, ECG aren't much interesting.

For health monitoring device, I'd like to have on my ankle.

mikepurvis2• 4 years ago

I'm new to the scene (got a FitBit Luxe for Christmas) and it's been pretty positive for me, but I really hate how closed off the ecosystem is. Not having more access to the data, much less the live data, is such a bummer.

Gigachad9• 4 years ago

What else would you want? Notifications and calling were pretty much solved on day one. Things like NFC payments were a nice post pebble addition but after that, extra fitness tracking is the only feature consumers desire which isn't fully being met.

tbranyen• 4 years ago

Wearing a Pebble Time right now. Works and looks great, but not 100% even with Rebble. Shame the company failed, the product was perfect for Android users.

bluSCALE4• 4 years ago

I loved my Pebble Time too. I was going to give it to my dad but when I went to fetch it, the battery had bubbled. Anyone know of a place that sells reputable battery replacement?

gnicholas4• 4 years ago

Ifixit has some guides. [1] Others commenters in past threads have said it's not quite as easy as it looks, so I haven't pulled the trigger yet. But I'll probably give it a try when the battery life is down to 3 days. Right now I'm at 4-5, depending on if I remember to enable Airplane Mode at night.

My fallback option right now is the Fossil hybrid smartwatch, which has the same basic functions and better battery life (10+ days), but is much harder to read. The screens also apparently get messed up by sun exposure...so I'm not anxious to jump on that bandwagon.

If anyone else has tips on replacing the battery, please share with the rest of us!

1: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Pebble+Steel+Battery+Replacemen...

INTPenis2• 4 years ago

I've been using a Fossil HR since it came out and I love it. Battery life is indeed 10+ days, probably depends on how often it has to show notifications.

I live in northern europe so the sun exposure does not compare to places like SF but so far so good. I never even heard of the sun exposure thing before now.

App support has progressed so I really have no complaints about it anymore.

If anything I think it's better than my old Pebble Time because it looks more like a classy watch. Oh and because it has actual hands instead of a screen to show time.

I've replaced the strap though, it broke after a while.

The app from Fossil is a hot mess but I rarely go into it.

My use case is mainly show time, show notifications, control music. I bike everywhere so it makes things more safe to have a watch and not have to fiddle with my phone. But at the same time I think charging a smartwatch every day is ludicrous.

jshier• 4 years ago

Pebble story heard second hand.

A major client executive, who was a huge Pebble fan, essentially forced us to connect the mobile apps we were doing for them (iOS, Android, and even Windows Mobile) to the Pebble. The Pebble SDK was C based, so it was rough finding experience from anyone on the existing mobile platforms. Eventually we got it bridged from the Pebble mobile app. Along the way we learned a bizarre fact about the C compiler used by the SDK: it didn't support conditional short circuiting, so there were a variety of bizarre bugs that we had to go back and find once we figured it out.

wvenable4• 4 years ago

The C compiler for the Pebble was GCC for ARM.

gnicholas4• 4 years ago

Why didn't they go back to their backers and ask if they'd be willing to pay a higher price? I would have been happy to pay 2x what I had pledged. When the Kickstarter launched I anticipated (based on how much I'd paid at Target for my Time Steel 1) that the price for the much more capable Time Steel 2 would have been significantly higher, like $350-$400.

I'd have been willing to pledge that much, and if it meant keeping the company alive I might have paid even more.

greesil• 4 years ago

Hardware is hard, if only because the revenue model is problematic unless your margins are really, really good

ellen44• 4 years ago

Thanks, it's useful!

wvenable4• 4 years ago

Pebble had an incredibly clever design for their watch apps. The watch itself had a limited processor and even more limited RAM but it could hold a few apps and those apps had a lot of capability.

Each app had both a on-watch component and an on-phone component and you could install these apps from their own app store and same app worked on both iOS and Android. They got around both the app install limitations on iOS and the cross-platform compatibility issues by making the on-phone portion run in the platform's JavaScript engine.

You could, for example, create a weather application that fetched the weather from the Internet and displayed it on the watch. The on-phone app would fetch the weather from the Internet using JavaScript code and then transmit that data to the corresponding C-based watch app. Watch apps could even have settings that were just HTML pages.

I always impressed by the cleverness and simplicity of that design.

mixedCase• 4 years ago

You merely built the best smartwatch anyone has produced to date.

Programmable, week-long battery, e-ink, ecosystem, microphone with speech to text incorporated, and pretty much defined the category...

I can only hope to see another one like it.

Gigachad9• 4 years ago

The pebble was not epaper. It just had one of those old style reflective LCDs like the gameboy. Low power usage but they look unacceptably bad to the average consumer who would rather a vibrant display with daily charging.

Xavdidtheshadow• 4 years ago

I loved my pebble(s). 2 great stories:

1. They supported 3rd party watch faces based on a file. There was a great little site that let you use a visual UI to build the file and, if done from your phone, upload it right to the watch. Once, when out at midnight beer launch, I made a custom face for the beer and won a little keychain from the brewery. My apple watch is nowhere near this functionality.

2. Once time in 2014, I ran into some Pebble engineers at an ice cream shop in Palo Alto, they spotted my watch, they bought my scoop! Fun, weird little Silicon Valley moment.

nunez3• 4 years ago

Fuck I love how raw and unpolished this was. I also LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVED my Pebble, both the original and the Time Steel. I was so sad to see them get acquihired, though happy to see some of its guts make it into the Versa line.

Also, stupid excited for Beeper. I hope they can figure out the cohesion problem without getting sued into the next millennium :D

ar7hur• 4 years ago

We started Wit.ai from Pebble's offices in 2013 in Palo Alto. We didn't know anyone in the Valley, but Eric had read our "Show HN" and kindly offered us to hang out there. We grew to a 6-people team and stayed there for 6 months -- Eric never asked us to pay $1. He helped us a lot and he also pushed us to join YC (W14). We wouldn't have made Wit.ai without him and I'll be thankful forever.

m-p-35• 4 years ago

I miss my Pebble Time Steel, the concept of a Timeline on the watch for upcoming events and weather is IMO superior to anything else out there.

I somewhat found a spiritual replacement for it with the Bangle JS 2, but the experience isn't as polished and it feels a bit slow.

twobitshifter2• 4 years ago

There’s also watchy which is more like the original. I haven’t seen it in the flesh but maybe others have experience. https://watchy.sqfmi.com/

m-p-35• 4 years ago

That thing looks T H I C C

topher200• 4 years ago

shameless self-promotion

Three ex-Pebblers went on to found Memfault(YC W19, https://memfault.com), taking what they learned about managing a fleet of IOT devices and building a suite of monitoring and OTA tools to support other hardware companies.

Answering questions like "did fleet battery life get worse with yesterday's update?" get really really hard when you start managing thousands of devices. Memfault is all about making it easier to create the next Pebble.

We're hiring! https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/memfault

RandallBrown• 4 years ago

Answering questions like "did fleet battery life get worse with yesterday's update?" get really really hard when you start managing thousands of devices.

To me that only seems like a question you could answer by managing thousands of devices. Not that it would be easy, just that you couldn't really answer that very accurately with only a handful of devices.

tyhoff• 4 years ago

It’s primarily about the number of hours. At Pebble, we’d be able to get a pretty good gauge on battery life with about 10-20 devices and about 24 hours worth of data. We recorded the battery’s percentage drop over the course of each hour, averaged all samples together, and then used that to estimate how long the battery charge would last.

This strategy is covered here: https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/device-heartbeat-metrics...

Of course it’s better with thousands of devices, but we were always surprised how accurate it was (as long as we had a few Android users in the office - it reliably got worse battery life due to worse Bluetooth performance)

aboodman• 4 years ago

I was obsessed with the idea of smartwatches in 2011-2012 and was involved in a few early efforts that, while exciting, were more complex than what I was really dreaming of.

When the pebble kickstarter launched it was so close to what I had in mind, it was pretty disheartening. It's possible I even reached out on the website to seeing about joining the team :). I can't remember.

Anyway, what an inspiring product and team. Thanks for sharing the story, and for the honesty.

teekert• 4 years ago

I cried a little when Pebble went away, never got a smartwatch again that felt as nice from a company I felt I could trust.

yobbo• 4 years ago

His conclusions seem correct, but this is how I see the general anti-pattern:

- Envision a product that seems great in fantasy and on paper, and the product category is still undefined

- Invest into realizing this product before sufficient technology is available to meet expectations

Arguably, Apple Watch is also not "good enough" to fulfil the fantasy of what a smartwatch could be, but their brand is strong enough to define the market. People want to wear something that fulfils the image of "Apple Watch", and that is enough.

A product without brand power built from cheap and premature technology will be niche, and not enough to "define the category". The valuable question is "what do people expect from our brand", rather than "what fantasy products can we imagine". Until it's realistic to build something that fulfils the expectation of an Apple product, they will not attempt it. The iPod vs mp3 players is a similar story.

Thinking that Pebble "defined a product category" is a misunderstanding of the mechanisms. The fantasy of what a smartwatch can be is obvious. The question is how to realize to the standard required to meet expectations. Understanding these expectations is the valuable insight.

Dave3of5• 4 years ago

Pebble failed because the big players seen this massive market, came in and made much better products. End of story.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

We were the first company to work on smartwatches.

A bit of history rewriting going on there...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink

simonbarker87• 4 years ago

I just released an episode of a podcast in which I was trying to remember the name of Pebble, talking about a company that was "making smart watches in like 2011/12".

Such a shame they didn't make it as it was a very cool device and company.

Jonny and Simon's Reel Tech Talk: https://share.transistor.fm/s/39e1935b

Around 15m20s for those interested (we watch a film and the talk about the tech in that film and have some fun)

odiroot• 4 years ago

Pebble Time is still my favourite smart watch ever. And mine is working without problems 7 years now. The battery life went down from ~10 days to 5-6 but still much better than any other I tried using.

Built-in compass, always-on display and physical buttons are just great.

enjikaka• 4 years ago

I really wanted a Pebble but they ceased production just as I was able to buy one back in the days. Still want one badly. All other watches suck.

Cthulhu_4• 4 years ago

I really wonder why there hasn't been a reboot or kickstarter campaigns for a successor to Pebble, especially since there has been years of development in smartphone-sized components (CPU's, batteries, displays) since then. There IS a market; the two million that bought a Pebble when it was still around, and millions more that missed out on the Pebble but would still pay money to have one now.

diego_moita3• 4 years ago

You'll find some on eBay and even Aliexpress.

fennecfoxy• 4 years ago

I still have my beloved Pebble Time Round sitting in a drawer, somewhere. I blame the Apple Watch for the downfall/unpopularity of smartwatches like Pebble.

People for some reason would rather have a $500 or more watch packed with over the top features and one day's battery life.

BlueTemplar9• 4 years ago

Apple Watch isn't really a competition - AFAIK Pebble never worked that well with iOS anyway (because of the usual iOS issues with third party hardware and software).

samlu• 4 years ago

I loved my Pebble. Had the first edition in Black with a watchface that you could only read if you knew how, used it until it broke years down the line. (The little plastic on the sides revealed the electronics, closed it with bluetac, but at some point water got in and ruined the internals) Got the Garmin Instinct Solar Tactical now, and am very happy with it. 1 month of battery life is just mindblowing to me. It also looks sleek as hell (I've got a techwearish style irl)

wngr• 4 years ago

+1 for current Garmin models. They finally fulfill the requirements my former Pebble models set.

hemmert• 4 years ago

Bring it back :-)

ajot• 4 years ago

Around this time Apple came out with the Apple Watch and we thought the smartwatch market was about to explode. So in a quest for big sales growth, we figured our 2015 strategy would need to shift focus to a broader market, away from our core early adopter market positioning.
In 2015, we had the option to narrow our focus to a smaller but more distinct market positioning. Looking back, this is one of my biggest regrets. We could have been the smartwatch for hackers but we tried to grow our volumes and market share (and failed).

I think that this is the big take here. You can define your mission to make a hacker-friendly device (or different from the status quo), and when you see Apple, Samsung, Google or whatever big brand try to get a similar product, you double down on that hacker-friendliness. They will sure get more appeal to mainstream users, but nerdy "I want a gizmo I can deal with" won't want that. The problem is surveying the real size of that nerdy market, and if it is enough to help you earn a living.

diego_moita3• 4 years ago

I have a Pebble Time in my pulse now. Have one more in a box for the day this one fails and a Pebble original in a drawer. I also keep spare batteries to fix them.

I make my own watchfaces and customized some apps to my needs: authenticator (for 2 factor authentications), skunk (with bar codes to use in place of physical cards), ...

Pebble was a brilliant product that didn't succeed. When so many horrible products succeed in this industry it is sad that being good is not enough.

refracture• 4 years ago

I loved my Time. Always on screen, awesome 8 bit color watch face, wonderful battery life.. I was pretty disappointed when fitbit decided to void all the warranties however, mine failed before the one year mark but after fitbit purchased them and shut it all down.

psychomugs• 4 years ago

My Pebble Time Round was one of my favorite gadgets, and its slow descent into a very light paperweight, due to not being able to hold a charge, broke my heart. I'm now a happy owner of an Apple Watch, but it's definitely much closer to small-computer-on-your-wrist than the watch-first design of the Time Round.

fudged71• 4 years ago

‪Watches need buttons. Pebble was the only watch that was easy to use while wearing gloves.‬

esel2k2• 4 years ago

After reading through 500 comments and myself only liking the pebble time (maybe steel for bat life) and the pebble time round, I wonder why pebble didn’t stop at two models. One for the formfactor and slim design fans and one for the general users. With that money spend all effort developing that long awaited pebble time 2 and double the price.

tikiman163• 4 years ago

I was super disappointed when pebble failed, it had so much potential and I loved where they were going with it.

Success and Failure at Pebble

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