HN user
Your opinion regarding the descriptive qualifier of this problem as an “engineering” problem, thus special (a no-true-scotsman) and exempt from all other requirements certainly isn’t based on facts. You first.
But hey, choices are choices. Feel free to make as many bad decisions as you like. How many replies have I put forward? How many obstinate retorts are there? Read them all and listen or don’t.
The tenacity of this evasive posturing is pretty tedious. I suppose the odds of some non-technical user wiping their phone or destroying it, thus losing their last working copy of the app (after Pebble’s IP is dropped from the walled-garden markets and itunes app store), combined with the need to perform a factory reset on their watch is, somehow to be regarded as a six sigma impossibility, yes?
No, it’s pretty unreasonable, and obviously a business decision.
It’s shipped in a locked state. A factory reset reverts it to that locked state. The device is rendered inoperable through a factory reset by design.
You need a remote server to reactivate this watch. If you try to reset the watch, erase your own private information, and sell it, the person that receives it will need to engage in some problem solving to reactivate it. Or they’ll demand a refund, because they don’t know what to do, to reactivate a watch that can’t validate its own existence.
Look at how the watch’s community failed to grow beyond certain limits, and how small the community remained, despite insistent proclamations that the device is well-designed. I think that speaks for itself.
No. Wrong. If I don’t want the smart bit, the device’s degradation into an ordinary version of a watch should be graceful, and without barriers or punishment.
I’m not sure why this is so hard to understand and design toward. Why would anyone buy something that bricks itself if one refuses to play the mother-may-i game?
If you’re selling me something, and you call it a “kind-of-thing” I want it to be an actual thing first and a “smart kind of thing” second.
Pebble was kind of not a thing. A little too smart for its own good.
after the initial update
Wait, how?
optional?
Unboxing it, you find there are strings attached, puppeting your actions.
That’s funny, because I’M a consumer, and I’m TELLING you that’s what I want in a smart watch. I guess I just don’t exist. Hilariously, neither does the Pebble.
Pebble was a terrible device, and riddled with horrble design decisions.
From the word “go” you knew Pebble was trying to lock you in, register and count you as a user, log demographic information about you, and tether that information to unique device identifiers.
You could not simply use Pebble as a watch, if so desired. Pebble enforced specific behaviors onto the user.
For example, you couldn’t just like the looks of the watch, buy it, take it out of the box, wear it, and use it to tell time. No.
Open the box, and the watch directs you to an internet connection, so it can phone home to the mothership. Really? Really?
To me, that reeks of exploitation, and the goal was never to provide people with a good watch that does stuff. Open the box, and push people around. Make them clap their hands and sing along.
Sorry guys. You made serious mistakes. People notice. Good riddance.