Hacker News Reader

If it had a button on the lid, it would just be another FM radio - not really a market that a small hardware company want to be in. The statement this radio makes by being untunable is literally the only reason anyone buys it.

View on HN

Exactly - we never wanted to compete with the rest of the home audio industry!

But it is tunable which breaks the whole 'statement' for me.

That's fair, but if I were to guess I'd say only 5% of our customers are even aware that the radio is re-tunable. It's not a secret by any means, but we don't really promote it and even if you did once know about it you could easily forget that it's an option at all.

I really like this. The fact that it's re-tunable makes this reusable for people who would otherwise have to buy a replacement and throw this one away.

We recently moved house and had to return our radio, even just to stay on the same station (they broadcast on slightly different local frequencies across the country to overcome local noise).

I'm seriously considering buying one of these but wouldn't be if it wasn't reprogrammable; I'm not into throw-away electronics because of the environmental impact.

But it is tunable which breaks the whole 'statement' for me.

It's more "hackable" than "tunable."

If it was a "tunable radio," then the tuning mechanism would be exposed to the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com