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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me a lot of the famous Slashdot iPod comment: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."[0]

...but, seriously, the selling point is the experience plus some fairly nice fit-and-finish. They're advertising it hard on the inclusion of a season of interesting games from notable developers in the price.

Certainly, you could pirate a whole lot of ROMs and play them on that retroid device, but that's a different appeal.

[0]: https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/Apple-releases-i...

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Let's be real... this isn't an iPod/Dropbox moment.

This is every bit as pretentious as it seems, and literally requires a high price attached to it for it's target market...

But that's ok! It's no different than a ton of other fields that thrive on a certain level of ironic pricing.

It's no different than paying $500 for foam slippers that retailed for $75 that claim to be designed as affordable footwear for the masses and intentionally look as weird as physically possible(Foam Runner)

Or spending $200 dollars on a literal clay brick: https://stockx.com/supreme-clay-brick-red.

This is like the tech version of a Supreme collab. People are even geeking out over Panic being involved in the comments here.

Ironically a lot of the people I can picture buying this also look down on that type of thing, but it's all coming from the same roots.

Yes, I very much doubt that this will be a vast consumer success like the iPod/Dropbox/etc. (Though since they've already sold through their initial run, it's probably going to be a success for Panic! at least.)

But the meat of the issue isn't related to ultimate success, it's that the famous Slashdot comment, and the grandparent here, aren't getting the point -- they're caught up in a feature list comparison, and missing the holistic element. The iPod was worse than a Nomad in the metrics people were using to compare MP3 players at the time; it was just also a better product.

Of course, telling the difference between a refined product and a pretentious flash in the pan is famously difficult. But that's the theory of why you'd buy the Playdate instead of the Retroid.

(My personal take is that it looks fun, and it wouldn't take many of those first 24 included games being decent to get it to a respectable value.)

The difference is the iPod/Dropbox people had the context and lacked vision. Here this person lacks context and has a very realistic vision.

I think it will go exactly as this person imagines. They just don't realize that, while not a success in most contexts, the level of sales and appeal this will have define a success in this specific niche

> This is every bit as pretentious as it seems, and literally requires a high price attached to it for it's target market...

I think you’re completely right and it‘s funny reading the justifications for the price and the hype. I mean, kudos to Panic for their success with the Playdate, but I have a justified reason to believe that a lot of these devices will end up in drawers after the novelty factor has worn of.

I definitely expect to see more than one getting cozy with an unboxed Funko Pop on a designer's desk in our office

If Apple advertised as little as Creative Labs did, it probably would not have done much better than the Nomad. iPods were far from perfect products, and non-iPod players were not all clunky ripoffs.

Then why not sell it cheaper and let people buy the games they actually want rather than bundling them all in the price?

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