> We evaluated the risk and consulted with our privacy lawyers and legal experts, and took the approach that we thought appropriately mitigated any issues while being open and transparent and did not believe emailing directly was helpful in this case.
Seems like a pretty weak justification. "Our lawyers said we don't have to notify users."
I stopped trusting adafruit when they sent me broken boards and never replaced them. Their software side is very startupy, they love to break things, especially if it was working perfectly fine before. I have a USB to uart/SPI/i2c adafruit device that won't operate in any of those modes without changing windows drivers between them, and ontop of it requires local side circuit python and it used to just be C.
Circuit python was a huge mistake on their part. They didn't have the people to do C correctly (look at their nrf libraries), much less C and circuit python versions. Which ends up being a compatability nightmare.
So I just buy a 5 pack of esp32's or other dev boards off Amazon and be done with it. If they're broke, I get them for free. Sad to see that Amazon breaks less consumer laws than Adafruit in this case.
They refunded me a $100 purchase, no return required, when I was sent defective product. I've always found their customer service to be friendly.
> Their software side is very startupy, they love to break things, especially if it was working perfectly fine before.
This is a very odd sentence to read in the context of embedded development. Adafruit is a hardware company with makers as a target market. I find Adafruit's software to be a good bit better than most vendor software I've worked with. And when there are bugs, most of the time the bug ends up being someone else's fault. cough Espressif cough.
That's what I think a lot of business owners and managemwnt don't quite understand about lawyers. If you listened to everything your lawyers are telling you, then you would never do anything interesting (i.e. anything risky). You don't necessarily have to listen to everything a lawyer says because their incentive is to limit your risk, not necessarily to ensure your long term success, which are different things. If it means doing wrong by your customers then lawyers may tell you to do it if it means a micron less liability.
I don't know that I've ever seen rebranded Aliexpress merch on Adafruit. Boards and such are primarily their own design. Proof being ... it's all open source and the design files are on Github. There's occasionally other vendor's products there, like Pimoroni. Again, not rebranded Aliexpress. Besides boards, there's tools and such, but those have all been on brand from what I've seen. Adafruit is how I found out about the fantastic Japanese ENGINEER brand. They generally put a lot of effort into combing through suppliers and finding good quality stuff.
In general, they have reliable supply chains and manufacture everything in New York City. I have never heard of them selling counterfeit FTDI chips. I have two of their FT232H modules purchased directly through their store and they're legit.
It's bad because smaller companies can't compete. And many of these smaller companies do more for the community than Amazon does. Good luck calling Amazon for help with picking a sensor.
It's good because if you return stuff you'll save money with Amazon. Like the times I buy things outside of Amazon I'm amazed to see I can't return it, of the penalty for doing so is like 40% of the item cost.
Taking this advice, and weighting this against other factors (goodwill with customers, for example) is what a good CEO is able to navigate.
I strongly considered purchasing my Raspberry pis from them, but I was put off by high shipping cost.
I mostly buy from DigiKey. They have a very wide selection of professional stuff, and they also resell adadruit and other similar hobby stuff (I think adadruit is a great company that makes great products personally).
You're not going to find a raspberry pi anywhere except from a scalper (~2x MSRP) for at least a few months, though. See https://rpilocator.com/?country=US .
I started off with rpi, but quickly realized I preferred not having a whole OS to manage. All my projects are now using adadruit boards, mostly feather nrf52840 ($20, Bluetooth low energy, great rust or circuitpython support).