Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

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This sounded to me like a device I might want, but the price is offputting to me. $150 is not cheap device. It's nearly 10x the used price of the smartwatch I wearing right now.

The CEO did a Reddit AMA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/1jea5cc/ama_with_er...

I am surprised by his comment there:

« Honestly 5 years seems pretty good for a $150 consumer gadget. »

So, its creator feels that a $150 watch is cheap. Huh. That is interesting.

I never owned a Pebble, but I’ve had 3 smartwatches in the last 8 years: an original Amazfit Bip which I liked a lot. It lasted 5 years, its battery life was 6 weeks when new and 4 weeks when old, it was always-on and daylight-readable, and it was about $70.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/amazfit-bip-review/

When it finally died, I replaced it with a Bip 5 last year. I didn’t like it – screen is wake-on-demand, it wasn’t sensitive enough to a wrist-flip to wake it so I had to press a button, and the battery life was down to 10 days. Higher-res screen, more colours, but no additional useful functionality to me. It cost about $80.

https://www.amazfit.com/products/amazfit-bip-5

So I sold it on for about $45, over half what I paid, and bought a used Amazfit Neo. It looks like a real watch, it was £15 used – about $20 – and it’s always-on, battery life in weeks, very visible, has a backlight, and does the essentials.

https://www.gsmarena.com/amazfit_neo_review-news-45962.php

So I’ve had three watches now and the total price of all 3 put together is about what Eric here dismisses as a consumer gadget.

Huh.

That is a potential Ratner’s moment right there.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/ratner-losses-me...

I don't think "consumer gadget" comes across particularly negatively or dismissively, and don't see this playing out at all like the Ratner's case.

Also, it seems like you might be a bit anchored to the low end of the smartwatch price spectrum from your own preferences, but I don't think it's particularly expensive among major smartwatch brands. Apple has by far the biggest market share, but I also tried to piece together how it compared to other companies with leading market share according to this chart[0]. It's a couple years out of date, but from looking at more recent data I don't think the market leaders have changed all that much. I might have made some mistakes navigating the websites of the various brands to piece together the comparison.

1) Apple - $150 is cheaper than all their models 2) Samsung - cheaper than all but one model 3) Huawei - similar to their second cheapest 4) imoo - $20 more than their cheapest model 5) amazfit - the cheaper brand you already mentioned 6) Garmin - cheaper than all their models

You're already using the cheapest smartwatch brand in those top 6 brands, so while $150 might feel expensive to you it's actually on the cheaper end of major smartwatch brands.

As a side note, this was all a bit interesting to learn about as someone dedicated to my $15 casio dumb watch.

[0]https://www.statista.com/chart/15035/worldwide-smartwatch-sh...

Interesting argument. Thanks.

It's making me re-assess what I thought were the goals of the Pebble project. Maybe it's not for me.

I felt the same way, but this thread seems to be full of people primed by Apple Watch pricing. Not sure how much that will translate to purchases in the end though, in my experience these folks are likely to leave a glowing comment and then just stick to their Apple Watches.

As someone who just wanted a low-frills smartwatch and was following repebble for that, I'm disappointed and have unsubscribed from their update emails. This thread at least pointed me towards a bunch of other good options though, so it got me there in the end.

> but this thread seems to be full of people primed by Apple Watch pricing

Pebble's fans are not in general AW owners. Instead, Pebble fans go to Garmin, Amazfit, or other watches with relatively long battery life and physical buttons. In my mind, AW pricing is irrelevant, and these other devices are the closest competitors to Pebble.

> primed by Apple Watch pricing

This is a weird take. An avg price for a normal watch is $100-$200. This is a watch with a lot more functionalities that a quartz movement, and the production run is much smaller. I think the price is very fair not taking into account the price of an Apple Watch.

> An avg price for a normal watch is $100-$200.

That depends on where you live (a $200 watch certainly wouldn't be considered "normal" where I live), but also: a normal watch has a lot more aesthetic value than this, even considering that this has good aesthetics for a smartwatch. It usually also has a significantly longer usable life, at least five times that of devices like this.

But I should have clarified in my original comment that the "primed by Apple watch pricing" was specifically referring to the people that seemed to think this was really cheap and that the price should be increased! I don't think the price here is unfair necessarily, but definitely disagree with the people who seem to think this is really underpriced.

> An avg price for a normal watch is $100-$200.

No, it really is not.

Take off a zero.

I think because this is a small batch run of watches for those who are fans of Pebble. Think of it almost like we would say an FPGA device for playing retro games, or a retro upscaler. They're usually prices quite high because they're niche items with small production runs.

These watches are for people who were fans of the original Pebble and miss it, therefore they're willing to pay a bit more to get back something that they thought they'd lost.

Yeah commodity fitness trackers with a few custom buttons would go a long way to scratch pebble itch. Make Casio F91W fitness tracker a thing.

That's my point -- such things do exist already. Amazfit is an example.

They give you the fitness-tracking functionality of a pure-play fitness band, plus they sync to your phone so you get notifications on your wrist -- answer and reject calls, read messages, reply with a thumbs-up or whatever -- and you get the fun stuff like customisable watch faces.

And they are well under $100.

It's already a product category, but many people seem unaware it exists.

Much the same as the high-end budget smartphones. I've had a couple of decent capable modern Android phones that were under $200 new. This is a thing that exists, but the folks that follow fashion don't seem to realise.

I spent years being relatively poor and in serious debt. You learn to live without luxuries, but if you're smart, you find the ways to get good stuff cheap.

A $150 smartphone can deliver 90% of the functionality of a $1000 smartphone. In the same way, a $75 smartwatch can deliver 70-80% of the functionality of a $500 watch.

And TBH, I know which I prefer. Phones and watches live hard lives, for electronics, and they are easily lost, stolen, dropped, broken, etc.

I would rather have a $200 phone in my pocket than a $1000 one, because I know the risks, and if the 4-digit-price one gets damaged or vanishes, that hurts my budget... but I can tolerate a low-3-digit loss more easily.

I agree, I'm just pointing out Pebble killer feature that later fitness band didn't adopt was just having a few extra buttons. It would be nice to have 5 buttons to do full media controls.

Bring these back on side of watches. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004293400666.html

Ahh, I see.

I don't think I've ever used any of my now 3 smartwatches to control my phone's media player. But then I mainly only listen to music on my phone when I'm on a plane.

Amazfit bip was nice, but I encountered a bug with GPS data loss too often. That is the price of the cheap Chinese product, I guess. So, when my Bip have been damaged, I decided to buy Garmin for 250€ instead. So far, it works well.

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