Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?
amateurphotographer.com
amateurphotographer.com
You can be more expensive if you’re better, or you can be worse if you’re cheaper, but they’re both the downsides while living purely off brand recognition.
They also blew up in a time where there wasn’t any real competition. Sony had action cameras but they were bulkier and expensive, and didn’t have the features of GoPro.
These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper.
Insta360 is a Chinese company designed in Shenzhen and built there, too.
People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place.
A similar pattern happened with drones with DJI, intentionally killing all non-Chinese drone brands. And with BambuLabs (founded by ex-DJI) with 3D printers (the only good non-Chinese printer that doesn’t cost 10-100x as much is Prusa, and they’re facing extremely strong headwinds).
Legitimately better Chinese products (incredible engineering) that have massive industrial policy support, probably industrial espionage support (as in the case of DJI for certain), massive influencer marketing campaigns, and near zero cost of capital. When China wants to deindustrialize non-Chinese industries for strategic and/or natsec reasons, they are incredibly good at it. (And note it’s not US-only, China targets basically ANY brand that isn’t Chinese. China absolutely does this to Europe as well… and you can see them doing it in real-time with automotive.)
The only surprising thing to me is how people just act like it’s not happening. I guess for people who don’t have any experience working on federal government adjacent aerospace stuff, the idea of natsec considerations for IT hardware seems entirely abstract, but it’s incredibly real if you do.
It doesn’t even have to be foreign - it can just be corrupt self interest.
What other explanation is there for attacking Venezuela and Iran?
You could ban Chinese IoT devices. Or spur local industry. But we aren’t talking about the military relying on Chinese hardware or something.
We cast aside local manufacturing for cheaper prices in another country and are going to pay the price one way or another.
They were made irrelevant by Insta360 and DJI, both with legitimately better products.
In my view, the only entity to blame for that is GoPro. And I believe that the shortfall was not only in matters of technology. My limited interactions with them painted a picture of an organisation with some super clever people, but paralysed by slow bureaucracy and high risk aversion.
By contrast, Insta360 was much more aggressive and enterprising, while DJI just did what DJI does: build amazing products.
Trying to blame this on some arcane Chinese plot to destroy the West is just a weak attempt to cope with reality: in China today there is simply much higher number of hard working, highly intelligent, highly educated people that are hungry for success then there are in the West.
One thing we forget is that the two great Chinese companies in this space (Insta and DJI) had first to compete against hundreds (thousands?) of other Chinese camera companies before they could come out on the top and compete globally.
They are not a product of a CCP plot. They are a result of a ruthlessly competitive and capable local ecosystem, itself a result of decades of consistent industrial and innovation policy.
Nothing is stopping us in the EU and US to do the same.
It seem to me that China choosing to subsidize industry it is not so different than the US choosing to subsidize Roads, Autos and OIL.
In both cases it does seem to work splendidly as intended.
Other than political inertia (or economic reasons far beyond my ability to fathom) there is nothing to stop the US from following suit.
I accept "free market" is a term of art probably from before global trade reality and could be narrowly redefined to mean whatever one wants (or wanted when it was coined) but in my ignorance I see it simply as free to choose actions and responses.
But I am far far away from opinions I am qualified to hold, think I will shut up now.
It winner takes all econony is literally based on destroying the competition as such.
Anything the federal government pumps money into tends not to do as well.
Stop crying already. US subsidizes a boatload of things.
I generally agree with your point about value extraction vs. re-investment.
The core points are:
- we can't trust a connected GoPro device any more than a connected DJI device
- Just because a device is developed in China doesn't make it a vulnerability.
- Just because a device is made in the US doesn't make it resistant to vulnerabilities.
- US politicians don't have any incentive to tell us the truth. Because of the nature of national security, they could completely lie about any accusations of Chinese involvement and we would never know, especially now that the US president fired anyone who resists his demands for fealty.
- GoPro was first to market but stopped adding value once they IPOed. US public companies depending on IP protections / rent seeking rather than cutthroat competition is the core reason DJI is beating GoPro, not Chinese government subsidies to the sector.
- China's middle and upper classes are far larger than the US's. Similarly, they are training more college grads. China also has more companies being created and more creative destruction than the US. It doesn't matter if we build a better v1.0 product because their innovation engine is moving at least as fast as ours.
- the US has had a 70 year head start on "a near zero cost of capital". Being the west's financier after WW2 and later the world's reserve currency.
The main driving force isn't anything but the simple fact that they can undercut everyone. Some of it is innovation in production methods, some of it subsidies, some of it is the low salaries, some of it is the 12hour shifts seen as normal.
Is it deserved? Sure. They let western companies unintentionally ship their entire know-how to China. Is it OK from a US perspective, does it mean that they can't do anything now, and should just source Chinese products for everything? Hell no.
Thanks for making HN as braindead as Reddit! Thanks to people like you, I'm becoming a master at translating Chinese socials!
What would the attack vector be? I’m not saying there isn’t any, I don’t know much about aerospace and this sounds interesting.
The cameras. But quite how, I don’t know.
For one, I had a GoPro whose sensor broke after about 20 minutes of recorded. I ended up getting 3 different replacements, all of which also broke. In the end I just forgot about it when my home burnt down in a wildfire. I got an Insta360 with better picture quality that's also been more reliable for a similar cost.
And I would have loved to buy a Prusa printer but I got a Bambu P1S combo for $600, an equivalent Prusa plus the $300 shipping to Canada would have been ~$2500 CAD. For making trinkets for my 3 year old son plus the few random other things I'd make it's not worth it to pay 4x the money.
Maybe it'll forever be this way due to the differences in cost of living but I do feel as though there's a million barriers to entry to building a business in North America, at least a business that's not fully online.
Neither one of those are equivalent to a P1S. They’re 2 tiers above it. Equivalent Bambu printers sell for about the same price.
I have printers from both companies. There are tradeoffs for each, but Prusa isn’t 4x more for an equivalent printer.
I did get a particularly good deal on the P1S combo apparently, the price on their website already higher than what I paid and it's significantly less in Canada than the US with exchange rate. Are they exactly equivalent, dunno, but both are the cheapest Core XY models with enclosure + colour changer that either sell.
Prusa is also cheaper in the US and EU than Canada.
They hardly have time to compete, busy as they are with foot-shooting practice.
Stuff like this: https://sensofusion.com/dronefactory/
So if we're getting spied on anyway, why not buy a better product?
If and when AI commiditizes professional services, it would be good to have modern industry to fall back on. With 3d printing the gap isnt insurmountable yet.
However, our country is run by lawyers, not engineers, so I dont have too much hope. At least a lot of our billionaires started out as engineers...
> GoPros are used all over in aerospace
Oh right, because the US has never done that ? Its public knowledge the US does supply-chain interdiction, see the infamous NSA “upgrade” factories as just one example.
The US is also just as capable of writing buggy code full of security holes as everyone else. Even more so today with the advent of "vibe code it and ship it".
It is only an attack vector if you allow it to be so, defence in depth and all that ...
> I guess for people who don’t have any experience working on federal government adjacent aerospace stuff, the idea of natsec considerations for IT hardware seems entirely abstract
But its all magically ok if its got a "designed in the USA" and/or "made in the USA" badge on it ?
The problem I see here is a desire to use COTS stuff out-of-the-box in natsec environments led by a desire to save money and/or save time. Seems to me like one of those "pick two" moments where the "security" option was thrown in the trash.
FWIW current administration wants to play this same game, but they def won’t do it as well.
I'm actually surprised to hear that GoPro is used in aerospace applications. I assumed that they would use cameras from companies like Teledyne that have a more industrial/military customer base. That is to say, there are almost certainly options for domestic camera manufacturers if required.
You are right about China. The West (especially Apple) taught China how to manufacture while losing the ability ourselves and for some reason didn't consider that they would figure out how to design products themselves and bring the entire product chain within the country.
Individuals at the end of the day mostly care about buying the cheapest thing that does the job. They don't consider where it comes from. Even those that do care have limits in how they will compromise (there is a reason why I bought Bambu Labs 3D printer even though I would have preferred a Prusa).
> When China wants to deindustrialize non-Chinese industries for strategic and/or natsec reasons, they are incredibly good at it. (And note it’s not US-only, China targets basically ANY brand that isn’t Chinese. China absolutely does this to Europe as well… and you can see them doing it in real-time with automotive.)
First, Gopros are made and assembled in China (with I think some in Mexico now to avoid tariffs). And absolutely nothing stops them from just sending potentially malicious firmware to the non-china made ones too
Second China didn't make Gopros fucking overheat, shoddy engineering did. They rested on their laurels while competition worked hard on making better product. If it was just production costs the top end GoPros would be the best in the niche, just more expensive, but no they are both more expensive and worse product.
Third, it is not "Chinese govt. doing it" (tho they are certainly helping), it is west constantly sending their tech advantage away just to get some cheap production there. Whether directly like Apple or Tesla, or indirectly, by allowing chinese capital to buy western car companies and instantly get all the tech then just apply their more integrated production to make same stuff cheaper.
West gave China their advantage willingly, for a short term profits, and continue to do so, then try to mask it as some kind of malicious push (not saying it isn't happening, just saying the western companies are complicit in it) rather than corporate greed ruining everything yet again.
The U.K. has just nationalised a steel plant which had been bought by China to stop it from being destroyed, and of course the economic right wing hate this as steel is far cheaper to import.
If that scam of a man wins the next election, it’ll be quite the show.
No. Not even close
China wants its place at the table.
With Erope and USA
People seem to think a developed China is a threat. But they are not staying in rural poverty for ever for our sake. That is not a threat.
They are not trying to "deindustrialise" anybody, just finding a place amongst equals
Wasn't that the thing like ~30 years ago? All the western companies pushing manufacturing into China for increased profit?
Capitalism and the west gave all that power away :), you deindustrialised yourselves.
If we discuss the problem of China doing industrial spying and applying subsides to destroy non-chinese companies, we should mention also that countries like Israel had been stealing tirelessly for decades every US army and US industrial secrets that they could grab. They had been caught later selling this secrets for money to third countries like Russia. And the cherry on top is that all was subsidized, but with US money this time.
Denying North Korean or Chinese people access to places with industrial secrets, while at the same time granting Israeli people free VIP access just because... "white people" (so they can sell it to Russia, and Russians can sell it later to China and NK) does not really make any sense.
In what way exactly? The camera will magically communicate to the mothership?
Sounds very similar to another US company - Garmin. They are still popular, but have been raising prices a lot every generation, because for a long time there was no real competition [1]. At this point, Garmin watches that have mapping support have an introduction price of >600 Euro. Even at that price point, zooming or panning maps is excruciatingly slow (sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to re-render) because they have used the same CPU/MCU for multiple generations while increasing screen resolution. They also haven't really innovated a lot as of recently and are moving some new functionality behind a subscription.
This has opened a large gap for Chinese competition. Now you can get a Coros Nomad that goes head-to-head with models like the Garmin Enduro for 350 Euro. They don't have full feature parity yet, but they are so rapidly adding features that they will at some point. Also, in contrast to Garmin, they seem to be using modern microcontrollers, so panning or zooming a map is insanely fast in comparison, while still having ~20 days of battery for daily use.
[1] Of the traditional competitors, Apple Watch Ultra and Galaxy Watch Ultra have gotten closer, but are nowhere near the battery life, robustness, mapping support, mapping + workout support, etc.
I just got a Garmin Instinct 3 Solar. It does mapping, and cost me about $300 US.
You're right that it's slow due to a wimpy processor. But the processor isn't because they're too lazy to innovate, but because they have something sipping tiny amounts of power so that I can get a battery life of several weeks.
As a sibling commenter said, the Instinct 3 Solar only does breadcrumb navigation, it doesn't do topographic maps on the watch (there are some Connect IQ apps that can add mapping, but you don't get good integration with workouts).
I use them all the time when cycling. I often plan a route, but when some different direction looks more interesting, I can spot check whether it leads to bike paths that will eventually merge back into my grand plan, erm, route. Or sometimes even for following the route, you want to look ahead by quickly zooming out or get a lot of detail at some complex intersection, where having a full map gives you much better orientation.
Well, except on a Garmin, my Fenix 8 is often so slow that I had to pause cycling to zoom in/out (even more complicated by not being able to do gradual zooming because it does not have a crown).
Yes, I know I can also use a bike GPS or a more generic GPSr with a large screen. I have used their gpsmap line since 2010 or so and even have the gpsmap H1. But having to always carry it around when you have a break somewhere is a drag and I always have a watch on me anyway. So I primarily use the gpsmap for geocaching and switched to using a watch for other activities.
but because they have something sipping tiny amounts of power so that I can get a battery life of several weeks
Coros watches have several weeks of battery life and fast maps. It is laziness (or margin maximization), because they could reach the same power budget by moving to a processor that is on a smaller node.
Their bike computers have a long lasting battery and are helpful for data. But wow are they frustrating. Software update regularly loses the config, the interface is just so painful (laggy touch screen or confusing buttons). The mapping is hard to follow.
Not that Strava mapping on a phone is any better. Why can’t Strava put arrows on the direction of travel?
This has been an issue across the whole Garmin product line. E.g. the Garmin eTrex 32x from 2019 still used the same CPU as the eTrex 30 from 2011. 8 years without a CPU update. And the eTrex was already had miserably slow map rendering in 2011 with maps from that year.
However, my understanding is that Coros just doesn't have an SDK. At all. So it's not really "lagging on features", it's a totally closed platform, that doesn't any have 3rd party apps at all, and will not have them, because it's impossible to write them. I don't know if it's enough of a reason to completely write them off as a competitor, but that does give me a pause. I mean, if I don't have a feature on Garmin, I can theoretically implement it myself, or even hope that somebody else did. If I don't have it on Coros, I will just have to make do.
I almost exclusively use GaiaGPS as my offroad GPS navigation app on my phone. It works perfectly fine and it has for a long time, roughly speaking 1/7th of my life.
As a motorcyclist and sailor, their hardware is second to none in terms of build quality and robustness. The ability to look down at my Zumo GPS on my motorcycle in a rain storm on a dirt road and have it respond to my wet dirty glove is a close to magic as you will get.
Then there's the watches, the Instinct range is ok but I have a button that doesn't pop back out, my wife's vivoactive suffered the well known touch failure.
However, as a UXer I will say that across all products the software interaction model sucks balls. "China" can and will produce hardware to meet a price point, its not that they can't build good products.
As soon as "China" figures out how to do good UX, the last moat western companies have will fall.
I don't know about UX, but I've had my Coros watch for a few weeks now and I didn't find it hard to understand. I think it's much easier than when I first learned to use a Fenix watch. It misses some Garmin features though that I'd really like to see like off-course rerouting. But like I said above, they have been adding features at a good pace and a drastically undercutting Garmin on price (most watches less than half the price of the closest Garmin watch).
The real competition is Apple Watch and for sport-intensive application Garmin wins because of battery and simplicity of usage in harder conditions.
Apple, Google, and Amazon could all make sense. Google would see the business as an opportunity to strengthen its existing IoT portfolio. Apple an opportunity to add to its integrated consumer electronics offering. Amazon would be more a play to improve GoPro's margins. They could easily push it with prime deals, etc.
I could also see Samsung getting in.
Regardless, expect to see more integration, AI features, etc, after acquisition.
I had a GoPro many years ago. Eventually sold it because I needed the money for other things.
Been thinking about buying a new action camera eventually.
Got any recommendations?
The one that interests me the most of the ones I’ve seen is the Insta360 X4 Air plus an underwater case for it.
I want to be able to bring my camera swimming, bicycling, hiking, etc. And I think 360 degree cameras are pretty cool. Hopefully it’s not just a gimmick that loses its appeal after a few hours.
I’m assuming it must be possible, if the resolution is good enough, to post process a portion of each overall frame into an undistorted 1080p (or better) view of the key view of the action, but a lot of people don’t do this (perhaps it’s much more difficult or time-consuming that I’m imagining, or perhaps many viewers enjoy the distorted 360 view more than I do).
Just my two cents, YMMV, etc.
If you just want to store a snapshot of the moment as it was captured, a regular camera that you pointed in the right direction is better.
I have an insta360 X5, it's neat and there's a lot of flexibility, but it does have downsides.
The app is also a pile of crap, it's crammed full of ads, social media junk I don't want, it's slow as molasses, and the size of the app is massive.
Are there any competitors on the market that also have this feature? I've looked around a few times in the past and haven't found any. Many cameras say that they have an IMU, presumably for image stabilization, but they don't seem to record or expose that data.
Man I still can’t believe how bad the rollout of the karma was. I remember at the time everyone in my professional circles was buzzing about it. Then they started literally falling out of the sky. Feel like they never recovered
4k on a gopro 13 is far far far clearer. And the stabilization is night and day. Half my hero4 videos are mostly blurry shakes and quite jarring to watch, with a bad fov. The stabilization on modern gopros is magical. The bitrate and quality is orders of magnitude better. You can now pull good quality stills from the video if you want. Hero4 can't handle anything but perfect blue sky in the middle of the day. Etc etc
Yep, something must have gone horribly wrong with QA.
Frankly, after 4k/30 and 1080p/60, there are strong diminishing returns, because most people these days watch videos on their phones in suboptimal conditions (or older desktops that may still be on 1080p), so what are they going to do with your 5k/6k video?
Sure, you can keep doing minor improvements to sensors and optics, but for a consumer it will not justify getting a new model for $500.
Also, competing with smartphone cameras which have gotten better over the years. I bet 99% of people would not be able to tell a gopro video from a phone video.
Would you mind providing a recommendation you have first hand experience with?
Such as?
I've found DJI cameras also don't discharge their batteries when sitting, my gopro 11 black is somehow always dead when I grab it even after a few weeks, but my osmo action is still at ~70% after a year.
Insta360 also has some neat offerings, but their software/app is absolutely abysmal, it's crammed full of ads and takes up several GB of space. It also requires an account login.
What makes gopro the standard in proper productions (and science etc) is that they're so hackable with the gopro labs software. With that, all the other cameras are toys in comparison for professional usage.
Gave the brand a second chance some years ago. Couldn't export my videos from the app, it always hanged. So I couldn't share footage. Apparently a common long standing problem on forums.
Woved to never buy anything from them again.
Yes, I've done the Garmin VIRB Edit thing, which is the very approach recommended by Jeff (NorCalCycling) in his tutorial videos on the subject. It feels like something out of 2005. It is incredibly labour-intensive and imprecise unless you're fortunate enough to be in relatively short criteriums where you've got the battery runtime to just record the whole race. Most real-world events and rides require one to turn the camera on and off at certain moments, which then requires _hours_ of stitching together clips and correlating them to GPS fixes from the head unit (in the FIT file), and quite imprecisely at that.
There has to be a more 2026 solution to this. All you need to do is correlate the footage to the FIT data points by timestamp, in the temporal domain.
If Garmin came out with one, it would absolutely annihilate this space. To the best of my knowledge, there is no competition that offers anything turn-key, though perhaps the best of my knowledge has not aged well and by now there is something. It's maddening.
Just don't buy DJI -- they absolutely want lock you in to their tools, parts are often not compatible even within DJI, require to create an online account, require an app (from a custom .apk on android) and in general have questionable privacy.
Of the open-source systems there's a new OpenIPC system with a most popular implementation of RunCam WifiLink 2 that supports onboard SD card recording [1] [2].
More proprietary (but still cross-compatible with others) is Walksnail Avatar V2 [3] with 32GB of internal storage.
For your case, you don't need a VRX (receiver), although you can totally give it your your buddies to see your race (with OSD) in real time. VRX can be built-in to goggles (if the same company), or as a separate module that connects to your preferred goggles over mini-HDMI, also with recording. [4] [5]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP7Ns7H9wvI&t=49s
[2] https://shop.runcam.com/action-camera-categorie/
[3] https://www.caddxfpv.com/products/walksnail-avatar-hd-kit-v2
[4] https://shop.runcam.com/runcam-wifilink-rx/
[5] https://www.caddxfpv.com/products/walksnail-avatar-fpv-vrx-o...
Judging by the paucity of software to do this, historically, it is not a straightforward problem, or all the devices involved don't generate all the data points required.
The real mess is when you have 26 clips from a long event to string together. It can easily take a day and a half to make a 3 minute montage out of that.
I did this with raw footage and a VESC speed controller dump to overlay a bunch of motor stats on a prior project, this was pre-AI and it was still only an afternoon project.
ffmpeg/image-magick do all the real heavy lifting out of the box.
Just prompting claude (probably I would start with Opus) "I would like a HUD display of the following metrics from my Fit file overlayed on these GoPro videos, and I'd like the videos stitched together (there are some gaps, I want seamless playback) it would probably do it in 30 minutes or less, and the majority of the time would probably be ffmpeg.
Video's a bit more complex no doubt, but like you say all the pieces are there, SMoP.
Been a while since I used it, but it will generate the overlays and you can sync it with your ride data (eg Strava or Apple Health in my case, but iirc it also supports Garmin Connect).
There are some capability differences between the mobile app and the Insta360 studio desktop app.
I'm pretty sure it handled multiple files, but in my case they were the chunks that the camera splits its recording into, which is a bit different than than having multiple clips as you described.
Of courses, for more advanced stuff you might want to provide the telemetry yourself (like the gopro doesn't know your wattage). But it does have much more than dji out of the box.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/10/oakley-meta-vanguard-rev...
Action cameras sound like a tough business, since most of them are built to last ages, and they need to keep the vast majority of content creators happy trying to increase image quality in a small form factor.
Anyway, I bought the Insta360 Go Ultra I had my mind on from the start, which I'm still reasonably happy with.
The Insta360 has super annoying/intrusive software that always feels like it's trying to sell me something, but it's pretty excellent in terms of actual video quality.
I copy out the footage directly using a USB-C cable (wish it had USB 3.0), and do firmware updates by just dropping the update file into the microSD card.
It's friggin' fabulous that everything is doable without having to use an app. (Also the app takes up somewhere between 1-2GB of storage on my phone, and I don't have that kind of space.)
Fyi: This is a lie, the youtubers are paid to tell you this.
Apple somehow reigns supreme still. Anyone else?
The manufacturing isn’t usually the most valuable part of the value chain. E.g., Apple makes the most money when you sell you an iPhone, not their Chinese and Indian factory suppliers and assemblers.
GoPro isn’t failing because they’re an American brand. They’re failing because they’re mismanaged and they made a bunch of product mistakes.
If you want more examples I can give them to you: Google hardware/phones, HP, Dell, Sonos, Bose, Ubiquiti, Cisco, Nvidia, Qualcomm.
Most Japanese corporations still do a lot of their design work in Japan. Sony even does manufacturing of Raspberry Pi devices in Wales.
And of course, speaking of Sony, the money maker for that console is in software, and most of Sony’s studios are in Western countries like the US and Japan. The manufacture of the console is the lowest value part of the business.
Companies that have significant manufacturing and fabrication outside of China/Taiwan: Intel, IBM, GlobalFoundries, ON Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Whisker (Litter Robot), and a very large percentage of the automotive industry.
Large appliances brands have a heavy presence in the US, Canada, and Mexico, including LG, Samsung, Whirlpool, GE appliances, Speed Queen, SubZero/Wolf/Cove, BSH Home Appliances (Bosch/Thermador), Electrolux.
KitchenAid mixers, Vitamix, Viking Range, BlueStar.
Igloo coolers, All-Clad, Lodge, Post-It notes, Darn Tough Socks…
When you have an item that is big and heavy to ship, it doesn’t primarily involve electronics fabrication work, labor time per item is relatively low, and you build it in Tennessee/Alabama, making it in the US isn’t really a cost problem.
Some have held out. Speed Queen are still made in Wisconsin. I will be looking at them when I need to replace my laundry machines, which I expect in the next couple of years.
Not their entire product lineups, but still a good chunk of them, especially for heavier and physically larger appliances. Your future speed queen might be just as American as if you had bought a cheap GE.
I don’t know where it’s made (probably not the US) but Cuisinart still makes the classic heavy AF food processor, if you’re interested in that.
As a side note, I don’t find that heavy weight or an older design/more metal parts has that much to do with quality or longevity. A lot of old stuff was heavy because material science had fewer options to work with. A motor assembly being made of cast iron doesn’t make it magically last longer. For example, my KitchenAid stand mixer is definitely the newer kind that has plastic parts inside, but it has never needed service and has been getting regular use for a decade with no degradation. Believe it or not I even have a notoriously unreliable Samsung washer and dryer from 2012 that are still going with zero maintenance. It even has a stupid touch screen and, yep, that works flawlessly.
Maybe the bar is low to consider that impressive but I think the point is that a lot of things getting cost cut has been somewhat logical. I see new buy it for life toasters on the market like the Lotus brand selling for $350. I just replaced a $40 Cuisinart garbage toaster that lasted 3 years and died. Chinese off brands built to similar quality by the same factories without the western brand name cost about $20.
So, do the math on that. The Lotus toaster has to last somewhere between 25 and 50 years to reach cost break-even compared to a cheap toaster.
The same math maths for speed queen washers and dryers. They are a great kit but they cost 4x more than a normal washer and dryer. If you conservatively estimate that a cheap washer/dryer lasts 6 years, you’re at 24 years before that speed queen breaks even.
If we are going to combat the economic reality of numbers like these then we need to start taxing disposal.
A dead toaster is a minor inconvenience. You can go without toast for quite a while. and a toaster can be replaced at any department store. You can carry it home and plug it in. Or order one online and have it at your door the next day. They are cheap enough and unimportant enough that there's no real downside to making price the dominant consideration.
A dead washing machine is a bigger deal, especially if your household has a few kids. You can't go without doing the laundry for very long. Replacing a large appliance involves scheduling a delivery and possibly installation, and maybe the schedule is already full until next week and you'll have to take a day off work to be home for that. I'll pay quite a bit extra to avoid that any more often than necessary. And that doesn't consider the value of the daily satisfaction of using well made appliances. They feel solid, they work without glitches, they are quiet, they are consistent, you don't worry about them.
Even with a toaster some of that applies. I've had toasters that were a daily annoyance to use. They burnt the toast, or toasted unevenly, sometimes randomly, or if you were making a lot of toast the subsequent batches would come out differently from the first. It's worth something to have a toaster that just reliably makes toast, the same way, every day.
One factor (mentioned at https://bsky.app/profile/rajakorman.bsky.social/post/3mqubnh... for instance) is Western distrust of the Chinese government and the regulatory barriers erected from both sides. TikTok's probably a good case study. There was a conspicuous lack of Chinese software companies having success in the Western consumer market before TikTok. Building TikTok involved creating a new product aimed at RoW which was separate from its original Chinese model, Douyin. And then after TikTok Western success was still elusive, to some extent, as the US government snatched away Bytedance's toy.
Though even beyond tech and other politically sensitive areas China's generally been pretty slow at generating RoW-consumer-facing products and brands. There's also the slightly remarkable fact that historically (and even to some extent still today) GUIs have been extremely, mysteriously hard for large companies worldwide to do well. The main exception have tended to either be called "Apple" or have dedicated themselves to copying Apple's homework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288221 .
(I am not an expert on anyhthing.)
While GoPro is made in Thailand.
America is just where their marketing teams hang out...
Largely because they've been producing in China for quite awhile. Now India too.
Apple reigns supreme because of China - and the two are inextricably linked. China would not have its high-tech manufacturing prowess if it were not for Apple. The book Apple In China [1] highlights how millions of cheap laborers and the country's engineers took the lessons of working with Apple to solidify its edge in this space in a way nobody can catch up to today.
China took the long-term greedy approach to invest in the relationship. We see the US today taking equity stakes in Intel and trying to play catchup by using elements of the same playbook. The US's advantage remains in the more "intangible" side of the process: creativity, design, new tech. In a global economy with free trade, this is all fine. But China never "westernized" itself as was expected from the increase in global trade. Now the US is back pedaling, trying to jump start its manufacturing. It will take a long time...
The book is a good page-turning read. I recommend it.
That's because America ban anything that starts to compete, like Huawei or Chinese car companies
I’ve had a few GoPros and a few GoPro 360s. I also had Roombas so you can blame me as the brand killer.
Car industry is better example, west tech export just to get cheaper prices fueled the growth of local companies that then outcompeted the west by just industrial might.
As soon as we hit deeper waters the capture button pressed itself down due the pressure and it wouldn’t come back up. That, unfortunately happened in a way that I couldn’t start a capture. Lost the entire thing, despite the camera being perfectly fine after we came back to surface.
Hated them ever since.
That said, GoPro is not the best for low light environments, and the battery is a bit temperature sensitive, both which can be an issue when diving.
I believe things eventually got sorted out for water use, but I was no longer a customer.
Was the GoPro you bought rated up to that depth or something? After a cursory look online, they're only rated down to 10m, which is about what I'd expect.
It wasn't a random object, it was a camera marketed for such environment.
Turns out it overheated 15 minutes into the drive, and corrupted all the footage from my whole ski trip.
I'm also still salty that they cancelled my favorite fast video editing software (can't remember the name).
This was 8 years ago.
I thought they were meant to be really robust and hardy but it decided not to work when I needed it and now I don't really trust them tbh. It's sort of opposite of what the brand was leading me to believe.
It's possible they are just poorly run, and they spend more in R&D than they recoup in revenue, but I strongly suspect they were set up to only be profitable if they sold millions of cameras per year as an attempt to maximize profits at that volume, without consideration of other scenarios.
The "problem" is that I don't use it that often. Most people do not need action footage regularly. It was more like a impulse/hobby buy rather than a need.
GoPro Labs works really well, https://gopro.com/en/us/info/gopro-labs
But it's a bit sad how long their expirements lives there before making it into the default firmware.
I have the same model and hate it. Damn thing overheats constantly. It has never been able to do 4K60 for more than ~twenty minutes even with a full-blast AC vent pointed directly at it. It still overheats periodically when doing 1080P60 too, but a lot less often and usually only in situations where I am also uncomfortbly warm.
More than zero overheating is unacceptable though considering I have to notice it happened, turn it back on, dismiss the warning, and restart recording. Pic from literally just today, July 18th: https://ibb.co/chPq0N8g
If you just need Good, there are dozens of no-brand options on Amazon and Ali that do 4K60fps with output that is more than sufficient for any non-professional use.
I don't have a brand recommendation off hand, because the ones I've bought have been random names, but they've all been more than enough. As a reference, I've used them for capturing footage for training machine vision systems, and some general purpose marketing videos. I'm not a "creator", so I paid no attention to editing features, clip hosting, or any of those things.
Amazon sometimes gets some hate here, but I usually just buy there because the returns process is so simple. In the random case I get a product that turned out to be deceptive advertising, I drop it at Whole Foods and have a credit before I leave the parking lot. And I have the product in hand in 48 hours at most.
I have to very strongly disagree with this sentiment. I have personally tested quite a few no-name "4K 60fps" cameras from Amazon and AliExpress. Many of them upscale from 1080 - which is fine I guess - but then in 60fps will use a crop sensor and upscale from like ~640. Even with the more recognizable SJCam and Akaso brands, unless you're paying ~$200 - you're going to get upscaling, bad color science, bad image distortion. When comparing against a GoPro 5 (first 4k 60 entry) or 8 (first with USB C) the difference is astounding.
Though perhaps this is the difference between good and great that you refer to - but for me, it's certainly worth getting a used GoPro vs any of these modern cheap alternatives.
Unfortunately current new GoPros don't improve on their existing line enough to justify paying current prices. I wish I could get a new 2018 quality GoPro knockoff for <$200
ISTR GoPro moved away from Ambarella SoCs several years ago and rolled their own, but most of the other cameras are using Amba, Novatek, etc., and certainly offer great performance for a fraction of the cost of GoPro.
However once it got a bit darker, or heavy movement, the big brands left the rest in the dust pretty much.
So yeah, do a bit of research and figure out your use-case.
What about equal-or-better-than-the-same-or-similar-GoPro?
Then they started this subscription thing and I was like, finally, they're going the SaaS way, they will make so much money, and they will be able to improve that camera that basically never seems to improve much version after version. I bought a bunch of put options, and I lost all my money, every time I put back some in the put options.
Now I have the insta360 go ultra and... I think go pro is going to die. It's just so good.
But seriously, safe to assume they meant to say calls and just accidentally wrote the wrong one.
and... -- and please correct me if I'm wrong -- got burned by it?
???
Insta360 is the company that has essentially taken over this space.
Idk if the firmware is open source, but there's a whole SDK you can use to implement stuff like that
The harder path is not being a shit CEO.
Memory is the acute issue causing their struggles; their most recent quarter saw a gross margin of 4.5% (that's revenue minus the direct cost of producing the cameras, divided by the revenue). That's a hefty fall from their previous margin of ~31%. This contributed to their operating loss of $57M in the last 3 months.
Thag being said, they haven't had a positive quarterly operating income since the last quarter of 2022, even when the margin was higher than 4.5%. So it's not like they were succeeding before the memory crunch, just losing money slower.
I bought model 9 and since beginning it overheats, randomly stops recording or just shuts down. There were promises to fix this with firmware updates - didn't happen.
The first surprise was just shoddy electrical engineering: unlike any camera from a big-name manufacturer, they drain the batteries in storage, to the point where they're dead after 2-3 weeks. But that aside, image quality is just poor for the price. It's oversharpened and oversaturated to cover up deficiencies, and that may work for some YouTube videos, but it's a $400 device that's miles behind any $500 mirrorless.
So I get it that if really want to go snorkeling or mountain biking with a camera, this might be a good choice, but that's a tiny market, and for everything else, why would you buy it? If you want cell phone quality video, you can use your cell phone. If you want professional quality, you can spend the same amount of money on a mirrorless from Canon, Panasonic, Sony, or whatever.
And that's why GoPro is dying: they are selling a premium product in a market of disposables.
You buy a GoPro to mount onto a dirt bike, or on your helmet during caving, or on a chest harness during a skydive, or on the front of your surfboard: all activities where a smartphone or a mirrorless would die on their first use.
GoPro isn't failing because the concept is wrong - the market is massive. GoPro is failing because its competitors started releasing clones which are both better and cheaper. They are the expensive premium brand in a market where buyers expect their product will need to be replaced when it inevitably can't handle the abuse anymore.
The reality is that even in "action" situations - the situations where normal people want to capture memories of hiking, biking, boating, etc - normal cameras, including cell phones, are usually more than enough and GoPro somehow managers to be worse.
I don't think people are cross-shopping action cameras and mirrorless cameras. Either you want a wearable light-weight shockproof, waterproof camera or not.
Worth pointing out that your experience is with a model from a decade ago. The current Hero model is the 13.
Most companies just sponsor a team or something, but Red Bull has paid for the baseline infrastructure of many sports.
They don't have the type of insane cashflow that RedBull does to sponsor tons of athletes and weird events, but their video contests are kind of a big deal in the action sports community.
AKA, their Line of the Winter[1] competition for skiing, or their Best Line conest for MTB[2] that they used to run. And they're the title sponsor for the GoPro Mountain Games[3].
They're still THE action sports cameara carried in a lot of outdoor equipment stores, but the Insta360 has really dominated social media recently, and their products are currently a better value for cost/performance.
[1] https://gopro.com/en/us/awards/line-of-the-winter [2] https://www.pinkbike.com/news/enter-the-gopro-of-the-world-b... [3] https://mountaingames.com/
Redbulls gross margins are probably 90%. It’s basically just water, sugar, and caffeine sold for $3.
You can do a lot of great promotions if the cost of your product is a rounding error.
Gopro has this cool reliable aura around them. How could they he struggling? So bizarre
As a long-time GoPro owner who recently added an Insta360 X5 to his collection, I can't really see any meaningful difference in software horribleness. They are both really really bad, with ads everywhere constantly pushing subscriptions to their cloud services.
At least with the normal cameras the software can be entirely ignored, I can take video from my Hero5 straight in to any ordinary NLE and go from there, but the 360 camera requires their software to convert from the native format to anything usable, even if I'm keeping it as 360 footage.
The worst part IMO for both is that they prioritize mobile apps over their PC software so if you want to edit on a computer like a normal reasonable person you lose features compared to idiotically doing things on a phone.
They are just not as good. I bought GoPro10 ~5 years ago and it constantly overheats. Very unreliable. It was the first and last time I bought GoPro.
On top of that, when GoPro first launched mobile phones generally did not have cameras capable of producing production-quality images, and especially video. 20 years later, the game is much different.
Remember the Flip video camera that was all the rage for like 2 years and then just disappeared when cellphones could shoot video? GoPro is like a rugged Flip, so it took a little longer for the world to catch up to them, but now there are lots of options, and a "cheap" sports camera that is 1/4 the price of a GoPro is good enough, even if it only lasts 1/2 as long.
Giving billions of free money to shareholders of Intel & friends is going to do absolutely nothing to change the tide. Want domestic manufacturing? Invest in building a JLCPCB alternative: automated to the fullest extent possible in order to save fractions of a cent on ops, then operated on a razor-thin margin but making up for it in volume.
Chinese people aren't the lazy dumb manual workers we have long pretended they are. After we have freely given them all of our engineering knowledge with outsourcing, they are now beating us on the free market. If we don't internalize this, stop with the silly competition-destroying tariffs, and try to compete again, we are doomed to slide into irrelevancy - and we've got only ourselves to blame.
The same thing is happening to BMW, Toyota,Mercedes...
Very good marketing I would say.
Attached Example (you will find many such videos on Social Media)
I will say the Insta 360 Go 3S is an amazing camera physically it's so small and convenient. They could improve the algo when you pan over a pavement that conglomerate pattern looks sickening when you pan.
GoPro will be fine. They just won't be the go-to for every YouTuber any longer.
Heck in youtube videos you'll occasionally hear "for some reason my gopro is really hot and smells like burning plastic".
Happens to every big brand, really.
typical story. first move out production, loose core competency, let competitors copy it with own brands in own jurisdictions, and shut down business.
Western manufacturing can't compete with a Shenzhen. Our supply lines suck, our labour is too expensive for any kind of manual work, and we didn't bother to invest in automation as decades of outsourcing made our manufacturers focus on low-volume high-margin products.
No need to steal when our own companies willingly export core competency for a few cents of shareholder value!
You are a country. You have to decide on your country’s economic model before starting the game. Choose:
- a free market economy. Companies are unhindered by the state to make their own decisions to maximize shareholder value. Decisions therefore lean towards short term profit margins rather than long term success. Influence of the state via elected politicians on a short term is expensive but effective to ensure you are unhindered by regulation. Success here is not aligned with the long term success of the state.
- a quasi free market where there is partial state ownership and control, but also supports free market principles to encourage private investment. The state will heavily subsidize your economy and decisions can be made to prioritize long term global success rather than short term shareholder value.
- a state controlled and state owned economy. All decisions are made by committee. There are no shareholders apart from the state. Success benefits all within the state. Failure also tied directly to the state. Long term goals are preference over short term goals.
Choose carefully. Once your have made your decision the costs to change it are extremely high and will result in societal and economic collapse.
Same with surfers, or people who race cars etc. Having a physically small camera, with robust mounting and stabilization is not something a phone in a gimbal or a "real camera" can provide.