Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by siddharthdeswal 3087 days ago
It's good this happened, else we'd have another Juicero on our hands.

Ridiculous price, beautifully over engineered product, a slight update to a centuries old problem, but at least they didn't get the opportunity to burn up as much investor money as Juicero.

1 comments

That said, most people use locks multiple times a day (and keep keys with us at all times), whereas we rarely drink juice. Juicero was a high cost solution for a relatively uncommon use case. This appears to be a high cost solution for a common one. It's possible that it was overpriced, but the idea of paying $600+ for a phone would have seemed nuts years ago as well.

It's easy to say something has a ridiculous price, but there are plenty of products that have launched with a high price and 1) redefined a category as something where premium is worth paying for, and 2) used a premium first product to pay for development of a cheaper model afterwards.

Nobody pays $600 for a phone. They pay $600 for a portable computer with a touch screen and multiple types of radio attached.
Agreed, building a high cost high value brand, and then moving downmarket is known to work.

I compared this to Juicero because the "degree of innovation" in their product doesn't seem to justify the 20x price premium [1].

To compare, a cheap Nokia is ~INR 4000, a OnePlus 5 is ~INR 30000 and an iPhone 7 is ~INR 45000.

However, there's a world of difference in features, components, software in the 10x phones.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00EZYA61K/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?ie=...

> and keep keys with us at all times

Except this lock also has a key. It's the $1000 smartphone you carry everywhere. That is prone to running out of charge, getting stolen, getting broken, not being in range of a signal, etc. The whole idea was bullshit from the get-go.

> The whole idea was bullshit from the get-go.

The market says otherwise - Amazon is all over this at the moment, so is Nest.