[Aurornis]

There are tons of successful hardware startups in recent history.

You just don't hear about them because they're not selling to you. They make business, commercial, and industrial hardware.

Consumer hardware is very hard because consumers are extremely demanding of hardware. Just look at how difficult it is to convince people to spend even $5-10 on useful software or sign up for a $100/year SaaS product with near zero marginal cost per customer. Consumers are really hard to please and consumer price points are difficult to serve.

[paxys]

In just a few years around 2007-2012 we got Oculus, Nest, Ring, Blink, Fitbit, Beats, Oura, Square, Pebble, Tile, Dropcam, SmartThings, Makerbot, Neato, Raspberry Pi... All pure consumer hardware startups with popular products and successful exits. So it's not like the category is somehow fundamentally not viable. It just needs VCs and consumers to both shift from the smartphone-only mindset and start taking some risks.