#nextthingco — Public Fediverse posts

Thinking about #NextThingCo (makers of the #CHIP and #PocketCHIP) and how they could've had a real good thing going if they didn't make a few mistakes.

1. They were aiming for *too* low of a price point IMO. They clearly wanted the sub-$10 price point, but they made the CHIP a $11 computer instead of a $9 one then perhaps it would've been less of a mess hardware-wise (e.g. maybe it could've just had a more reasonable SoC and eMMC instead of some bootleg chinesium SoC with onboard flash that has with zero upstream Kernel support and is very difficult to work with when externally reflashing) . Similarly for the PocketCHIP (a speaker and a better keyboard would've been wonderful)

2. They were trying to sell rather niche things that may sell 10,000 units (if they're being optimistic), which is a lot but well short of really real mass production, and yet they wanted to sell it for a price you can only get with massive economies of scale. Like, the PocketCHIP had injection molded parts, which is a crazy expense. I remember c. 2015 when Raspberry Pi started making official cases (this was the 3b+ era), and they made a blog post about how cool it was that they could finally afford injection molds to make an official case—and this is a company that had massive worldwide cachet, the same year they had also become the best-selling British computer company in history (surpassing the ZX Spectrum)

3. They had a Panic/Playdate situation where they clearly had no clue about the realities of scaling up production and ended up really irritating many people that made early preorders, but unlike Panic they weren't very open about the delays and problems (and I'd say Panic wasn't very open either, but at least they said anything at all)

Thinking about #NextThingCo (makers of the #CHIP and #PocketCHIP) and how they could've had a real good thing going if they didn't make a few mistakes.

1. They were aiming for *too* low of a price point IMO. They clearly wanted the sub-$10 price point, but they made the CHIP a $11 computer instead of a $9 one then perhaps it would've been less of a mess hardware-wise (e.g. maybe it could've just had a more reasonable SoC and eMMC instead of some bootleg chinesium SoC with onboard flash that has with zero upstream Kernel support and is very difficult to work with when externally reflashing) . Similarly for the PocketCHIP (a speaker and a better keyboard would've been wonderful)

2. They were trying to sell rather niche things that may sell 10,000 units (if they're being optimistic), which is a lot but well short of really real mass production, and yet they wanted to sell it for a price you can only get with massive economies of scale. Like, the PocketCHIP had injection molded parts, which is a crazy expense. I remember c. 2015 when Raspberry Pi started making official cases (this was the 3b+ era), and they made a blog post about how cool it was that they could finally afford injection molds to make an official case—and this is a company that had massive worldwide cachet, the same year they had also become the best-selling British computer company in history (surpassing the ZX Spectrum)

3. They had a Panic/Playdate situation where they clearly had no clue about the realities of scaling up production and ended up really irritating many people that made early preorders, but unlike Panic they weren't very open about the delays and problems (and I'd say Panic wasn't very open either, but at least they said anything at all)

Thinking about #NextThingCo (makers of the #CHIP and #PocketCHIP) and how they could've had a real good thing going if they didn't make a few mistakes.

1. They were aiming for *too* low of a price point IMO. They clearly wanted the sub-$10 price point, but they made the CHIP a $11 computer instead of a $9 one then perhaps it would've been less of a mess hardware-wise (e.g. maybe it could've just had a more reasonable SoC and eMMC instead of some bootleg chinesium SoC with onboard flash that has with zero upstream Kernel support and is very difficult to work with when externally reflashing) . Similarly for the PocketCHIP (a speaker and a better keyboard would've been wonderful)

2. They were trying to sell rather niche things that may sell 10,000 units (if they're being optimistic), which is a lot but well short of really real mass production, and yet they wanted to sell it for a price you can only get with massive economies of scale. Like, the PocketCHIP had injection molded parts, which is a crazy expense. I remember c. 2015 when Raspberry Pi started making official cases (this was the 3b+ era), and they made a blog post about how cool it was that they could finally afford injection molds to make an official case—and this is a company that had massive worldwide cachet, the same year they had also become the best-selling British computer company in history (surpassing the ZX Spectrum)

3. They had a Panic/Playdate situation where they clearly had no clue about the realities of scaling up production and ended up really irritating many people that made early preorders, but unlike Panic they weren't very open about the delays and problems (and I'd say Panic wasn't very open either, but at least they said anything at all)

Thinking about #NextThingCo (makers of the #CHIP and #PocketCHIP) and how they could've had a real good thing going if they didn't make a few mistakes.

1. They were aiming for *too* low of a price point IMO. They clearly wanted the sub-$10 price point, but they made the CHIP a $11 computer instead of a $9 one then perhaps it would've been less of a mess hardware-wise (e.g. maybe it could've just had a more reasonable SoC and eMMC instead of some bootleg chinesium SoC with onboard flash that has with zero upstream Kernel support and is very difficult to work with when externally reflashing) . Similarly for the PocketCHIP (a speaker and a better keyboard would've been wonderful)

2. They were trying to sell rather niche things that may sell 10,000 units (if they're being optimistic), which is a lot but well short of really real mass production, and yet they wanted to sell it for a price you can only get with massive economies of scale. Like, the PocketCHIP had injection molded parts, which is a crazy expense. I remember c. 2015 when Raspberry Pi started making official cases (this was the 3b+ era), and they made a blog post about how cool it was that they could finally afford injection molds to make an official case—and this is a company that had massive worldwide cachet, the same year they had also become the best-selling British computer company in history (surpassing the ZX Spectrum)

3. They had a Panic/Playdate situation where they clearly had no clue about the realities of scaling up production and ended up really irritating many people that made early preorders, but unlike Panic they weren't very open about the delays and problems (and I'd say Panic wasn't very open either, but at least they said anything at all)

Thinking about #NextThingCo (makers of the #CHIP and #PocketCHIP) and how they could've had a real good thing going if they didn't make a few mistakes.

1. They were aiming for *too* low of a price point IMO. They clearly wanted the sub-$10 price point, but they made the CHIP a $11 computer instead of a $9 one then perhaps it would've been less of a mess hardware-wise (e.g. maybe it could've just had a more reasonable SoC and eMMC instead of some bootleg chinesium SoC with onboard flash that has with zero upstream Kernel support and is very difficult to work with when externally reflashing) . Similarly for the PocketCHIP (a speaker and a better keyboard would've been wonderful)

2. They were trying to sell rather niche things that may sell 10,000 units (if they're being optimistic), which is a lot but well short of really real mass production, and yet they wanted to sell it for a price you can only get with massive economies of scale. Like, the PocketCHIP had injection molded parts, which is a crazy expense. I remember c. 2015 when Raspberry Pi started making official cases (this was the 3b+ era), and they made a blog post about how cool it was that they could finally afford injection molds to make an official case—and this is a company that had massive worldwide cachet, the same year they had also become the best-selling British computer company in history (surpassing the ZX Spectrum)

3. They had a Panic/Playdate situation where they clearly had no clue about the realities of scaling up production and ended up really irritating many people that made early preorders, but unlike Panic they weren't very open about the delays and problems (and I'd say Panic wasn't very open either, but at least they said anything at all)