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0 pointsJakeTheAndroid7y ago0 comments

Google Glass cost like 1.5k and did nothing useful or barely did anything at all for that matter. Was durability the main promise of the phone? No, the hinge was promised to be strong and the screen was promised to be flexible. They got parts of that correct. No one was ever promised an unbreakable device for 2k, and no one should even expect such a thing from the first ever folding smartphone.

First adopters pay a high price for testing bleeding edge technology, I can't think of many cases in which that hasn't been the case. This is technology that exists no where else. They need to recoup costs from R&D to make the improvements required to produce a real product.

This is how things used to be kickstarted before we had micro-fundraising. This is why everyone talks about how tech reaches the rich first, they have the funds to test this tech before us plebs, because it costs money to develop bleeding edge stuff. What bleeding edge, physical technology comes in at a low price point comparatively to the market rate? I can't think of any off the top of my head.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

throwaway20487y ago· 3 in thread

A device that breaks within days from completely normal use is completely unacceptable for anything that costs $2k.

Nobody was asking for an unbreakable device.

JakeTheAndroidOP7y ago

The way it was phrase made me interpret it, but I understand it now as break easily. My apologies.

And yeah, it's bleeding edge technology. So long as they honor warranties and those warranties don't exclude something like this, then it's roughly what I would expect from the first gen.

It's far from ideal, but Apple launched consumer phones that bent while hanging out in your pocket which cost around the same price and wasn't some R&D project. This is clearly not meant for your everyday consumer and is priced at a point that only people that want to test this phone will pay. The testing isn't in Samsungs favor, but it's par for the course as I would expect.

dmitriid7y ago

> that bent while hanging out in your pocket

Where by "while hanging out in your pocket" you mean "applied a not inconsiderable amount of pressure to a specific area of the phone in a specific direction".

vs.

Samsung's "$2000 dollar phone fails the next day while performing its intended functions"

Oh. And of course Samsung's own phones bend in pockets as well

jplayer017y ago

HN guidelines say

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Nobody anywhere is expecting an unbreakable phone and I'm not sure why you'd want to interpret his comment as saying that.

_bxg17y ago· 1 in thread

"No one was ever promised an unbreakable device"

There's a huge difference between "unbreakable" and "half a dozen reviewers accidentally broke theirs within days".

There's also a huge difference between a developer preview and an early-adopter device. The Fold's marketing wasn't anything like that of the Glass. The latter required you to sign up as a developer to even buy one. It was also a totally new product category for developers to experiment with, not an evolutionary step forward in an existing category. Nobody's talking about exploring special apps that are only possible with the folding screen. That's all anyone ever talked about with Glass. The Fold was marketed as a consumer-facing device with a few compromises. It's planned to be sold in AT&T stores for goodness' sake.

yoz-y7y ago

Also reporting on Google Glass was not exactly positive either, to put it mildly. Mainly because it was expensive for a product with no real out of the box use case.

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