> Dopplr’s product was ambitious, gorgeous, and by all accounts, it worked well, but it didn’t provide the magical experience the Airpods did. Almost no startup could! That “magic” is the cumulative product of decades of R&D and manufacturing expertise.<p>Nope. The "magic" of Airpods (I own a pair) is quick synced pairing. Startups like Dopplr can't provide that "magic" for iOS/Mac users because Apple doesn't enable the requisite access on their software. Dopplr, Bragi etc are better than Airpods but Apple controls many of the devices they need to interface with so they are fucked.<p>The lesson is don't design your hardware to match Apple and primarily at Apple users. They will cut the legs under you
As a HW designer I’d like to contest the title; hardware is hard. Mistakes always happen on any project, but with hardware they’re very expensive to find and fix. Test equipment like oscilloscopes and bus analyzers are in the $100k range, furthermore building your hardware will cost $100k++. Hardware is hard. Software tools are generally free and fixes only cost engineer’s salaries.<p>Not that this keeps me from thinking HW ideas, and SW is great too.
“We fucking started a hardware business! There’s nothing else to talk about. We shouldn’t have done that.”<p>What I hear in this quote is "we went into a technological field we know nothing about with the intention of making money. We shouldn't have done that".<p>Nothing wrong with going into hardware if you have experience end-to-end bringing a hardware product to market. It's just that less people have that than in the software world, and us software people get used to being able to figure out everything JIT.<p>Probably don't go into chemistry either, or algotrading, or practicing law, thinking "eh, I'll figure it out as I go".
I was part of a hardware startup for nearly a decade.<p>Most real hardware companies that I recall failed for reasons other than hardware. Which fits with the author's overarching argument.<p>When people imagine a hardware company failing, I think most imagine something going terribly wrong with prototypes, some failure in the field, manufacturing failures, overbuying, etc, etc. But I think those events are rarely fatal for real hardware companies.<p>I say "real hardware companies" because those kinds of failures are endemic with crowd funded hardware startups. And I think that's why most people assume that all hardware companies fail for those reasons, because crowd funded hardware startups get so much public attention.<p>But outside of the crowd funding bubble, my experience has been that those kinds of events are just normal bumps in the road. We were on razor thin angel funding, and we hurdled all those kinds of problems. What really kills hardware startups is what kills _any_ startup. Bad product-market fit.<p>Over the decade of my involvement with my previous hardware startup, we watched _tons_ of fellow hardware startups die. Not because they hit some manufacturing snag, or shipped a million units of explosive doorstops. Every single one died because no one wanted their product. The classic startup tale.<p>Perhaps I have a unique perspective on the whole software startup versus hardware startup thing because I'm a jack of all trades. I'm just as comfortable working software as I am hardware (and boy does that duality come in handy). So I've seen both sides from the trenches. Hardware people will tell you it's harder, because they don't know how frustrating real software development is and assume it's some kind of greener pasture. And software people will tell you it's harder, because hardware is a mystery to them.<p>I've wasted days dealing with Google Cloud's SDK issues. And I've wasted just as many days chasing a defect in a board remotely with a customer half way around the world.<p>In other words: The grass is not greener on the software side.
There's another important aspect: No, You Can’t Manufacture That Like Apple Does <a href="https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple-does-93bea02a3bbf" rel="nofollow">https://blog.bolt.io/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like-apple...</a>
Hardware is hard in ways that software will never be.<p>* The cost model is different.<p>* The hiring model is far more interdisciplinary.<p>* You can't apt-get your supply chain.<p>* There's near zero real world A/B testing.<p>* You're at the mercy of far more external factors.<p>Relative to SaaS, hardware seems Sisyphean.
I don't get their line of thinking:<p>>Do the opposite of what Apple would do<p>Count how many Chinese companies just jack into Apple lookalike market or market for goods designed along the same line of thought.<p>Take Rapoo for example, once an unremarkable company. What elevated them to the current level was a big bet of proper design. Their first red dot winning product was designed by an intern that they almost had fired for insisting on design that "does not look enough like apple".<p>I also see no surprise if a company like Jawbone gets into "last mile operational impediment" what in reality was just the usual result of company not having engineering expertise.<p>Here, I'd say lies the greatest rift in between SV style software startups that take quality compromise in code as something usual and a normal hardware company that knows that a broken product is literally simply broken with all resulting material losses
Hardware is hard imo due to:<p>1. Cost and pricing models. This is very difficult especially when you're not big enough to place larger production runs. You don't have economies of scale here. It's expensive to manufacture just a few boards at a time.<p>2. Manufacturing/supply chain points of failure.<p>3. Hardware points of failure (buggy vendor chips etc.) which could easily derail a project. Hardware isn't as malleable as software too.<p>4. Long product development times. Your first version of the product can quite easily stretch out to many months or even years. This is a huge risk from a shareholder's perspective.<p>To gain some context into hardware manufacturing, I recommend reading:<p>The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware by Andrew Bunnie Huang.
Never mind that Apple has a long running inside track with MSM, and do some serious marketing.<p>I recall being virtually unable to go a commercial break without seeing at least one iphone feature demo ad right after launch in my part of the world.<p>With Apple it is just as much about attention as it is actual products. They have managed to make the choice of phone or computer into a lifestyle signal that their competitors can only dream about.<p>Oh, and i recall the Palm CEO talking about how when they were designing the Pre they constantly ran into Apple having bought up whole factory outputs of part Palm wanted to use. End result was that Palm constantly had to go with their second best choice.
I think the competition is on par with Apple, maybe it should be titled "Copying Apple is hard". Ultimately, have been a lot of innovation by the competition long before Apple did it, like QI charging, large screen, multiple usability improvements etc.