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Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

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Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#41

Post by mortenjorck »

s73ver_ wrote: post #36
Analemma_ wrote: post #2

Trying to break in to the high end of the smartphone market as a newcomer is a mistake. That's Apple and Samsung's territory, and they have the muscle to fight you intensely for it. The Chinese manufacturers have the better idea: start with cheap phones, build a user base, and move up. In particular, the camera is the ace in the hole that the established players have. People spending $700 on a phone expect a top-notc…

Isn't that what Tesla did, though?

Hypothetical car analogies are imprecise enough already.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#42

Post by foobaw »

I have higher hopes for their next phone. This first edition was way too basic for my taste. It also showed a lack of experience in dealing with camera.

With the funding they have, I'd rather have them do some sort of acqui-hire over an OEM rather than just hiring a bunch of MBA / former Google employees. They should realize that making a good phone requires years of experience by now.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#43

Post by revmoo »

dmix wrote: post #33
jakef wrote: post #14

Who would buy this thing? The phone doesn't look to be anything special, the name makes it sound low-end, there's zero brand recognition. The magnetic wireless accessory thing is irrelevant to vast majority of consumers, especially since Bluetooth has already solved that problem and works with any device. I can't imagine a scenario where someone is looking to buy a phone in the ~$700 range and chooses this.

> there's zero brand recognition Really? I was going to take the opposite perspective and say celebrity and name recognition goes a long way, irrespective of actual success... I always hear the "Essential" brand name brought up now whenever Apple, Samsung, etc are mentioned. Even in the non-tech news sites. Which is funny to consider given their sales count.

Nice try, Essential marketing director

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#44

Post by gue5t »

alexblumel wrote: post #26
gue5t wrote: post #11

The Essential phone does nothing fundamentally new. The Librem 5, on the other hand, will if it gets crowdfunded: it'll be the first phone to not lock its users into the shitty app store paradigm where you rely on the manufacturer for a max of 2-3 years of support/security-updates while renting siloed closed-source programs that sell your usage data and show you ads. The Librem 5 will run regular Linux that keeps wor…

Jesus Christ, HN and the creators of this (ugly, toy-like)phone seem to never get basic, rudimentary supply and demand in action that anybody running a business should already understand. People don't care about being tracked and they certainly don't care about running some obscure Linux distro on their damn phone. A million people showing dislike on how the market works won't magically change how it works. People bu…

I'm demand, trying to find and coordinate with other demand for the same product in order to ensure that there is a supply. Please don't treat economics as normative when it is, at best, a descriptive science. Please don't shit on me for trying to find other people who have the same ideals and want to see them become reality. It's really discouraging and runs counter to the "anything is possible" spirit of hacking.

There are specific reasons the Ouya and FxOS didn't make sense: an open game-console is already rather quixotic when all the games people want to play are closed-source and open non-games devices exist. FxOS was based on web technologies (huge mistake, given that they're garbage and inefficient), targetted at "emerging markets" (read: poor people, who for some reason are assumed to care less about their phones being slow and not having app compatibility?), and didn't make driver promises. If they had at least gotten calls to happen on a mainline kernel once I would have been convinced, but the real goal of FxOS was market share, not advancing user freedom (where hardware support, not userspace/apps, is the bottleneck). I don't know much about OpenSolaris.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#45

Post by Synaesthesia »

allenbrunson wrote: post #25
khazhoux wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palm got upended because their product was not actually that great. It solved a need, for sure, but the core quality was not there. What is iPhone bad at? Where's the entry point for a disruptor?

> What is iPhone bad at? ecosystem lock-in, not allowing un-vetted apps to run, walled-garden approach to everything. based on comments i see here, some people are mad enough about this to avoid iPhones altogether. that's where i'd start, if i were trying to launch a smartphone platform today.

One can basically level the same charges against Android, and indeed the entire tech industry for having closed source chips, firmware, baseband etc. It’s unfortunate that we’re all so beholden to corporate behemoths and that we don’t have a totally, top-to-bottom free, open and democratic hardware&software in technology.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#46

Post by majormajor »

s73ver_ wrote: post #36
Analemma_ wrote: post #2

Trying to break in to the high end of the smartphone market as a newcomer is a mistake. That's Apple and Samsung's territory, and they have the muscle to fight you intensely for it. The Chinese manufacturers have the better idea: start with cheap phones, build a user base, and move up. In particular, the camera is the ace in the hole that the established players have. People spending $700 on a phone expect a top-notc…

Isn't that what Tesla did, though?

No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla. This is more what Faraday Future was trying to do - be late to the game and copy, maybe change a few details to try to marginally improve it.

What Tesla did is more like what Apple did - massively expand the "smart phone" segment in the first place.

If you compare the Essential phone to a V30, S8, or Pixel, there's nothing anything near the difference of comparing an iPhone to a Nokia N95. Something that is so compelling it makes you not care about the other things the iPhone doesn't have that the Nokia does, like GPS and 3G. Similarly the Model S vs a 7 series: one has more bells and whistles, one is a fundamentally different product that a lot of people not very interested in the old option find much more compelling.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#47

Post by gue5t »

imustbeevil wrote: post #35
lawrenceyan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever heard of the concept of niche targeting? I definitely recommend checking it out if you haven't. :)

Niche targeting is how you end up selling 5,000 phones.

With ~1000 more preorders the Librem 5 will be fully funded.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#48

Post by celticninja »

jakef wrote: post #14

Who would buy this thing? The phone doesn't look to be anything special, the name makes it sound low-end, there's zero brand recognition. The magnetic wireless accessory thing is irrelevant to vast majority of consumers, especially since Bluetooth has already solved that problem and works with any device. I can't imagine a scenario where someone is looking to buy a phone in the ~$700 range and chooses this.

Plus as a modular phone it is incredibly difficult to repair so it fails its main purpose as far as I can tell.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#49

Post by Synaesthesia »

alexblumel wrote: post #26
gue5t wrote: post #11

The Essential phone does nothing fundamentally new. The Librem 5, on the other hand, will if it gets crowdfunded: it'll be the first phone to not lock its users into the shitty app store paradigm where you rely on the manufacturer for a max of 2-3 years of support/security-updates while renting siloed closed-source programs that sell your usage data and show you ads. The Librem 5 will run regular Linux that keeps wor…

Jesus Christ, HN and the creators of this (ugly, toy-like)phone seem to never get basic, rudimentary supply and demand in action that anybody running a business should already understand. People don't care about being tracked and they certainly don't care about running some obscure Linux distro on their damn phone. A million people showing dislike on how the market works won't magically change how it works. People bu…

Sure that’s what marketing has taught us to desire but if people were educated about freedoms, rights and scary things like PRISM which we can do nothing about, I think this could be a promising start.

Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch

#50

Post by as1mov »

alexblumel wrote: post #26
gue5t wrote: post #11

The Essential phone does nothing fundamentally new. The Librem 5, on the other hand, will if it gets crowdfunded: it'll be the first phone to not lock its users into the shitty app store paradigm where you rely on the manufacturer for a max of 2-3 years of support/security-updates while renting siloed closed-source programs that sell your usage data and show you ads. The Librem 5 will run regular Linux that keeps wor…

Jesus Christ, HN and the creators of this (ugly, toy-like)phone seem to never get basic, rudimentary supply and demand in action that anybody running a business should already understand. People don't care about being tracked and they certainly don't care about running some obscure Linux distro on their damn phone. A million people showing dislike on how the market works won't magically change how it works. People bu…

It's a niche phone, meant for a specific demographic. Not everything has to appeal to the lowest common denominator to be a success.
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