In my phone I want a good camera and a reasonable price. The Essential misses on both.
(they say a software update will improve the camera, we'll see)
Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
81–90 of 101 posts
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 differe…
"No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla." But high end luxury cars were a thing. Tesla wasn't competing with just electric cars, they were competing with all cars.
Tesla would have gone precisely nowhere with a mass market luxury gas burner. Established brands had that market pretty much locked up and beating them on quality when starting from scratch is basically impossible.
Small players in this market have to go to the ultra-niche extremes where you sell like 20 cars a year for millions of dollars per and usually still lose money.
The electric drive was the killer feature on the Tesla. Without it the car has no reason to exist.
Also, by luxury car standards the interior of a Tesla is absolutely subpar. They were competing against cars with handcrafted mahogany dashboards and precision stitched leather seats where people will spend hours and days fine tuning the static and moving resistance on the heater control knob to get it just perfect.
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#83The 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…
>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 buy fast, sexy, bleeding edge smartphones with GREAT CAMERAS (not surprised the whole website decided to omit this, it's probably terrible). Companies that make these phones thrive (see: Apple, Samsung, etc. ) while companies that focus on things only a handful of programmers like (for free)wither away into obscurity, see: the Ouya, Firefox OS, opensolaris, etc.
The demand side is high enough. The kickstarter already reached 800k USD which is 50% of their funding goal. Remember they are using off the shelf components that have already benefited from economies of scale. Selling a few thousand units is enough for them to turn a profit. If they tried to compete with high end phones like the essential phone does then their needed budget would instantly increase by two or three orders of magnitude but the demand wouldn't increase by the same amount because there are already successful competitors.
I don't really know why you think everything needs to be the best and "disrupt" everything else to be profitable. It's basic economics.
$600 * x (variable revenue) = $1000000 (estimated fixed costs for R&D) + $200 * x (variable costs for components & assembly) | - $200 * x
$400 * x = $1000000 | / $400 x (variable revenue) = 2500
So I estimate they only need to sell 2500 units or capture 0.00016% of the market. It might be hard but it's certainly doable.
By the way the phone can be plugged into a monitor and keyboard to act as a full linux desktop. That sounds interesting to me even if it didn't focus on privacy and freedom.
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#84This is going to be a great budget phone when it's getting cleared out on various sites for $3-400 early to mid next year. At $700 it just can't compete, especially with a mediocre camera, but once it drops under $500 then it'll be a lot cooler than most of the stuff in that price range.
I tried one out, and it's not a hunk of junk in any way... it just doesn't do anything to wow you at that price besides the screen. And it screams "brand that will push one big update if that then quit making phones"
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You listed the exact same thing 3 times. And yeah, some people care about this, but most users don't. A new entrant to the market that uses this as the defining distinguishing feature isn't going to succeed.
> You listed the exact same thing 3 times.
nope, not at all true, and i already covered many of the details over here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15350080
> A new entrant to the market that uses this as the defining distinguishing feature isn't going to succeed.
when the iphone came out, the critics said it was nothing new: not the first phone with a touch screen, not the first phone that could play music, not the first phone that allowed you to browse the web, etc. all true. and also, way too expensive. the people at blackberry watched steve jobs' original keynote and declared that it wasn't even possible! and yet the iphone succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
there is always a market for doing things that seem to have been done before, but getting the details exactly right, for a certain set of users. i think allowing a whole ecosystem to blossom around a phone, provided by many different companies instead of just apple, done with exactly the right amount of curation, is just such an idea.
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#86The 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…
I would but I can't tell if it makes phone calls or not. They only talk about "matrix", which sounds like some kind of tor phone thing.
>Will I be able to communicate from my Librem 5 to other phones?
>Yes, you will be able to make regular unencrypted phone calls to any phone number. You will also be able to communicate securely by using the phone dialing application and messaging application, that can run on the Librem 5 phone, Android based phones, and iOS based phones, and any computing device.
The FAQ is at the bottom of the kickstarter.
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#87Value. Early adopters recognize and act on it. This is how OnePlus succeeded with its first phone. No bloatware, great specs, fair price. Essential is about $250 too expensive. It would have been enough if they had released a cheaper phone with the same specs, branding anonymity, and durability - less the attachments. Value. Value. Value. This concept is key.
The attachment system would be a huge selling point if it gave it the ability to do significant improvements or upgrades to the unit. But so far it appears to be a novelty thing. If they released several addons at launch to show the versatility of the system, then they'd capture the market that wants modular phones. But they didn't. The specs are nothing spectacular. It's not as great, stats-wise, as my Oneplus 3T, t…
It's telling that the main attachment being advertised at launch is a 360 camera, but the phone doesn't support Daydream.
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have yet to see a bluetooth device that just works (I am a non apple user, so I can't speak for IOS devices). Indeed, if you go all-in on Apple they really do "just work", and come pretty close when you use a non-Apple BT headset with Apple gear. I can't say if this is because the standards are inadequate and Apple does some extra work, or if the BT implementations on cheap hardware are simply terrible. I kinda l…
Apple's Bluetooth products "just work" because they don't use Bluetooth for the pairing part.
Sounds like a data point in favor of the "the standards are inadequate and Apple does some extra work" hypothesis.
Let's hope Apple can feed some of this back into the standards organization.
Apple's efforts with standards committees has historically been so-so -- neither bad nor good, seemingly mostly reflecting the interests of technical managers unless there was a specific strategic need (e.g. USB committee, Qi), and never with a coherent commitment.
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
"No, basically nobody had expensive luxury electric cars before Tesla." But high end luxury cars were a thing. Tesla wasn't competing with just electric cars, they were competing with all cars.
Tesla would have gone precisely nowhere with a mass market luxury gas burner. Established brands had that market pretty much locked up and beating them on quality when starting from scratch is basically impossible. Small players in this market have to go to the ultra-niche extremes where you sell like 20 cars a year for millions of dollars per and usually still lose money. The electric drive was the killer feature on…
But their strategy was still go to after the high end market, instead of try to target the low end market and go up.
Re: Essential has sold just 5,000 phones since launch
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tesla would have gone precisely nowhere with a mass market luxury gas burner. Established brands had that market pretty much locked up and beating them on quality when starting from scratch is basically impossible. Small players in this market have to go to the ultra-niche extremes where you sell like 20 cars a year for millions of dollars per and usually still lose money. The electric drive was the killer feature on…
But their strategy was still go to after the high end market, instead of try to target the low end market and go up.
That is true, and it works because there is a market for high end vehicles. The market is there because the high end companies make a product that is measurably better than the mass market product from traditional manufacturers.
Such a thing really isn't possible in the cell phone market. A tiny shop can't build a phone notably better than an iPhone or a Galaxy. The only luxury phone provider I know about just glued diamonds on old dumbphones and went out of business.
Essential was apparently banking on people finding the modularity concept to be a killer feature worth a price premium, but that has not been the case apparently.