I'm asking them the same question. I backed this as an android user looking to charge my power hungry devices. The iPhone compatibility was secondary for sure. I was willing to be patient while they figured out the lightning plug thing and am extremely disappointed that they're cancelling (and siphoning all the money through their startup) instead of releasing a product.
Siphoning implies they are doing something untoward with it, which does not appear to be the case here. They're already building something that will let them do a mass refund; they have decided to use that tool to send out this money, at some cost to themselves. What could be wrong with that?
exactly. I know the founder. He originally had no plans of creating an alternative to kickstarter. He wanted to create great hardware products and use Kickstarter to fund the development. After running into Apple approval issues for POP, realizing how a less than honest company could ship a shitty product and keep the $140k that backers had provided, he realized just how bad kickstarter is for funding & creating hardware products. Not only is he giving the money back - this inspired him to create a better alternative for creating and backing products. It is a classic founding story.
I'm a bit skeptical as well. The alternatives to giving up seem too obvious. Perhaps they didn't crunch the numbers right and were going to take a bath on the building them. Assuming its really just a problem they had with Apple, I don't see why they didn't provide a poll asking their customers what the their preference was (refund or design change). If nothing else, just bundle a lightning cable with the device.
Having a plain USB port or two would be handy anyways as there are still plenty of proprietary USB cables in the wild (GPSes, oddball electronics, older electronics, iPod shuffles).
They seem to have 2 female USB connectors already. They could have just changed the 2 30pin connectors to USB as well. Or have 4 USB + 2 Lightning..
Not sure if they're also supporting the extended dock connector functionality, and hence had to keep the 30pin connector.. but I agree that it seems like a press grab..
> Apple has refused to give the project permission to license the Lightning charger in a device that includes multiple charging options.
> In fact, even combining Apple’s new Lighting connector with the old 30-pin connector in a charging device was verboten
Emphasis my own. That doesn't read like combining Lighting with the 30-pin was the only issue, but rather the particularly egregious seeming issue. I'm reading that as Apple would not allow Lighting and USB either.
Yeah, if it were my product I would have refunded everybody's money and immediately launched another campaign for the all-USB version of the product.
Announce the new campaign in the same email that was announcing the refund; if people were still interested they could fund the new campaign.
Maybe they do plan on re-launching eventually, or maybe they just don't think there is demand for the compromised product. Or maybe they ran into other issues and are using this as a graceful out. Who knows.
Part of their pitch is that you don't have to carry your cables around (they did include 2 USB ports at the base just in case).
But I guess their mistake is pitching this as an iDevice charger from the start (see their video; very heavy focus on iDevices). And when they couldn't include a lightning connector, it became a deal breaker.
If you buy a phone you get a USB to Lightning cable. You can buy more of these if you want. Why is this a deal breaker?
There are a lot of devices out there that aren't Lightning and would benefit from a system like this, so 4 regular USB ports is a lot more useful than specialized connectors.
I agree. This seems like a problem with a trivial solution. My bet is that they decided that they wouldn't make enough money on the project to make it really worth their time. Blaming apple may be justified since it is a stupid policy, but I'd just as well have a system that just has four USB ports that I can plug whatever I like into.
I thought you can't charge apple devices with different usb devices? I have an apple tablet at my work and my pc does not charge it, I have to use my friend's mac.
Per spec USB2 output max 500mA per port. This is enough to charge an iPad when it's asleep, but as soon as the screen is on it will stop charging to power itself.
The wall charger and Macs include a non-standard trick (a resistor on the data pins in the wall charger, probably some active negotiation on Macs) to output up to two full amps.
Higher charge rates are part of the USB3 spec, but this would require both devices to implement it, and I don't know if it's even a mandatory part of the spec.
So, plug your iPad on a PC and it will charge, just slower, and only when sleeping.
You'll probably find that it does trickle charge (though doesn't own up to it), but just barely.
Your PC likely isn't delivering enough current via USB to charge an iPad. (I think it needs a 1A supply and the USB spec only requires 500mA or something like that).
Apple refuses to license any product which combines the Lightning connector with any older Apple connector.
Thus, buyers would have had to use the 30-pin to USB (or USB to Lightning connector, which is apparently not available in the US?). Either way, this was not the product that they Kickstarted. They decided to do the right thing, by returning the Kickstarter money. The company behind the Kickstart is contemplating whether to have a new kickstarter that would feature Apple connectivity by way of the usb-to-apple connectors (rather than through dedicated connectors like they have/had in the current version).
I think their mistake was Kickstarting something for "Apple iPhones, Apple iPads, Apple iPods, other Apple devices, (and oh yeah some of those other things that make up the majority of the world's rechargable devices too)".
It's just plain unwise to make business promises to deliver interoperability with proprietary interfaces without having your agreements in place first.
As a side note, I'm quite disappointed that we as a technological society can no longer implement basic means of supplying low-voltage DC power for a users' own devices.
Except it wasn't a mistake. Just because it failed doesn't mean it was a mistake.
We should be admiring them for taking risks like these. If it worked, it would have been quite awesome. And now that it's failed, everyone received their money back, so no harm was done whatsoever.
Yes, it was their choice to return the money rather than pivot the project, but that's irrelevant -- the fact is that they returned all the money to the backers and chose to absorb the $11k loss themselves. This is behavior we should be encouraging, rather than trying to discourage people from daring to dream and to take harmless risks.
But just I hate to see anyone having to eat credit card fees on $139,170 for something that was preventable.
Power connectors have historically been low-risk parts so it's an understandable mistake. But sourcing and costing all the needed custom parts should have been one of the first steps in the hardware design process.
But just I hate to see anyone having to eat credit card fees on $139,170 for something that was preventable.
It was their risk to take! Why do you care?
Power connectors have historically been low-risk parts so it's an understandable mistake. But sourcing and costing all the needed custom parts should have been one of the first steps in the hardware design process.
So what if they didn't? It's their decision.
I'm struggling to understand what your point is. "Here's why [I think] they failed." Well, yes, in hindsight, mistakes are obvious. But in the moment, things aren't so clear-cut.
It would have taken a single phone call to Apple's licensing group to learn that this would be a problem. They didn't make that phone call. That was a mistake.
It would have taken a single phone call to Apple's licensing group to learn that this would be a problem.
That's not true. Apple saying "no" when there is no money on the table and no popular interest means nothing.
Apple saying "no" when you have customers beating down your door and $130k to divide between licensing and manufacturing is a different matter. Apple chose to pass up this money. There was no way to foresee this until the choice was on the table.
Building first and asking permission later is sometimes admirable.
But one ought to weigh in advance whether or not 1000 customers and funds on the order of $130k is likely to provide enough leverage to bend the rules of a company with, literally, the most money in the whole world and a famously proprietary attitude.
According to the article it sounds like they started on the design before Apple announced the new connector, and then updated their design once the connector was announced. Also it seems they did contact Apple but "[they] didn’t get a yes or a no up front,”. Once they finally got a straight answer from Apple they canceled the product. So apparently they did make that phone call and it wasn't as simple as you seem to want to make it.
Before they did the kickstarter, they were fully in the right by Apple's own guidelines and policies. Even now, they're in compliance with the public ones, just not the 'just about to be released even more anti-competitive ones'.
You get a usb-to-lightning cable with any new iOS device, that's what you would use with it. By just providing a female usb port, bring-your-own-cables, they wouldn't need licensing from Apple at all.
Edit: I'm skeptical about their motive. It seems they are using this as a press event to announce their KickStarter competitor ChristieStreet.