Niche market seems like an exaggeration, because they're competing against literal monopolies.

Pebble serves those people who want to watch or a ring that doesn't require being a slave to a wall wart, who want the watch to last for a long time. Take a look at Garmin, they do that too and they are a successful company. They are much older than Google and they still have a hard time keeping up with Google and it's billions of dollars of of mystery money advertising revenue.

The pixel hardware is a battery draining nightmare, in my personal experience having pixel watches for years and being a long-term pixel phone user. Even today the pixel phone that I have, after having I think five of these things, drains battery probably 20 to 40% faster than .. the competitor that I would next buy if I weren't feeling like I wanted some of the features that Google has bundled in with their phone and home and other like mnvo and messaging products. So, it seems like a mis comparison there, in my opinion. I don't want a smartwatch that lasts 25 hours and then has to be recharged. Or a smartwatch where the screen turns into a UHF channel just going out of tune and there's no tech support on Earth literally that is willing to help me. Volunteers on Google's support forums are lying to themselves that they have any power or sway with Google. It's a waste of time in my experience.

The pixel watch can be a nightmare. I've had the version 1 and the version 2 for years and I gave up because of the bugs. Random crashing, randomly dialing 911, just weird stuff that should not happen.

And then there's the support which is zero support. Completely frustrating to post a message and then get some volunteer support Tech, hahaha, saying expect improvements! And it's a volunteer saying that. And they have no authority. And There is no support, it all falls through. Random crashing on both versions of the watch. The first version screen was flickering like an old school television trying to tune in a distant UHF broadcast. Display drivers anyone?

So, pixel watches are in the drawer and I've got a Garmin watch on right now. Garmin is clunky but at least it's reliably clunky.

So it feels like a mis comparison, to me who's had the pixel watches.

I used to own the pebble, a couple versions of it, when they were first announced for several years again. And I found them to be very reliable and lightweight and usable.

I wanted a smartwatch that could talk to Google's home ecosystem and so I traded out of Pebble. And it's just been kind of mediocre misery.

Plus I don't know what Google is doing but recharging the pixel watch every 18 hours, or 36 if you're super lucky and your apps on the pixel watch behave themselves correctly, makes me feel like a slave to Google's naive product manager aspirations.

Like, "it can do everything, and we make money off of you because you are the product!" While at the same time making me miserable.

:-P

"Ready to beam up" ... Smartwatch plays transporter sounds.

The mercenary values become quite plain sometimes. They have told us who they are, these people who are now brazenly about money and power.

It's up to us not to forget, and to vote accordingly, and to call BS when we see it.

Otherwise we lose our democracy.

> to vote accordingly

too many people are too comfortable - both with not voting, but also to vote blindly.

> we lose our democracy.

it's half-way into the grave imho.

Shutting down the service. Blocking new users. Preventing existing users in the UK and many other countries from continuing to use the product. Giving everybody who is still a user the free unloaded plan.

Basically feels like a failure, a startup failure.

Presumably there's an acqui hire thing going on. Certainly the technology is going to meta. They probably don't give a care about the user base, since it's meta they have the ability to address the entire planet on a much grander scale than the Limitless company was able.

Overall a very big disappointment and the slack community is just railing against Dan Siroker and the decision. The community feels betrayed and like the opportunity cost was a huge waste for them.

A number of alternative communities is sprung up and competitors in the market have started to join the slack form to offer their own alternatives. Notably the omi.me company is offering a bounty for hacking the Limitless pendant hardware to work with their own open source AI reminder stack.

I know 2 people that work there. There is zero proprietary tech they have. The hardware is just a standard microphone and bluetooth. The app is just feeding the recordings to GPT and Claude API. This is a failure of the business to grow and pulling the rip chord to make it seem like a good exit. Highly doubt the investors even got their money back.

By all accounts the CEO was not good at his job

This is so puzzling. If they’re not selling a user base, a brand or proprietary tech, then it does make it look like an acqui-hire as someone mentioned. But why acqui-hire a team that hasn’t built anything special? This makes me think there might be IP on the pendant product design that Meta wants.

This is unsurprising. What would be nice is if they can open source it so that we can connect the (fairly nice) hardware to our own backend and get some use out of it.

Oi!

Use case == Next iteration of "You're Fired" may be more like it.

Experimental Aircraft are less licensed than non-experimental, so this is more of a YOLO pilot.

Agreed, tldr

"Zillow updates products, increasing likelihood of severe financial risk to its end users."

Sounds like an AI could be writing the Pro AI social media posts.

I believe this is literally what was warned about by the super intelligence expert, When talking with Bernie Sanders at the Georgetown something something conference this November: that AI will be persuasive to humans, and basically it will talk the humans out of disabling the power for the AI machines.