I think the support has a lot to do with just how transparent Panic have been about the entire process. You can see a lot of people being able to emphasize with the human element behind the product and the company.

I've always been impressed with Panic's level of communication. Many companies could learn a thing or two from them!

From their blog they literally talk to people like they are little clueless kids. If that is how people like their interactions. I personally find it semi-annoying and mildly offensive.

They write in a colloquial, friendly style and use language that is easily understood by people that exist outside of the HN echo chamber.

This is targeted at the HN echo chamber, though. A Nintendo Switch costs less and plays AAA games. This is an STM32 with a black-and-white low rez screen and a hand crank. You could build one yourself for $50. (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3160 but that has a color screen.) Ordinary people that want to play video games are not going to buy this.

I know this verbatim sounds like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." or "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem", both famously wrong assessments of hit products. But in this case, it's different -- the masses already have video games. If you want to make a 320x200 black-and-white game, fire up your editor, open up an OpenGL canvas at that resolution, and start coding. You can have your game available to billions of users tomorrow morning.

They could easily say "we switched from the STM32F4 series to RP2040s because there is actual availability right now" and not alienate a single potential customer.

I'd consider myself deeply steeped in the HN echo chamber. Even though I'm a software guy, I've spent my share of time tinkering with electronics, implementing DIY home automation projects with Raspberry Pis and ESP8266 chips, etc.

But I wouldn't have recognized either of those without going to look up more information, skim the specs or possibly manuals to understand whether or not I care about the change.

The communication from Panic is simple, straight forward, and gives me a bit of context without making me go spend more time on research. They did exactly what they needed to do to help me feel more informed and less frustrated by the change.

On your implication that this is an unnecessary overpriced product, then I suspect this product was not built for you. Sure, someone could purchase those parts and have their own thing up and running in no time. But no one would care.

The PlayDate builds a defacto community all participating in the same product and the hype surrounding it, and this is what people buy into.

I also take issue with this only targeting the HN crowd. There has been plenty of hype in other circles, and the Playdate team will be shipping a no-code project so they're clearly trying to make this accessible to enterprising kids (young and old).

People seem to forget that you can’t evaluate games purely on tech specs. Sure, the graphics will be way better on my Switch. But if I want to play those cute Keita Takahashi or Lucas Pope games, I need to buy a Playdate.

Agreed, and interestingly it’s a similar story for the Switch itself! Relative to a PS5 it’s very underpowered, yet it’s still hugely popular in large part because of the awesome Nintendo games.

I hear enough inscrutable engineering talk at work. I'm perfectly happy to read actual prose that reads like it was written for humans.

What are engineers if not human?

Engineers may be human, but they’re often inhumane, cold, calculating, and callous.

For example, being observably irked by insufficiently technical PR copy.

> Ordinary people that want to play video games are not going to buy this.

Everyone, including Playdate, knows this. Nobody is thinking this is the next Switch. People who aren't the target audience of the Playdate always seem to think this is the intention and I'm not sure why.

I've said it before, but to me it looks more like a kind of physical Pico8. Again, Pico8 isn't meant for the mass market, but its certainly not useless

If your initial reaction to something is "I could make that myself for cheaper" then you definitely are not the target market.

Go ahead, make them. I’ll give you $100.

Panics' language is definitely designed to be friendly to non-native speakers, who you seem to be discounting as unworthy of such treatment.

But I would say this is probably a bigger market than you seem willing to accommodate in your argument.

STM32 is STM32 in literally every language.

Maybe it sounds like that because they are marketing a toy?

This is actually just really good product/CE communication. Very technical and very untechnical people alike can read those posts and have a very good idea of what is going on, with a high degree of specificity. You don't have to use every piece of jargon available and write like a dick to have an interesting technical conversation. Communication like this is refreshing and clear, and you lose exactly nothing by writing like this to customers, as the technical implications of each sentence are also clear if you are technically inclined.

Compare with the grift of the Amico and the useless secrecy of Analogue.

Panic deserves every ounce of goodwill they’re getting.

When I see this kind of stuff I find them fascinating, because it's always the same story. People building a hardware product and then realizing that building hardware, even when it looks simple has a lot of moving parts. Coming back from that is quite impressive.

But when people boast about their amazing products to reek in VC money I actually get upset. I'm not sure if I'm more upset at the founders or the VCs though.

For example recently they have been raving about oxide, how amazing it is, how amazing the founder is, how amazing the idea is. But if you look at the website with all the ambitious goals and an estimate of early 2022[1] I can already see this company burning money like no other without ever getting close to that estimate. Either they have zero clue about supply chain or their wilfully misleading investors or a little bit of both.

But I guess that's the world we live in.

[1] https://oxide.computer/

Playdate does not seem like VC funded?

Panic is existing Mac software company, that sold (arguably, niche) software at not-that-small prices (well, usual for Mac OS ecosystem, at least in 2000s/2010s), and had a modest success being a distributor of Untitled Goose Game; and PlayDate is made in relatively small numbers; I would think they are self-funded and not backed by VCs.

Clearly I talked about two opposite directions. The first paragraph is about panic. The rest is about the companies that don't act like panic. Why lump it together?

And Firewatch!

People will link back to this comment in two years to point out how wrong / mean spirited HN can be sometimes.

I would rather them take the time to get this right, than potentially launch new hardware that flops and slaps them in the face.

It maybe helped that Steam Deck, Play Date and Analogue Pocket all announced their delays recently. Goes to show that this is beyond any single company and everyone's affected equally.

Yeah the supply chain breakdown study that was posted last week (sorry couldn't find link) points to the fact that demand across the board in almost all industries is quite a bit higher than it was pre-pandemic. Confusingly, supply is also higher across the board compared to pre-pandemic numbers, it's just that demand is so much higher than it was, that the increased supply is still woefully insufficient.