dewcifer

You bet, I'm still using Sparkocam from way back when.

This thread perfectly exemplifies what happened to cheap eReaders. People were willing to pay more for them, so they now cost more.

I have a paper white from years back. I've thought about getting some eInk displays for projects.. it's really dumb how much new [device that has an eink dislpay and displays a file/PDF] cost.

But it's also infuriating that people pay for emojis and sound boards on Discord and the like. The world we live in.

You are correct. It's about control and money.

Good question! I'm not too sure. But I often wonder why P2P hasn't become more robust as speeds and tech have improved. Like live service games.. it feels like there could be robust P2P implementation that could facilitate a lot of failed multiplayer.

I imagine that cutting out the live service ($$$) and SaaS have a large role to play.

Front-end dev of 20+ years. Plenty of back-end and full stack work in there too. While I definitely agree with the sentiments in this article, I feel it is a bit more nuanced a conversation than this.

While you can truly swap out the UI and ultimately the front-end doesn't matter if the back-end isn't solid long-term - you can equally swap out/automate/just install a rock solid back-end framework, just like you can a front-end.

Furthermore, the front-end is the single thing that customers/users typically interact with - which makes it drastically more important than is let on in the article. We were recently doing a book study on measuring UX and I am pretty convinced that the way people feel about a thing is more important than how well it functions.

I don't really even call myself front-end or back-end anymore.. to be honest I'm not sure it's as useful of a distinction as it has been in the past. Both aspects of an app need to be solid and also bespoke to a degree imo.

Am I just out of my mind for feeling like I should wait a few months for a cheaper hardware equivalent to drop without an OS that will run Pebble?

I guess $100 average profit is "normal" in terms of production, marketing, r&d and all of that.. but this is just an old watch that someone is selling again since the OS was open sourced. The profit is just all profit.. I can't imagine a non-US manufacturer won't just start cranking out devices people can flash with a better OS.