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Pebble Gets Acquired By Fitbit - Ends Production and Ceases Support Of Its Existing Lineup of Smartwatches (getpebble.com)
Reader phorm writes: In a notice to Kickstarter backers, pebble has stated that -- following the acquisition by Fitbit (official now) -- they will no longer promote, manufacture, or sell devices. Further, while existing functionality may continue, it is likely to be degraded and warranty support will no longer be provided. This includes any recently shipped Pebble models. For those that were eagerly awaiting shipment of Pebble Time 2 and other newer devices, those devices will not ship at all. Pebble has indicated refunds will be made within 4-8 weeks. Those expecting their money may not want to hold their breath, however, because a contradictory statement made by to backers by email says that refunds will be made via Kickstarter by March 2017.Fitbit said it is only purchasing software assets from Pebble.
I think this sums it up best
I'm sorry, but wouldn't Fitbit be obligated to honor the original warranty (or whatever laws are in place in the nation it was purchased in)?
Get bought out before dropping support. Laugh all the way to the bank.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I backed the original Pebble, then later the Pebble Time Steel. I had backed the Pebble Time 2, and I am HIGHLY disappointed with both Pebble and Fitbit for not honoring those pledges. Even with degraded support or updates, I would have loved to have what I paid for. And shame on Fitbit for not honoring support or warranty for the company they are buying. The worst of it is there are users with BRAND NEW Pebble 2 devices, only days old, that now have no warranty and no support period. What's even worse is that there are no other comparable smart watches. I'm one of the few that love smart watches, despite the current trend and downfall of many of them, as I've owned them going back to Calculator Watches, then Fossil Abacus PalmOS 4.x watch, and many others. I tried a Android Wear watch but grew dissatisfied with it as the battery on both those and Apple watches in most cases do not even last a full day and are now *always on* display like ePaper watches are. I tried a Fitbit way back, as a health monitoring before they added step counters into Pebble. I hated it, and got it returned after the device stopped working a month or two later. This only solidifies my opinion of "Never again Fitbit"
i bought my first one in march of this year. it was dead by september. i complained to support and they gave me a new one. my friend who suggested i get a fitbit got hers in february, and it was dead by october. wayyyyyyyyyy too much money for the cheap piece of plastic junk that you get.
Who on earth is eagerly awaiting a Pebble Time 2? Who actually wants a Pebble Time 2?
Apparently not even FitBit wants one...and that's saying something because there is little in the world more useless than a FitBit. We have two Charge HR's in the house and they are not durable and not accurate for their intended use.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
And thus begins the consolidation of smart watch companies. We saw that Basis was killed off a few months ago by Intel. At least Intel was so kind as to offer full refunds for all of the watches.
Not interested in your product, fit bit. Later
You can't go wrong with buying an Apple Watch.
Wearables are a fad. Who on their right mind is going to spend hundreds of dollars for some minor functionality? And that's not the only thing: All of these devices need to be tethered to a smartphone to work properly, and for each wearable, you need a new app. And another app means another subscription, because these things just LOVE to upload all of your amazing stats to the cloud. Also, these apps are usually a piece of crap, so it also means another attack vector. And more battery drain.
And for what? So that you can receive notifications on your wrist? Or so that you can count how many steps you made? Or notifications about how many steps you made?
Fitbit better watch out because they could be next.
Legalities aside, if this is how Fitbit treats existing customers now during an acquisition, I have no faith they'll do any better on their other products whenever they can get out of it.
I've seen some Garmin products at the store - probably I'll get one of those instead. At least they have a reputation for long-term support of their products.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
>> People funded product, product happens, people who built product sells out to competitor, product is killed
Let's hope people have learned their lesson: any money they give through Kickstarter should be for entertainment purposes only. You're basically buying movie popcorn, at best.
And on a general point this just demonstrates why "smart" watches suck. They're closed platforms and when the platform is discontinued you're left with a bitrotten brain dead piece of crap. Just one more reason to buy a dumb watch.
My Pebble Time Steel died Dec 4th. No wonder I was not getting any replies to my warranty support requests and emails. It is also sad that Fitbit is unlikely to make a device like the Pebble. 10 days of runtime with an always on screen was a wonderful feature.
It looks decent:
http://consumer.huawei.com/en/...
Fitness oriented but nevertheless it has 6-14 day battery life and always on LCD screen.
That source is in financial trouble and unable to produce the displays Pebble depends on.
Therefore Pebble has no products to sell and thus no cash flow.
Therefore Pebble has had to wind down operations and pay off creditors.
Pebble's IP has some value to Fitbit and hiring a few of Pebble's suddenly-available engineers is a no-brainer but Fitbit has no interest in the Pebble company or it's products.
The lesson is to be very leery of DEPENDING on a single source supplier. Pebble was a healthy going concern until they could no longer get their needed displays. Then it went off the rails.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
And now its watch has ended
Purchasing a rival company for the express purpose of putting them out of business is a crime in the US. Why is there not an anti-trust investigation into this?
What about the people who buy the products in stores who are getting screwed as well?
But Pebble was an actual product, sold as an actual product outside Kickstarter.
Brick and Mortar stores sold Pebble.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
It was the only smartwatch that met my needs, and it did so well enough that it has become indispensable to me. Now there's nothing on the market that I'm aware of that can replace it.
I bought a number of Pebbles, but not a single one of them through Kickstarter.
"“It’s a bittersweet day, but I want to extend my biggest thanks to the Pebble community,”
Right....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny thing about Pebble is that they weren't a "smart watch" company. They were a data mining Silicon Valley company. Pebble was looking for more data scientists than they were giving a damn about making a hardware product. I met a few of them.
The hardware product was just barely a thing to allow them to collect the data they wanted (where their real attempt at money was in data collection and sales). "Big Data" is going belly up it seems.
You are quite clearly not a lawyer. Just bcause you *think* the law should be a particular way doesn't make it so, and purporting to announce what the law is just makes you look like an ass when you're wrong.
An asset purchase agreement, which is what this is, does not bind Fitbit to any of Pebble's existing legal obligations. Pebble still owes whatever legal obligations it previously had to its customers, exceot that Pebble no longer has most of the asserts it needs to satisfy those obligations.
I read this blog post and wish I could get a refund for the minute of my time wasted on this companies rank nonsense.
They dump everything, say you should expect what you purchased to fail to work properly, assert all warranties retroactively null and void attempting to zero out all outstanding liabilities... They then sell all assets to another company and finally have the guts to promote that new company.
If I owned a pebble I would sue them to just to prove a point. There is something really wrong with tech industry culture and it is only getting worse.
So saying by March 2017 isn't really that out of sync.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I generally found the Pebble limited in what it could do and it crashed often. The hardware of the first gen Pebble was pretty solid since it was supposedly waterproof to 50 metres, but the apps and syncing were flaky at best.
How so?
I've wanted a Pebble for a while after playing with one in the store. I actually liked it better and the Apple Watch and Android offerings. Sad to see them go. Maybe I can pick one up cheap now.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
You quite clearly are not a lawyer, or at least not one that deals with winding up businesses. Such an asset purchase agreement is considered a preferential transfer, and can be claimed in a claw back lawsuit by other creditors, or declared void by a magistrate. If the transfer was made with the intent to benefit only some creditors or owners, then the transfer could also be considered fraud.
Ohh, and the captcha was ethics.
In this case it turns out that they did do an assignment in bankrupcy, so the bankruptcy approved the disposition of the assets clear of the liabilities. Without that, you don't get to just dispose of the assets to a 3rd party and leave everyone in the lurch - the people left in the lurch also have a legal claim to those same assets, no matter whose hands they are found in.
Try giving away everything you own and then declaring bankruptcy. Any debtor can contest the bankruptcy at that point - one of my friends did exactly that - contested a bankruptcy and held it up for a year - and in the end the judge discharged the debtor of everything except the money owed my friend ($20k or so). You have to do the bankruptcy first, then obtain approval to dispose of the assets so as to make the best recovery possible for the creditors.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
If people wearing watches for the last 15 centuries or so is a "fad" in your eyes, then I guess so.
With all of their production runs pre-sponsored by the end customers they still managed to run this into the ground? Talk about BAD management ðY
I own an original Pebble from Kickstarter, which I bought before owning a compatible smartphone. Since I'm into running, I ended up replacing my Pebble with a Garmin smartwatch that also provided GPS and a heartrate monitor. (Were I not into running, I'd still be using that original Pebble, since it did everything else I wanted.) I feel like Pebble really started the smart watch revolution, and they did it right -- a simple watch that works with your phone, without attempting to replace it. Unfortunately for them, once the idea was out, any other company could copy it, and that's exactly what happened.
Sadly, the first to market is rarely the one who lasts the longest. Hydrox is gone, but Oreos are here to stay.
They didn't give away any assets. They sold them.
The money they received is an asset equal in value to what they disposed of (the IP)
That isn't anything like "giving away everything you own and then declaring bankruptcy"
But Pebble was an actual product, sold as an actual product outside Kickstarter.
Yes, but in the end, Pebble closed up shop like a Kickstarter project. The problem is the culture. A solid company would have found *some* buyer at some price point before it came to this, so if nothing else the lights could be kept on for a few years. In the end they walked away from all of their customers leaving them with a piece of cheap plastic.
I will boycott fitbit if they completely kill off pebble support and don't open source code either.
A solid company would have found *some* buyer at some price point before it came to this
Like, maybe, Citizen?
I'm not going to blame Fitbit. But they didn't earn any positive karma, either.
Nor am I surprised that the real reason came out of the blue, after it was too late to inform my decision (I would have bought one for spare, while supplies lasted).
Emphasis with Kickstarter is "start". Then it quickly morphs (usually) into the same old close-to-the-vest business wisdom, and you end up with half of the advantage you wished for, and a quarter as much stability as a going concern.
I have zero interest in any other smart watch.
Sigh. It's a sad thing.
So can you: Form a company. Give a lifetime warranty. Go out of business?? If so, so much for customer loyalty.
And what did Bam Bam have to say about this?
Just another day in Paradise
There's an open source app called GadgetBridge that will support all the basics for Pebbles, and will keep working even if the Pebble cloud dies. You will still be able to load new apps and watchfaces and re-flash firmware. Apps that need to access the Internet may not work (for now, devs can contribute). As a side-bonus you get greatly increased privacy.
This is Android only, I don't know if there's an iOS equivalent (anyone?).
I'd like to make a product just annoying and threatening enough to the dominant player in a field that I can sell it to them for a few hundred million.
To do that, I need your support. Please fund my project - if I go through normal (regulated) investment channels, I'll have to share the proceeds with my investors and I don't want to do that....so crowdfunding is perfect.
Backer rewards include branding "sucker" on the forehead with a hot iron for $1000.
Thanks. You have my undying gratitude, loyalty, and respect.
Can't the writer just say Pebble went bankrupt? Or is that not allowed in the new economy???