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Essential Products, Startup From Android Creator Andy Rubin, Lays Off 30 Percent of Staff (fortune.com)
Essential Products, a startup founded in 2015 by Android creator Andy Rubin, was started to create a smartphone with high-end design features that wasn't associated with a particular operating-system maker. Unfortunately, reaching that goal has been harder than anticipated as the company has laid off about 30 percent of its staff. Fortune reports: Cuts were particularly deep in hardware and marketing. The company's website indicates it has about 120 employees. A company spokesperson didn't confirm the extent of layoffs, but said that the decision was difficult for the firm to make and, "We are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game changing consumer product." The firm was Rubin's first startup after leaving Google in 2014, which had acquired his co-founded firm, Android, in 2005.
Essential's first phone came out in August 2017, a few weeks later than initially promised. It received mixed reviews, with most critics citing its lower quality and missing features relative to competing smartphones, such as a lack of waterproofing and poor resiliency to damage. The company dropped the price from an initial $699 within weeks to $499, and offered it on Black Monday in November 2017 for $399.
Essential's first phone came out in August 2017, a few weeks later than initially promised. It received mixed reviews, with most critics citing its lower quality and missing features relative to competing smartphones, such as a lack of waterproofing and poor resiliency to damage. The company dropped the price from an initial $699 within weeks to $499, and offered it on Black Monday in November 2017 for $399.
He sold out to Sprint and still didn't listen to consumers and decided it was a good idea to allow a privacy faux pas. I mean, if you are looking to upset the industry you sure as heck cannot look and act just like them to do it!
The company has also announced that in the coming weeks they will be changing their name to "unnecessary".
Surprise. No one cared about an overpriced below average phone that offered nothing of interest beyond minimal curiosity among nerds.
My god, I hope 30% of the workforce turned out to be an integer number of people.
Nullius in verba
Being just another smartphone on the market isn't going to cut it when you're charging sky high prices. No, this doesn't mean you should add a 5th camera ("fuck it, we're doing six!") or making it so thin that it bends if held tightly. What it means is you give people what they want. It's not complex either, it's removable battery packs, a headphone jack, a MicroSD Card slot and solid but modular construction that is robust that still allows the owner to replace parts if/when they break it.
It's not sexy but it's what we want. Sadly, you want to sell us a new version of the same phone every year, like Apple and make a killing but that requires an insane amount of capital. Just give us what we want and you will sell lots of smartphones, just not every single year ad infinitum.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It has a valuation of $1,000,000,000! I mean it is worth so much! Why would you lay off people?
Apparently they weren't essential personnel.
You've heard of all the clones of the Raspberry Pi SBC? One of them is the Orange Pi. They have a line of DIY kits that will let you build your own phone starting around $40 on AliExpress.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Make it a few mm thicker and add a battery that lasts 3-4 days. Ensure it has a headphone jack. Don't add a notch, and do add dedicated buttons (which can be touch, that's fine) on the bottom (and minimize other annoyances.) Make it dockable, maybe running ChromeOS in its docked state. And give it a decent screen and cameras.
There. A phone that everyone will want that nobody sells right now that you can probably sell for $200 or less given what other manufacturers are doing - and make money from assorted "docks".
The market is crowded, but crowded with me-too phones that suck. It really isn't hard to make a phone that doesn't suck, it's just nobody wants to do it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.