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Meizu's $1300 'Zero' Smartphone With No Ports Got Just 29 Pre-orders on Indiegogo (androidpolice.com)
Chinese smartphone maker Meizu generated some headlines in January after it unveiled Zero, a $1300 smartphone that doesn't have a headphone jack, or a charging port, or a physical SIM card slot, or any buttons, or a speaker grill. The company said it would make the phone available to consumers via Indiegogo crowdfunding platform. Well, the market has spoken. AndroidPolice: Meizu set itself an eminently reasonably bar for the campaign, too, at $100,000. That may sound like a fair bit of cash, but Meizu would only have had to sell 77 phones in order to meet this goal. It managed just 29. It's unclear how many of those were Meizu employees, other than to say "not enough."
So brave that they crossed the thin line between bravery and stupidity, in fact.
That list of 29 names contains 100% rich sucker content and such data would be priceless on the dark web.
"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."
- W.C.
ps: Why do the refugee caravans come to the USA and not to Venezuela or Cuba???
Early adopting is cool as everyone knows, so I bought the first 20 of them in a fit of fangirl pique. I figure I'll be popular any day now that I've bragged about my stupidity online. /Kendal
So the only possible way to even use this thing as a phone is with a separate blue tooth device? That's fine if you're anticipating a call, but a bit cumbersome if you're walking down main street and not hooked up.
This is moving the smart phone even further away from being a phone and more into being a PDA.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It got 29 fake pre-orders from their "friends".
Apple manufactured hundreds of millions of smartphones without headphone jacks, knowing that consumers would in the end be OK with the choice.
This company said they would produce this device only if they were paid enough ahead of time to do so.
How is that brave again? Hey, I'll produce a phone made of razor blades if you you me ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Wow I am super brave!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And it will sell millions.
“It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.”
Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
Deleting just the headphone jack is stupid, because there are still other holes for stuff to get into. But deleting all of the ports makes at least some kind of sense, because having no ports actually does eliminate some problems. I still wouldn't buy a phone like this, but I can see what they're trying to accomplish other than selling more expensive headphones.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How do you force a reboot with no buttons?
My LG G smartwatch has no buttons, except a recessed one to force a reboot.
anyone?
“It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent.”
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
Adam Smith
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody. You built a factory out there - good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory... Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea - God bless! Keep a hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Elizabeth Warren
I no longer care about people that fall for these scams. If you failed to learn from the last few years, you now deserve to lose your money.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Develop and manufacture a complete phone for $100,000? More likely "we' ll buy a galaxy s10, and glue a portless non-removable otterbox knock-off around the thing"
Just get rid of the screen, cameras, and microphone and they'll be onto something!
29 !!! That's almost as many comments on this thread. Fuck off with your non news.
Can rarely be trusted with US based campaigners, why would anyone in their right mind expect to get anything back from a Chinese one?
So we now know that 29 morons are wealthy enough to waste $1300 on a dumb phone.
Sorry there Super Faggot, you didn't build that. You're a cheerleader without tits nor ability to read.
...uncrossing my eyes after reading and rereading "Meizu set itself an eminently reasonably bar for the campaign" several times.
I get that people really love their headphone jack, I've never had an issue with Bluetooth but I've quickly learned my lesson about trying to encourage anyone on Slashdot to just use BT for everything audio, but the whole port thing aside, the thing about this device that I think really killed it. $1300 price tag. I get that Apple came out with the $1k phone just recently and what-not but look every phone maker on this planet. If current gen will now always cost $900+, I'll always go with previous gen. $500 is literally the most I will pay for a smartphone, full stop. The price tags on recent smartphones is way, way, way outside the domain of reasonable in my opinion. Clearly I am not the target audience of current gen phones.
That seems like a lot of money for a bargain phone. Why did they expect people to pay more instead of less? It doesn't make sense.
I'm not putting down the idea of cheaping out with cost-reduced designs by removing connectors that you think some people might not miss, but cheaping out only makes sense when it results in the device being cheaper!!!
the indiegogo is now closed but here is a link for anyone that wanted to look. https://www.indiegogo.com/proj...
Unless you're a gazillionaire why would you throw away money in something like this? Even apple is losing traction with their "costs more gives less" model
We want buttons. We want ports. Cute concept, but pass
Luxury! Why, back in my day we had nothing but a single serial line on our PDP-10s and we were thankful.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Next one doesn't have display, mic or speaker. Price must be at least triple of this.
How many of those are real persons and not competitors buying for disassembly/reverse engineering? And then there is the usual suspects (NSA, Russia, China, Iran, Best Korea etc)
It has been reported that this is not a real product, but Meizus just feeling out the industry.