I'm jealous that yours is still working, and I'm looking forward to getting back in the fold. My Fitbit Versa that I finally got after the acquisition is definitely spiritually related, but after Google bought Fitbit and got involved it became terrible with bugs.

It's crazy they manage to say this with a straight face when their product still costs $225. Gee, $225 for a disposable piece of e-waste or $250 for a rechargeable device... but hey, at least it reminds you with an advertisement to spend another $225 before it dies!

That's like, horror game flashlight levels of longevity.

Anyone still expecting anything different is ignoring reality.

It's really not complicated. If you want to continue to be gate kept, use their products and keep giving them your money. If you don't want to be involved with their shady practices, stop giving them your money and using their products.

Usually the terms will use wording like "30 days or the minimum applicable by law".

> most frequent are problems with the touch panel. At first, we thought this could be a hardware problem and replaced around 70 watches. After reviewing the units with our factory, we now believe this could be a software bug. We’re working to fix these issues with a software update - if we can’t, we’ll replace the affected watches (regardless of your warranty eligibility).

https://i.imgur.com/Z2Yrkl1.jpeg

You could even make it a seperate item - buy one with/without the charger, then in 2 years you decide if you want the charger or an upgrade.

> Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That's up to 2 years of usage.

2 years is optimistic I think. 3-6 second thoughts is not much, most ideas I'm having past TODOs are >15 seconds. Plus this would definitely depend also on how regularly you sync to the app.

Bare in mind, these devices have not yet been used in the wild on people outside of the product creator. Maybe one of the use cases is to note down monologues, or to easily record conversations with clients for later review.

1 month battery life is also highly usable, but there at least should be a way to charge it.

It’s effectively a regular ring with a button on it that’s smaller than a typical 1ct engagement ring. The oura by contrast (even the 4) is a chonker compared to “regular” wedding bands. I’ve tried in the past but personally a very thick ring is a non-starter for me. Might just be a personal sensitivity thing. Clearly the oura sells.

From a V1/MVP/founder lens I am sensitive to the value in shipping a product that just works rather than doubling the complexity with a bms, custom charger, wrap around flex pcb, and associated engineering effort to mitigate ignition hazards. Especially when there’s platform risk in seeing if this thing even gets used. There’s no platform risk on the watch side which has comes miles from my first pebble/Alerta that was one day charge and blackberry phone compatible only.

As for the ewaste argument? If the market demands a rechargeable product then that’s the right move. But from a weight perspective? This feels performative. Even pessimistically three-four 5g device that are 0% recyclable will generate less ewaste than a 200g phone with 55% recovery and a 5% recapture rate of obsolete devices thats turn over every 3.5 years. It’s like 10x less and probably in the ballpark of what a hypothetical “rechargeable” index would look like.

Assuming most of the weight of that ring is the battery, it appears to be storing around 0.5Wh, so two years of operation should amount to approximately 30uW of power.

It should be possible to squeeze this much from a 0.5mm2 amorphous cell in direct sunlight. Considering the ring is 6.6mm wide at the widest point, they could get orders of magnitude more power even in poor lighting conditions, by just wrapping a thin-film solar panel around the ring.

EDIT:

Or just slap on four of these photodiodes:

https://www.sparkfun.com/miniature-solar-cell-bpw34.html

They're tiny, they're light and even though woefully inefficient, they should do the trick.

> Adding the port, the USB-C PD circuitry may take up too much room.

You don't need PD circuitry for this. 5V 500mA over USB2 is more than enough. But the actual port and battery charging circuit is a bit ridiculous at this size.

I'm not sure precisely what the EU rules are, but the requirement should really depend on the dimensions/power of the device.

I think the amount of ewaste is pretty small. My uneducated guess is that it's probably about the same as a musical birthday card. And unlike a singing card that probably gets used a dozen times and thrown away, the Index can be used >10,000 times before it's time to recycle it (assuming it lives up to the specs)

For comparison, check out the rechargable Stream ring. It's bulkier, costs >2x as much (before including subscription... The sub alone costs more than buying an index every 2 years), and needs to be recharged every night. It's sort of in line with Pebbles advantage over other smart watches- doesn't need to sleep on a charger every night

This is a solved problem though. Wireless earbuds can do it. We're probably just talking about a TVS diode.

> For a niche, low volume product with an unknown market demand I think making the simplest possible version of the product is a good idea to start, but at $99 it’s getting into the range where buyers don’t want to think of it as a disposable item.

> The bigger problem is that the 2 year battery life depends on the device being used for only short notes like “Add milk to the grocery list”. The people who expect to use this for taking notes or thinking out loud could exhaust the battery in a couple months.

$75 for a use once device that could last as little as a few months under normal usage, or $100 for something that could operate for 5+ years. Knowing whether there is a market is always difficult, but if you do crack a market you typically only get one chance to get people onboard.

I absolutely hated brushing the iWatch screen and triggering random crap and there was no other way to interact with it! Garmin's w/ 5 buttons and transflective (sunlight-readable) displays have been the closest alternative, and they have a pretty cool "touch-screen alt mode" which you can access via press+hold on two of the diagonal buttons to enable/disable (or automatically starts if you open up the "maps" app for dragging it around).

Long battery, sunlight readable, buttons.

No one is using the thing like a dedicated microphone to record their entire day's audio, it's a note-taking tool.

You should worry more about your daily commute than a little ring.

It’s plastic straws all over again.