This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
It's always great to see shitty companies fail. This will he a great weekend for me.
They made a fantastic product and slowly, painfully, failed to innovate away from it.
360 cams are eating our lunch: makes a margina 360 cam
gimbal cameras are eating our lunch: software gimbal
gimbal cameras are STILL eating our lunch: huge hardware gimbal.
They should have gone after the dashcam market, made one that could handle day/night really well for a good price.
Practically a penny stock now at less than a dollar
Well, perhaps if they just let me normally use it and transfer data without an internet connection and perhaps supported KDE Connect (considering their price tag), I might have considered buying one instead of just improvising a water resistant cover on a raspberry pi camera.
My go pro broke.
At this point, I just use my phone, and there are cheaper options
Also, when I see a fish eye lens in a video, I switch off immediately, because I know immediately that what I'm watching is heavily exaggerated
On the higher end of action cameras, it's GoPro, DJI, and Insta360 that are very good. They are better than the budget brands. Problem being the budget brands are still pretty good. It follows phones. Before small camera sensors sucked. By like 2015 it reached a point of good enough for the vast majority of people. Good enough 1080p for YouTube. Then 4k came along and the same thing happened where camera sensors at the budget level became good enough for the vast majority of people. So it doesn't matter if you find people in video communities all trying to get people to buy the $300+ GoPro or DJI action cam or else they'll regret it, plenty of people will try the ~$100 ones and find them very good for their use case
DJI at least has an evolving drone business. GoPro exists as an experience enhanced brand where the experience enhanced is being undercut by other competitors and on the premium end, DJI sells more stuff and people have a habit of buying stuff from brands they already have. So if you have any thoughts of shooting video with a drone, for an action cam you'll probably buy DJI. Just want to strap a camera to your helmet or whatever, any of the plethora of ~$100 action cameras will do. GoPro's lane has shrunken. It has premium competitors while not being competitive for the entry level
Didn't GoPro start requiring online activation of their cameras a while back? Like customers couldn't use it out of the box until they installed the smartphone app and activated it?
Edit: Looks like GoPro did try doing it by using dark patterns first and then getting more aggressive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gopro/comments/16n6xyr/so_you_need_the_gopro_quik_app_to_activate_the/
And the second highest comment is "wHY arE YoU bUyINg nEW TeCH wItH aN OlD pHOnEeeee?" (Because OP's complaint is about how they don't have a phone capable of running the app rather than just a "why the fuck does this need an app?")
Though there's a non-zero chance those replies are made by someone with a vested interest. It's annoying how both those and people who have just drunk the koolaid are pretty much impossible to tell apart.
Hah, and here I was thinking of getting a GoPro as a dash cam/rear cam. Sucks to suck GoPro lost another customer.
Nice to see that at least in the hardware market, competition still works. It is normal for companies who don't offer competitive value for the money to just fail. This is how market economies are meant to work.
GoPro hasn't really done anything for the past 5 years at least. Totally on them.
What a crazy fuckup. You have a household name almost for action cameras and you keep releasing overpriced crappy products.
A lot of the comments look to me like part of the reason for the failure. At least the old ones continue to work almost forever. They product was so good that people aren't replacing them. This leads to them releasing overpriced crappy products to make up for it.
I wish we lived in a world where making the best product, that is reliable and durable, for as cheap as possible was standard and made sense. We've essentially made it so it doesn't work.
The correct option seems to be, to me, for them to not have scaled like they have. They should have been a niche durable action camera, and their costs would have stayed low. Every product that sells though is told they have to scale as much as possible forever, until it kills the product.
I suppose their shareholders had other ideas, they just failed to have the right people piloting that ship. Other companies took over their space and now it's too late. They should probably attempt what you said, scale back and just release a solid action camera again.
I wonder if there are other " genericized trademark" companies that have failed that spectacularly. You can still buy Frigidaire refrigerators. Vaccuuming is known as "hoovering" in the UK, and Hoover is still around.
It would be pretty interesting if "a GoPro" exists as a word for an action camera and the company / brand no longer exists.
The Harley Davidson or Fender business model.
.....sooooo what you're saying is they'll be coming out with a GonePro soon?
thank you, thank you....I'll see my way out
I appreciate a good amateur comedian, but I really think you have the chops to GoPro.
angryupvote
I'm on my second gopro (a hero 10). It will overheat in the shade outside in summer. The battery also crapped out quite early, though they did find another one to send me (I bought it new from them directly, but after newer models released). I don't see myself buying another of their cameras.
They all overheat.
How did they fuck it up that bad. All thry need to do is keep selling an ok camera
They stopped selling an OK camera and started selling cameras that overheat in the shade with dark patterns to try and force you into using their mobile app for video processing.
I disagree there, the market of people who record their outdoors activities was always limited and quickly got boring. Eventually, competitors caught up and many of them focused on products in better form factors for non-extreme sports that were better for a wider range of people. There is a reason why the likes of DJI and Insta360 are the goto products for those that don't utilize larger cameras.
Between DJI Action 6 and Insta360 X5 on the high end, and the cheap knockoffs on the low end, GoPro is in a big pinch. Unless they pull a totally new rabbit out of the hat.
Now that they've milked the brand dry, my bet is they'll either:
Let it go bankrupt and walk away with the profits, or
Sell to someone who will use what's left of the brand's credibility to drain any remaining suckers hoping for a revival.
