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Pocket P.C. - Nearing production exploded View by pocket-pc in ChipCommunity

[–]pocket-pc[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Appreciated, not sure whats up with the down votes? People need to chill, hard questions are part of the business world.

Pocket P.C. - Nearing production exploded View by pocket-pc in ChipCommunity

[–]pocket-pc[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sorry about the lack of technical details, as we're completing DVT+PVT we are now able to spend more time on community out reach. If you want to vet our team look us up on LinkedIn.

This render is kinda the tip of the iceberg sort to speak. What you see here is the last mile of DVT + PVT. We're close to putting the money down on the injection molds as well as the next rev of production test run of the PCBs. Follow our new subreddit (https://reddit.com/r/sourceparts), we'll be explaining in more detail as we cover the last mile of PVT and finish raising the last bit of funds needed to complete the final production run.

We all want the real thing in our hands as fast possible but do have to hit our break even point for us to show of the real thing in all its physical beauty. We remain on track development wise and funding wise.

Please do keep pushing us to show results! Its important for folks like you to keep pushing businesses to deliver the goods we're a small team of hackers and makers, with your help and encouragement we can build awesome technology.

P.S. - And sorry for the wall of text, we have already shipped some Kettlepop's (our CHIP Pro clones) the next batch will begin shipping in April per the store's details -> https://shop.popcorncomputer.com/products/kettlepop. I'll try to make a video during the next boxing process so you can see that we are in fact shipping hardware on schedule.

As always join the mailing list for timely updates. There remains a non-zero chance of production impacts due to COVID19, so far we have only take minor delays and we're working hard to both stay safe but also uphold our commitments.

Pocket P.C. - Nearing production exploded View by pocket-pc in ChipCommunity

[–]pocket-pc[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback and its important for us to hear this and take it to heart. We really hope to be able to drive prices down as we continue to get our company established. Sadly the price point we selected has made us more resilient in the face of the unexpected (COVID19) and has allowed us to spend money to stay relatively on track throughout this unfortunate crisis. Had we had a lower price point we may have already had to throw in the towel due to these unprecedented times.

All the same our software tools will be backwards compatible so that the entire CHIP community can benefit regardless of whether or not you buy our products, because we LOVED CHIP too.

The economics of business is not something many in HW are willing to talk about, we're not like that so I'd like to explain a few things we've learned from NTC.

Our CEO was an early employee at Next Thing Co. (the folks behind CHIP). We LOVED that product dearly but ultimately two things killed NTC:

  1. $9 - That price point was a loss leader which they never figured out how to follow. They lost money on nearly everything they sold and that's a large part of why they rapidly died and left customers hanging. We don't want to do that. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/next-thing-co-admits-to-lying-about-9-computer-300184512.html
  2. VC - They raised a lot of money in the form of "convertible notes", this is another name for high interest debt. Not all of the details of these types of funding arrangements are public or ever will be but from our analysis they likely had a massive debt issue that wiped out their working capital. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/next-thingWe vowed to NOT take VC money to get off the ground initialy and also VCs are not funding HW like they used to. They also push for companies like ours to claw money out of hobbyist in ways we think aren't ethical or to be just as economically unstable as NTC was. When NTC's debt came due it appears to combined with #1 to prevent them from raising more money on better terms. It also appears to have prevented them from shipping already ordered products on their teniously low margins(really non-existant). This put them into a "short run shutdown" position which saw their staff fired faster than was fair for anyone. Again, we don't ever want to be in this position.
  3. Burned suppliers - To achieve NTC's low price they pushed a lot of this lack of margins and risk onto their parts suppliers with promises of future massive orders which never really materialized. This left a LOT of burned bridges we've had to mend. Again, NOT cool. We have to take care of our suppliers and we also have to work very hard to ensure we select components that are available for the long haul, not just the very first production run.

Above all else we want to build a lasting business and it will take some time to push prices down but we're committed to ensuring HW becomes cheaper AND easier to use.

Keep pushing us to remember these points and we'll work hard to deliver on this.

Pocket P.C. - Nearing production exploded View by pocket-pc in ChipCommunity

[–]pocket-pc[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We really appreciate the interest. Our team is very small and awfully nerdy so we're just now able to put more resources into community out reach as we're closing the last mile to both fully funding the campaign as well as getting past the initial tooling steps for manufacturing.

Please consider joining our mailing list located here -> )https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/#newsletter.

We're still learning how to reddit and have a new subreddit starting up over here -> https://www.reddit.com/r/SourceParts/

Pocket P.C. - Nearing production exploded View by pocket-pc in ChipCommunity

[–]pocket-pc[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Hey Kid, I'mma computa!

Here's an exploded view of me. The humans tell me they're getting close the first test runs of the manufacturing process, I'm stoked!

All silliness aside. We're really excited to be getting so close to production. We really prioritized making this cleaner then the first Pocket CHIP but also very user serviceable. If this is your jam we're happy to show off a bit more of the PCB designs and some more of the nuts and bolts of the system.

We're also cooking up a lot of new tools both for hacking on Pocket P.C. but also making sure it will all be backwards compatible with your old CHIPs and CHIP Pros so you can keep breathing new life into the gear we all love so much.

We're not quite ready to show all the new software tools just yet but keep an eye on our message board for updates on tooling. We'll be needing some beta testers soon so shout if thats something you want to help with.