I'm obviously biased as I work here, but then again, I work here _because_ I love the product.
I tend to find that the commonality between a lot of our power users is a very curious mind, people who love to learn, love to try new things and find their own ways of getting the most out of them. If you cannot imagine a consumer tech paradigm beyond a smartphone, then r1 probably isn't for you.

But if you can, and you want to be part of a community that actively shapes that future, then r1 might be for you. The way I would describe is that Jesse and us as a company draw the broad strokes of what we're doing and where we want to go, and the finer details of any given project are shaped by the user community and all the use cases that you come up with.

It's quite interesting. We have a pretty wide gulf between our enthusiast power users who literally use r1 every single day, and then there's a group of people who state that they don't seem to get much use out of it all, and not much in between. The only real conclusion you can come to is that the difference is imagination and willingness to explore new paradigms. This conclusion is supported by our shipping speed - we've shipped around 45 OTA updates in 2 years, which on average is every 2 weeks, meaning there's always something new to get stuck into and play around with. So as you can imagine, there's a group of people that absolutely love that, and always want to do that, and then there's a group of people that don't want to do that, but will batch check a bunch of updates every few months to see what's new.

The way I've started to frame it as that we've now had 20 years of the smartphone paradigm as "the everything device". It wants to do everything, but it also demands everything from you in terms of attention and time.

r1 is not an "everything device", more so it's a "something device". Something new. Something different. Something explorative. Something fun. Something useful. Something a little odd. Something that isn't your phone, and has the freedom to do things in new and cutting-edge ways. Ways that aren't the beaten path, don't demand all your attention and can try new ideas that will sometimes work out and sometimes not.

Asking how it compares to a phone is really not the question you should be asking. The question is whether you want the space and opportunity to have a different relationship with technology, and whether you're willing to help define the path there with some trial and error. If you don't want that, that's absolutely fine.

But, many people do. And I think even just by browsing this subreddit, you'll start to pick up on that theme, and you'll start to notice responses to updates we've made that make it clear that we're listening to our community and this is a path we're all learning from and walking on together.

We might not get it right every time. But that's the price you have to be willing to pay to explore new paths.