The Apple Watch is just okay but sells like 25x per year Pebble's entire lifetime sales. I guess people love their Pebbles but this seems like a lot of effort for something most people probably don't want.
Who cares? As tonymet said, something doesn't need to be a huge market to be a viable business. Truthfully I would say that many problems in modern American business culture can be traced back to the false belief that one has to turn their business into a huge affair selling to masses of people constantly.
I just wish integrations were better across the board. I'd buy a Pebble because i love eInk, but my apple watch is just going to be nicely integrated into my apps, ios, etc. Hell even my car as a Key.
Lockin sucks as a user :/
(though there are of course differences between the target features between Apple Watch and Pebble, i'm ignoring that)
That's what we are usually taught, but it doesn't actually seem to be the case. In the smartphone market in particular, as the market itself has grown, the offerings have all seemed to converge on a relatively uniform feature set. Niche phones for niche markets have slowly been weeded out. I don't understand why this is the case, but empirically it seems to be so. That's not to say that there are no weird, niche phones anymore, but it does seem to be the case that there are fewer of them than in the past, when it seems to me that we should expect the opposite: as the market grows, the absolute size of proportionally tiny "niche" markets should also grow, which seems like it should support a greater diversity of weird phones.
third party apps (particularly stuff like messaging, banking and government services) only supporting the main two operating systems is a big barrier to a new one getting any traction.
On android at least, it's entirely possible to have weird, niche, hardware options. Why do no android phones have IR blasters anymore? Or FM Radio support? Why has the headphone jack almost entirely disappeared? (as far as I can tell, Sony is the only manufacturer with phones that will work on American networks). These are options that the mainstream consumer has decided they don't want, but I don't buy that there aren't niche markets for them (I know I'm not a typical consumer, but I can't be that far out on the tail, and I want all of those things)
Yes, weird, niche, OSs are much harder because of network effects, but weird, niche, hardware should be getting more diverse, not less so.
> Why do no android phones have IR blasters anymore?
Both Xiaomi and OnePlus have it on their phones. Personally I never used mine and didn't see the point. It was quicker and more effortless to just click the button on the physical remote next to me than having to navigate through the apps on my phone.
> Or FM Radio support?
You can listen to almost any radio station online nowadays and plenty of countries (EU) have roaming agreements so the benefit of having FM radio must be extremely niche. I know you mentioned it being niche, but I'm talking niche niche.
I assume you have some kind of use case that goes beyond regular consumers.
well, more compellingly, why can't I get a phone with a physical notification light any more?! amazingly useful feature on my galaxy nexus from back in like 2012, but I've never been able to find another phone with it. not to mention a 5.5" phone with a flagship chip in it. I'll even forgo the camera quality.
I'm not very knowledgeable about current models but isn't that the whole USP for Nothing Phone? There are multiple lights so you can customize unique patterns for both contacts and apps.
> These are options that the mainstream consumer has decided they don't want...
I don't even think it's that. I think companies are so blinded by copying Apple that they have lost sight of the fact that they can have a competitive edge if they don't. Like, if people wanted what Apple was offering they would just buy Apple in the first place! And companies used to try to differentiate themselves (I remember marketing specifically making fun of the lack of headphone jacks on the iPhone), but they seem to have just given up.
