I'd feel bad having a $40 toy for a failed make-the-world-better $100 product. Wasn't there even a 2-for special where I buy one, and one gets sent abroad?
It looks like they are still around though, and at least seem to be active. The specific laptop itself, probably not, olpc does not seem to fit this list. I agree.
I knew a girl in school who had one of these. It was a neat little gadget at a cheap cost, but was criticized for not solving more pressing issues (water, schools) and there was no training provided for teachers. The laptops also weren't sustainable and difficult to repair.
It seems the initiative is still kicking since their website is still alive (albeit without an HTTPS certificate).
Well, if you think OLPC was a deliberate grift—I don't—then it's like the moral difference between scamming buyers looking for an Internet-connected juicer and scamming donors looking to help the world.
As a non-deliberate grift—I guess the same math applies? Wildly overpromising and underdelivering on a picnic cooler seems somehow less morally problematic than wildly overpromising and underdelivering on an effort to improve third-world childhood education.
Of course, the counterpoint is that Silicon Valley (or MIT Media Lab) bros whose hearts are in the right place deserve plaudits for their ill-informed-but-generally-well-meaning efforts, even if those efforts waste millions of dollars that could have gone to more effective altruistic endeavors.
I think you are on the right track here, and its important.
In the context of work with developing nations, the defense of good intentions is increasingly dismissed out of hand. Good intentions are often deeply problematic and can cause more harm than good - including capture/transfer of resources that could have been used in some other way improve conditions for people.
c.f., many NGO projects to improve stove design in less developed countries [0]
Not necessarily. The list is actually two different categories mixed together:
1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC)
2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest)
However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three different things all at once and they succeeded at none of them.
- OLPC wanted to sell computers to the educational market, so they were selling lots of cheap machines to schools. This is actually not a bad business model; Google and Apple today have basically cornered that market with Chromebooks and iPads. Had OLPC succeeded, we could have had schools covered in cheap XO-1s instead. However...
- OLPC wanted to be a philanthropic mission to the third world, so they were designing the laptop with all sorts of weird features that only made sense for that market. Some of them are reasonable, like they actually intended it to be ruggedized and easy to repair. But they also had some weird features - like, it was designed around being able to mesh-network an entire village together with them. And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary. All of these features are unnecessary if you're just selling laptops to schools and they ultimately wound up getting dropped.
- OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it. The laptop was designed around a Linux-based UI called Sugar and was specifically intended to push Free Software onto the third world. The idea was that kids could learn how the computer actually worked by modifying the software onboard. It even had a view source button on the keyboard! All of that is catnip to people like us and completely useless for educators.
Ultimately they wound up delivering a very weird product that didn't actually do the thing it promised to do. That's very much in the spirit of a failed startup.
I'd add the technology probably also just wasn't there for the price point they wanted to build to. After all, a succession of netbook and adjacent laptops over the next few years didn't really hit a sweet spot either--certainly not commensurate with the hype in certain circles.
Theranos was a scam, but I think Coolest Cooler wasn't.
It was just a stupid idea and they underestimated the difficulty of getting them made. It cost far more than they thought and they tried to dig themselves out of that hole by selling them on Amazon and trying to use the profit to pay for the copies they owed to their Kickstarter backers. This caused all sorts of drama, but my impression that they did their best to try to deliver what they had promised.
Theranos was very different in that they were clearly lying about their capabilities, and hid the truth at all costs, up to causing serious problems for people that needed a real analysis and got a fake one.
Coolest cooler was intended to address a perceived need. One that may still exist.
What the world "needs", is an easy-to assemble frame that you can yourself integrate the functions you need. So if we made coolers to a standard size, with some standardized attachment point, that would be a start.
Then you could have a lightweight wheeled frame of standard dimensions and attachment points, that you could then integrate the components you need: portable power pack, BT speaker system, etc.
We have so few standardized systems for connecting things together physically. There are things like the screw mount for cameras, picatinny rails, and 19in equipment racks, for instance. But so few of the other items in our everyday lives, like BT speakers are engineered that way. They are all designed for style, and can't easily be combined.
If you had a system where everyone with nearly zero mechanical skill could attach things together, this would get us closer to the world where everyone who wanted one could have a coolest cooler. Otherwise you have people trying to stick things together with duct tape, which usually works very poorly if at all.
> Ultimately they wound up delivering a very weird product that didn't actually do the thing it promised to do. That's very much in the spirit of a failed startup.
Also, it had the typical techie issue of "solving" a problem by trying to force more tech into it. Tech people are often like the proverbial person who only has a hammer so sees every problem as a nail.
That was always my take on OLPC. They tried to do way to much and kept expanding scope.
If they just focused on one slice of the pie, they might have been able to pull it off. For example, build an inexpensive laptop that could be shipped en masse to their target audience.
The packs were pre-juiced, the Juicero Press just squeezed the juice out of the packs.
The advantage of the packs is that they can lock you into their ecosystem and charge you more money for the convenience of using the machine. Razor-and-blades is a common, worthwhile business model... if the razor can be made cheaply enough to give away, and the whole package actually solves a problem.
The idea was to basically be "Keurig, but for juice"; and it would have worked had they not charged SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS for the press.
The problem of having to carry one less item from the supermarket?
Soda stream is kinda the same, a machine which produce a easily available product directly in you home. But the soda cartridge doesn't expire after a week and can produce alot of fresh soda. So you save alot carrying and it's easy to always have soda since an extra cartridge takes little space. In addition it offer you a choice of how "strong" soda you want.
The only advantage of the juice packs is that they presumable ship it to your door. But it seems very strange if the packs actually are any fresher than presqueezed juice shipped in a regular container (which would've been more convenient). And from the few pictures I saw no water was added to the juice so no volume/weight is saved.
Keurig seems to be coffee capsules which arguable does solve a problem/brings convenience.
soda stream is a lot cheaper than buying bottled sparkling water, and you can make a very good analog to your favorite mineral water / soda / energy drink for even cheaper if you buy the right additives online. They did do a good job of making their luxury version waste most of the CO2 tank because it's impossible to make a good airtight seal.
you can homebrew your own though, and use a much larger/cheaper CO2 source than what they sell at grocery stores, which I'll probably be doing soon.
> And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary.
They had to drop that feature when they realized that 1) there was no way to anchor the dynamo into the laptop chassis without making the laptop substantially larger, and 2) a child couldn't provide enough power to charge the laptop at a useful rate. They made some external dynamos, but I don't think those were widely used either (again, too slow to be useful).
> It even had a view source button on the keyboard!
And it didn't do anything. The button was baked into the hardware before the software was written. There were a couple of other nonfunctional buttons on the keyboard.
There was, at one point, even a proposal to include a disassembler in Sugar to let students reverse-engineer the (closed-source) wireless card firmware. I don't think that one ever got off the ground.
> OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it.
I have roughly an associates degree in education. (I don't actually have it, but I have more than enough credits.) This is a massive misrepresentation of the importance of constructionism. It's not a tech-bubble fringe theory. It's the only respected idea in pedagogics since at least 30 years. Every mainstream idea in the academic sphere about education is constructionist. Poststructuralism has had no lasting impact. C/ism is the only surviving school of thought in this field.
They had a lot of cool tech, but all the poor integration of a bunch of unrelated open source projects and a lack of people with the ability to design something to fit their market.
The end result was a cool product that nobody wanted that didn't work awfully well. I now use my OLPC as a sunlight visible status board - and I still need to reboot it once a month because the kernel has some memory leak somewhere.
Calling end-stage capitalism ventures a stunningly dumb joke seems a bit harsh. The fewer people have surplus cash, the more idiotic-exotic the devices & services peddled to them have to become. Mind the gap!
Man, that Jibo toy makes me sad. I feel like Amazon realized that they didn't need the screen or the character movement to accomplish 95% of what consumers were interested in: voice-controlled task automation. The Echo and similar devices make more sense, but I would have liked to see what Jibo could have become.
In some alternate reality the world is full of expressive robots... and probably doors that sigh when you walk through them.
There was a great little video on twitter I can't find where someone took one of those little robots with big on screen eyes and had it reading output from gpt-3.
It was cool since you could basically ask it anything - I'd buy one of those.
I'm not too familiar with OLPC (perhaps they were indeed a money grab), but I feel there is a difference between "oops..my startup that would have made me rich AF failed" and "oops.. my startup that would have made the internet more accessible for african kids failed"
Although Negroponte is an angel investor these days according to Wikipedia, so he did become wealthy somehow. I'm not sure how much OLPC helped that (although leaders of seemingly noble non-profits can do quite well for themselves in general).
Well, he's from a wealthy family, an early investor in Wired when they were cool among other well-known startups, and a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. Being an angel investor doesn't necessarily mean billionaire.
I'd love to see what about hard to repair e-waste dumped on teachers with minimal training was supposed to lead to making the internet more accessible for kids.
Speaking off the cuff, without knowing the insider details, but I would say OLPC helped pave the way for Raspberry Pi; Theranos helped paved the way for a lot of future blood testing companies (and let's hope discourage people from pursuing a secrets and patents strategy), et cetera.
I loved the Coolest Cooler idea but thought maybe it was overengineering something that most people didn't really need. How often do we get to use a cooler in a summer? Not much for my family, not enough time.
I almost backed the Coolest Cooler, until I saw the built-in 'ice blender' and realized I didn't want a cooler that required a power supply. Sad to see so many people get taken for a ride :/
A friend of mine got hers and loves it. She uses it multiple times per year, it is a staple at her parties.
I understand not all backers were so lucky, but it seems to be more a situation of the company not being able to execute on something that a lot of people actually did want (judging by the # of backers they had).
But that's still ambiguous. It refers to all the products as toys. So is it actually selling the original hardware, like the Jibo, for $40? Do they "work" in any way? Does the OLPC turn on?
No they're plastic toys that resemble the startup product. Not the actual startup product itself. It's simply an item to collect for novelty, not for any real purpose.
I don't think counting products that never made it to production really counts, through...
I backed the Peachy Printer and was sad to see it fail (and definitely assume that large parts of the creator's explanations were not entirely true), but a failed $600k Kickstarter is not in the same league as an eight- or nine-figure company producing something that turns out to be completely stupid.
I'm usually a fan of MSCHF's parodies, but it's a bit disappointing to see reflexive tech-hate using the usual examples, Theranos and Juicero, on the HN homepage.
Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup? It was always a nonprofit, so of course it didn't make money.
While the technology was lacking in many respects, it did serve a lot of children at the time, and proved the market that Chromebooks came to later dominate with a similar approach (linux-based OS with minimal resources at $100-300 price point).
>Did One Laptop per Child truly fail as a startup?
I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well).
It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.
If it, and netbooks as a hardware category, failed, it was because in the end they turned out to not have been worth it. I used a netbook happily for about a year or two, it cost ~$400 if I recall correctly, and afterwards I donated it to my sister who I think used it for a while as well.
That's at least $150/yr for a low end product fun but uncomfortable product. After the netbook I upgraded to a Macbook Pro that was $1250, and I used it for 8 years, after which I also donated it to my sister, and she's still happily using it. That's a roughly similar $150/yr, but for a best in class product with great comfort and wide usability.
I wonder if anyone used a OLPC's for more than a year or two.
Sure, but it is just an extreme example of the TCO of the OLPC being comparable to a high end professional grade laptop. It was just a very hard problem to solve, and the technology was not quite there yet.
Definitely not suggesting kids in Africa should just buy macbook pro's, but $100 is also a lot of upfront cost for a product that's actually not that useful and destined for the wastebin within a year or two.
I do hope I'm wrong and it brought some cool technology too some kids far removed from the big cities.
For "cheap," netbooks as a category have been replaced by your run-of-the-mill entry-level laptop. The cheapest Dell Inspiron starts at ~$300. $400 gets you an Intel i3 or an AMD Ryzen 3, both of which are leagues better than an Atom.
For "small," the category was replaced by Ultrabooks as people realized that it's usually better to have a thin laptop that doesn't force you to compromise on the display or keyboard size.
I remember traveling with a netbook so that I'd have a computer I could use for tickets and reservations, and even for that, the low resolution 8-10" netbook screens were painful. 12-14" Ultrabooks with >= 1080p panels are much more comfortable, and the weight is comparable.
To be fair, you're comparing netbooks then what what we have now. At the time, the pokey, sluggish Atom was the best you could get for a lightweight system and longer-than-usual battery. Remember... the common alternative to a netbook then were awkward 1-2 inches thick 'desktop replacement' style monstrosities unless you wanted to pay a LOT of money relative to performance... and netbooks were $300ish versus $1200+ for laptops at the time. I was grateful for my netbook and they really did seem to push portables into becoming better at being... well, portable.
To be fair there were fairly compact/light* laptops at the time from a variety of manufacturers. But the period between, say, 2000 and maybe the late 2000s in particular laptops were becoming common but you had to make serious tradeoffs between price, size/weight, performance, and other features.
The Asus eeePCs were great for the time as a beat-around little on-the-go laptop, when most laptops were still 15 or 17 inches and weighed 5-10 pounds.
I really enjoyed the one I bought in college - it actually fit on those terrible fold-out desks that lecture hall seats have.
I've had both a "subnotebook" (a Fujitsu) and a small Chromebook. The <13" form factor can be nice for travel but, in both cases, I ultimately came to the conclusion that the compromises relative to a 13" form factor that didn't weigh that much more just wasn't worth it.
I think you underestimate the build quality of the Macbook Pro, it is quite literally the best laptop ever created, if they produced them now with modern chips and monitors, developers would buy them by the thousands and possibly macos would still be the developers os of choice. I wouldn't hesitate to bring it to the outback. What do you think would happen to a macbook in Australia?
I assume he's saying that if he needs a minimal laptop, he'd bring something pretty cheap and disposable--as I've done on trips. I've certainly brought a cheap Chromebook on some trips even if I use a MacBook at home.
People absolutely get through school and business meetings with smartphones.
If you visit a community college or know someone who teaches at one, a surprisingly high percentage of students do their homework and write papers entirely on their phone. It's kind of amazing.
The trackpad had terrible bugs that pinned the cursor to the side of the screen. That's as far as I got using it. I'm sad that some kid probably ended up with one on account of me.
Every child in the Uruguayan public system got his/her laptop, I don't know at a global scale but it gave access to the internet/technology to thousands of children that would otherwise wouldn't have. So calling it a total failure seems off to me.
By all accounts they were not really useful, broke easily, and couldn't be repaired in the field. Many countries backed out of their commitment once they tried out their samples. Those which took delivery ended up not integrating them into curriculum because they didn't deliver on their promise.
It did kickstart the "netbook" form factor, which ended up replacing most OLPC use cases. So not a total failure from a technology standpoint, like Juicero and Theranos were. But it is a bit of a poster child for everything that's wrong with the MIT Media Lab.
There were older subnotebooks of various kinds but "netbooks" by that name are usually associated with small Atom-based machines that Intel was pushing partly in response to OLPC hype. See, e.g., this article from 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20110130085835/http://blogs.comp...
It did fall short of what they wanted to deliver as a device probably because it was far too ambitious... but they accomplished quite a bit due to that ambition. Consider that it was conceived of in a time before inexpensive laptops were available. In 2005, a low-end laptop still cost well over $1000. Things like a Chromebook, netbook, Raspberry Pi etc. didn't exist yet. If anything, the OLPC probably got companies thinking sooner and more seriously about the low cost portable computing space than they would have otherwise.
I agree. OLPC wasn't a failure in the same sense as the others. They created laptops, they got used, and a lot of people did learn a lot. It didn't succeed to the level they hoped, but that's true for almost all projects. It's easier to be critical in retrospect. OLPC did succeed in making the world a better place, and that's to be commended.
Even 8+ years ago, OLPC was taught as a case study in business school. It was a largely failed project.
It's a pretty classic example of a CEO who was very capable at establishing business partnerships but had such a rigid view about the problem they were trying to solve. They never really proved that the 1:1 concept actually had merit, but ended up being so invested in quantity over quality.
In developing countries, the computers were too simple to teach effective computer skills. And in undeveloped countries, the laptops did nothing to address actual education problems.
Chromebooks have the benefit years of Chrome apps being developed to solve actual problems. They also give up a lot of the goofy ideas like hand crank recharging or mesh networking and etc.
Chromebooks simply took over the netbook market which was already established by the time OLPC got some publicity. I think OLPC failed because it became more about proving that tech and "bold ideas" from silicon valley could change the world, instead of seriously addressing issues in the third world – it reminds me of the PlayPump.
Arguably OLPC's approach has - in hindsight - been discredited, but yeah, it seems overly cruel to lump it in with Juicero or Theranos.
We do have impossibly cheap computers now that are far more accessible, that do nearly all the things normally expected of computers, and with widely available resources for programming on them - RPi, Chromebooks, etc.
The success of those devices relative to OLPC (with of course, the benefit of hindsight) seems to come down to a few major differences in the approach:
- insistence on highly-custom everything, rather than exploiting as much as possible off-the-shelf to keep costs down.
- insistence on targeting the absolute lowest-cost end of the market initially rather than starting at a higher price point and using that as a starting point for iterative cost-reduction.
The latter pitfall one still sees various hardware startups fall into with some regularity. Universal accessibility is a fantastic goal, but often the easiest way to do it is to sell something considerably more expensive first.
I was given an OLPC laptop as a gift, and learned that their CMOS battery (If I remember correctly) was hardwired, and when the battery died the laptop was useless. I sent my OLPC to someone on a forum who claimed to fix them, along with a fee, and never heard back. The only time I’ve been screwed by someone on a niche forum like that.
Still, it was a fun thing to play with. The form factor was like a durable OG iBook, and it worked well for basic tasks.
right, didn't really 'fail' as a 'startup' - it just took a very long time to develop and tech continued to move/struggles to be independent and stable with manufacturer messes and giant competing companies, various interests slowing things down all while user needs changed rapidly and capabilities of platforms increased. This was really a long time ago early 00s things were very different and nowhere near mobile device era and so at the time was very noble and promising.
I didn't need to hear Justin Kan talking stupid claiming it missed the mark because of phones in that video about the toys ignoring the timeline/history, it was years before that which is a lot considering how fast things changed
OLPC straddles the line between startup and social program. Given that it wasn't actively harmful [citation needed], it actually managed to produce the laptops, and they had some non-zero if modest utility, we'd have to place it in the upper ranks of the latter category. Even if it had zero impact, that would merely place it in the modal group [0], nothing to be ashamed of!
A key element of the project was their custom Sugar Linux desktop environment which would have wireless collaboration and data sharing as a central feature, and a suite of custom educational software to run in that environment. The OLPC Foundation never fully delivered on that promise -- the software they shipped was buggy and incomplete, with few applications available and many of the promised features stubbed out or completely absent. The only real saving grace was that their desktop environment included wrappers for Firefox and OpenOffice, and that was enough to make the systems useful to students.
The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible!
The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.
Why though? It's the signal that you're lacking water. If you aren't feeling thirsty, your body is judging that it doesn't need more. There's special circumstances when you should push away any discomfort in getting it when thirsty, like when you're sick, and give it priority, but thirst is pretty much the indicator.
You don't even need to drink that much in the form of glasses of water either, because you are getting it from food throughout the day too.
The Dallas Morning News sent them to subscribers with their Sunday paper back when this was a thing, because they realized nobody would buy one. It still failed miserably.
> I never thought it would go anywhere because who would buy hardware just for that? But I did kinda admire that they tried.
I think they gave away the readers for free. I had one at one point, and I certainly wouldn't have paid a penny for it. I think they were also the basis for quite a few barcode-based hobbyist projects at the time.
In retrospect I see it as ahead of it's time. The idea of "place a computer readable label on things to send you to a special website (etc)" is still alive and used today in the form of QR codes. The hardware problem ended up solved by convincing everyone to carry a computer in their pocket and image recognition, but the central idea is pretty much unchanged.
I always appreciated CueCat because years after they failed I bought one on ebay for $2 and used it as a barcode scanner to categorize all my books. Worked great for that. :)
The best part is when you go to mschf.xyz there are a bunch of links, and when you click one it logs `TypeError: n.setAttribute is not a function` to the console and then doesn't do anything.
millions of dollars to build a homepage with some links on it that spit out JS errors is the ultimate commentary. i think it's genius.
For those unware, this is the same people behind those Lil Nas X shoes with blood in them that made the news a few months back. While they do sell products, they seem to be less of a traditional startup with the goal of making money and more of a mix of satirists, artists, and trolls.
Who's the target audience for this crap? A bunch of Hacker News-esque weekend projects that get a bunch of PR from Vice, WSJ, Verge, etc. every time they release something. Just seems like a team of copycats stealing hackathon ideas, giving them a slight twist, then calls it art and journalists fall all over themselves for it.
You won't see these publications writing about similar projects on HN, because they're not called "drops" (lol) and doesn't have an edgy site. Maybe I'm just jealous of their success, I just don't think it's noteworthy at all.
I had never heard of them before, so I found this article[0] which gives me the impression that they're a 'creative nyc agency / art studio'. No idea how they convinced professional investors to give them millions of dollars, but seems like they create "artworks" and sell them for pretty high prices. I think their target audience is every trust fund kid in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
from going to their website, it seems like they try to use clever web design and limited-time deals to sell weirdo and off-kilter failed products. I clicked on a link to a 'chair simulator' which ended up as a steam game a-la-goat simulator.
It seems like they are a factory to sprinkle some clever web design and marketing to create demand for failed products, making something out of nothing. With time as an incentive. Reminds me of the early days of Groupon.
I thought so too, but after months of occasional research I ended up buying (what I consider) an absurdly expensive pelican cooler.
I looked at it based on some main criteria, like:
1. Is it durable
2. How long will it keep stuff cold?
3. What’s the warranty like?
The pelican was 2-3x the cost of alternatives (but the same as a few competitors like Yeti), but ultimately scored best on each. Based on the material it’s made from and the experience I have with their other products (particularly cases, which the cooler essentially is) I felt confident the cooler would be effectively bomb proof and last ages in harsh conditions. It has a lifetime warranty, but I don’t want to have to use those. I want something to really last.
After a few years it still looks brand new and still keeps ice a ridiculously long time.
It’s kind of funny - I put fish in it when spear fishing remotely, which seems ridiculous because I’m putting gnarly stuff in a really nice cooler. Somehow though the plastic doesn’t retain the smell, and it’s still perfectly usable for regular camping trips. Having insurance that fish I catch will stay fresh is incredible though. If I stay somewhere three nights and get my limit each day, I can bring fish/crab/etc home.
Combined with our rooftop tent it means we can camp really comfortably for a long time. It was well worth the cost so far.
Edit: I should add that I don’t work for pelican or anything, I just like my cooler and have become conditioned to justify why I bought it, haha. So many people give me shit for it, it’s programmed in now. I swear it’s worth it - if you’ll actually use it. Something 1/3 the price is fine for plenty of people’s needs too.
Yes, but the Coolest Cooler with its blender and speakers seems obviously designed for beach parties and not outdoorsmen. I don't doubt there's a market for high-end coolers but there are very different use-cases.
Like, as a car-camper I always spring for the plug-in car-powered Peltier coolers.
Oh I see what you mean, I thought you were more along the lines of someone who thinks the $50 cooler from Walmart is no different from the $350 cooler I bought.
The coolest cooler isn’t for me either, but I guess if you’re at the beach a lot it could have been nice.
I’d prefer to bring ready-made things in my pelican and a travel speaker (though I never play music in public spaces) - I’m not a fan of do-everything devices.
When you go camping, "cooler management" is a pain in the ass. Ice becomes one of your biggest limiting factors in the duration of you trip. Anything that can make keeping cold stuff cold for long periods of time is a worthy investment.
210 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadIt seems the initiative is still kicking since their website is still alive (albeit without an HTTPS certificate).
Sounds very much like a fallacy of relative privation to me.
As a non-deliberate grift—I guess the same math applies? Wildly overpromising and underdelivering on a picnic cooler seems somehow less morally problematic than wildly overpromising and underdelivering on an effort to improve third-world childhood education.
Of course, the counterpoint is that Silicon Valley (or MIT Media Lab) bros whose hearts are in the right place deserve plaudits for their ill-informed-but-generally-well-meaning efforts, even if those efforts waste millions of dollars that could have gone to more effective altruistic endeavors.
Which, like, yeah, that's an argument, I guess?
In the context of work with developing nations, the defense of good intentions is increasingly dismissed out of hand. Good intentions are often deeply problematic and can cause more harm than good - including capture/transfer of resources that could have been used in some other way improve conditions for people.
c.f., many NGO projects to improve stove design in less developed countries [0]
[0] https://nature.berkeley.edu/er100/readings/Crewe_1997.pdf
1. Products which failed because they were targeting their niche poorly (e.g. Juicero, OLPC)
2. Products which failed because they were outright scams (e.g. Theranos, Coolest)
However, I do think the failure of OLPC is still interesting enough to deserve a mention on this list. With OLPC in particular they were trying to be like three different things all at once and they succeeded at none of them.
- OLPC wanted to sell computers to the educational market, so they were selling lots of cheap machines to schools. This is actually not a bad business model; Google and Apple today have basically cornered that market with Chromebooks and iPads. Had OLPC succeeded, we could have had schools covered in cheap XO-1s instead. However...
- OLPC wanted to be a philanthropic mission to the third world, so they were designing the laptop with all sorts of weird features that only made sense for that market. Some of them are reasonable, like they actually intended it to be ruggedized and easy to repair. But they also had some weird features - like, it was designed around being able to mesh-network an entire village together with them. And at one point they were even going to have a handcrank on the thing so you could charge the laptop by hand if necessary. All of these features are unnecessary if you're just selling laptops to schools and they ultimately wound up getting dropped.
- OLPC also was built around it's founder's pet theories about constructionist learning. If you don't know what that means, well, then you're probably not a Hacker News user; because constructonism is how most techies learn a new system. We play around with it. The laptop was designed around a Linux-based UI called Sugar and was specifically intended to push Free Software onto the third world. The idea was that kids could learn how the computer actually worked by modifying the software onboard. It even had a view source button on the keyboard! All of that is catnip to people like us and completely useless for educators.
Ultimately they wound up delivering a very weird product that didn't actually do the thing it promised to do. That's very much in the spirit of a failed startup.
It was just a stupid idea and they underestimated the difficulty of getting them made. It cost far more than they thought and they tried to dig themselves out of that hole by selling them on Amazon and trying to use the profit to pay for the copies they owed to their Kickstarter backers. This caused all sorts of drama, but my impression that they did their best to try to deliver what they had promised.
Theranos was very different in that they were clearly lying about their capabilities, and hid the truth at all costs, up to causing serious problems for people that needed a real analysis and got a fake one.
What the world "needs", is an easy-to assemble frame that you can yourself integrate the functions you need. So if we made coolers to a standard size, with some standardized attachment point, that would be a start.
Then you could have a lightweight wheeled frame of standard dimensions and attachment points, that you could then integrate the components you need: portable power pack, BT speaker system, etc.
We have so few standardized systems for connecting things together physically. There are things like the screw mount for cameras, picatinny rails, and 19in equipment racks, for instance. But so few of the other items in our everyday lives, like BT speakers are engineered that way. They are all designed for style, and can't easily be combined.
If you had a system where everyone with nearly zero mechanical skill could attach things together, this would get us closer to the world where everyone who wanted one could have a coolest cooler. Otherwise you have people trying to stick things together with duct tape, which usually works very poorly if at all.
Also, it had the typical techie issue of "solving" a problem by trying to force more tech into it. Tech people are often like the proverbial person who only has a hammer so sees every problem as a nail.
If they just focused on one slice of the pie, they might have been able to pull it off. For example, build an inexpensive laptop that could be shipped en masse to their target audience.
> ... and had a limited lifespan of about 8 days
Ah, so maybe semifresh then. What's the advantage of the packs then? I can buy such juice at the supermarket, no?
The advantage of the packs is that they can lock you into their ecosystem and charge you more money for the convenience of using the machine. Razor-and-blades is a common, worthwhile business model... if the razor can be made cheaply enough to give away, and the whole package actually solves a problem.
The idea was to basically be "Keurig, but for juice"; and it would have worked had they not charged SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS for the press.
> and the whole package actually solves a problem
The problem of having to carry one less item from the supermarket?
Soda stream is kinda the same, a machine which produce a easily available product directly in you home. But the soda cartridge doesn't expire after a week and can produce alot of fresh soda. So you save alot carrying and it's easy to always have soda since an extra cartridge takes little space. In addition it offer you a choice of how "strong" soda you want.
The only advantage of the juice packs is that they presumable ship it to your door. But it seems very strange if the packs actually are any fresher than presqueezed juice shipped in a regular container (which would've been more convenient). And from the few pictures I saw no water was added to the juice so no volume/weight is saved.
Keurig seems to be coffee capsules which arguable does solve a problem/brings convenience.
you can homebrew your own though, and use a much larger/cheaper CO2 source than what they sell at grocery stores, which I'll probably be doing soon.
They had to drop that feature when they realized that 1) there was no way to anchor the dynamo into the laptop chassis without making the laptop substantially larger, and 2) a child couldn't provide enough power to charge the laptop at a useful rate. They made some external dynamos, but I don't think those were widely used either (again, too slow to be useful).
> It even had a view source button on the keyboard!
And it didn't do anything. The button was baked into the hardware before the software was written. There were a couple of other nonfunctional buttons on the keyboard.
There was, at one point, even a proposal to include a disassembler in Sugar to let students reverse-engineer the (closed-source) wireless card firmware. I don't think that one ever got off the ground.
I have roughly an associates degree in education. (I don't actually have it, but I have more than enough credits.) This is a massive misrepresentation of the importance of constructionism. It's not a tech-bubble fringe theory. It's the only respected idea in pedagogics since at least 30 years. Every mainstream idea in the academic sphere about education is constructionist. Poststructuralism has had no lasting impact. C/ism is the only surviving school of thought in this field.
They had a lot of cool tech, but all the poor integration of a bunch of unrelated open source projects and a lack of people with the ability to design something to fit their market.
The end result was a cool product that nobody wanted that didn't work awfully well. I now use my OLPC as a sunlight visible status board - and I still need to reboot it once a month because the kernel has some memory leak somewhere.
There's an inscription in the marble below the list of products that implores you to pay your respects to capitalism.
In some alternate reality the world is full of expressive robots... and probably doors that sigh when you walk through them.
https://elliq.com/
There's actually quite a few of these that I never knew about, aimed at old people. Not quite sure why.
https://roboticsbiz.com/top-seven-companion-and-social-robot...
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2679/2074/files/banner-vid...
In the context of the "loneliness epidemic" there's something very Black Mirror about this phenomenon.
Or did they?
https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/24/amazons-new-echo-show-10-f...
It was cool since you could basically ask it anything - I'd buy one of those.
https://books.google.com/books?id=v4y5DwAAQBAJ
Dead trees feed the next generation.
I understand not all backers were so lucky, but it seems to be more a situation of the company not being able to execute on something that a lot of people actually did want (judging by the # of backers they had).
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/torquing/zano-autonomou...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/olo3d/olo-the-first-eve...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/117421627/the-peachy-pr...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2106691934/blocks-the-w...
I backed the Peachy Printer and was sad to see it fail (and definitely assume that large parts of the creator's explanations were not entirely true), but a failed $600k Kickstarter is not in the same league as an eight- or nine-figure company producing something that turns out to be completely stupid.
It's not kind or curious. It's just a bit boring.
While the technology was lacking in many respects, it did serve a lot of children at the time, and proved the market that Chromebooks came to later dominate with a similar approach (linux-based OS with minimal resources at $100-300 price point).
I'd say it kind of did (as did Netbooks as a technology for the most part as well).
It's smartphones really that won the segment that OLPC was primarily targeted at. Chromebooks became fairly big in education but primarily AFAIK in developed countries.
That's at least $150/yr for a low end product fun but uncomfortable product. After the netbook I upgraded to a Macbook Pro that was $1250, and I used it for 8 years, after which I also donated it to my sister, and she's still happily using it. That's a roughly similar $150/yr, but for a best in class product with great comfort and wide usability.
I wonder if anyone used a OLPC's for more than a year or two.
I'll bet the children in Africa etc with the OLPCs used them for several years. They can't switch to a MacBook.
if you earn $250 a month in a developing country, $1250 is like 9-month pay (* calculation may be wrong --- gotta sleep?)
Definitely not suggesting kids in Africa should just buy macbook pro's, but $100 is also a lot of upfront cost for a product that's actually not that useful and destined for the wastebin within a year or two.
I do hope I'm wrong and it brought some cool technology too some kids far removed from the big cities.
For "small," the category was replaced by Ultrabooks as people realized that it's usually better to have a thin laptop that doesn't force you to compromise on the display or keyboard size.
I remember traveling with a netbook so that I'd have a computer I could use for tickets and reservations, and even for that, the low resolution 8-10" netbook screens were painful. 12-14" Ultrabooks with >= 1080p panels are much more comfortable, and the weight is comparable.
* By the standards of the time
I really enjoyed the one I bought in college - it actually fit on those terrible fold-out desks that lecture hall seats have.
A netbook, feh, doesn’t matter if it breaks.
I know people that created books and websites on a netbook, who got though school and business meetings with them. I never seen that for a smartphone.
If you visit a community college or know someone who teaches at one, a surprisingly high percentage of students do their homework and write papers entirely on their phone. It's kind of amazing.
It did kickstart the "netbook" form factor, which ended up replacing most OLPC use cases. So not a total failure from a technology standpoint, like Juicero and Theranos were. But it is a bit of a poster child for everything that's wrong with the MIT Media Lab.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...
It's a pretty classic example of a CEO who was very capable at establishing business partnerships but had such a rigid view about the problem they were trying to solve. They never really proved that the 1:1 concept actually had merit, but ended up being so invested in quantity over quality.
In developing countries, the computers were too simple to teach effective computer skills. And in undeveloped countries, the laptops did nothing to address actual education problems.
Chromebooks have the benefit years of Chrome apps being developed to solve actual problems. They also give up a lot of the goofy ideas like hand crank recharging or mesh networking and etc.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-wh...
We do have impossibly cheap computers now that are far more accessible, that do nearly all the things normally expected of computers, and with widely available resources for programming on them - RPi, Chromebooks, etc.
The success of those devices relative to OLPC (with of course, the benefit of hindsight) seems to come down to a few major differences in the approach:
- insistence on highly-custom everything, rather than exploiting as much as possible off-the-shelf to keep costs down.
- insistence on targeting the absolute lowest-cost end of the market initially rather than starting at a higher price point and using that as a starting point for iterative cost-reduction.
The latter pitfall one still sees various hardware startups fall into with some regularity. Universal accessibility is a fantastic goal, but often the easiest way to do it is to sell something considerably more expensive first.
Still, it was a fun thing to play with. The form factor was like a durable OG iBook, and it worked well for basic tasks.
I didn't need to hear Justin Kan talking stupid claiming it missed the mark because of phones in that video about the toys ignoring the timeline/history, it was years before that which is a lot considering how fast things changed
[0]: see the Iron Law of Evaluation.
The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible!
The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.
You know, just in case you lose the sense of thirst for some bizarre reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipsia
The definition of "for some bizarre reason"
You don't even need to drink that much in the form of glasses of water either, because you are getting it from food throughout the day too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/upshot/no-you-do-not-have...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
I never thought it would go anywhere because who would buy hardware just for that? But I did kinda admire that they tried.
One of those 'oh man great idea ... oh no I don't think it will ever work' kinda situations.
It was very much a fun early mass consumer days of the internet kinda shot in the dark / fun to me.
I think they gave away the readers for free. I had one at one point, and I certainly wouldn't have paid a penny for it. I think they were also the basis for quite a few barcode-based hobbyist projects at the time.
http://zteo.com/posts/sunday-hacking-cuecat-delicious-librar...
https://thischemicaldoesnotexist.com/
https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
This is a product from MSCHF which is a $100M+ startup [1]
(feels like they're getting a bit of an astroturfed free ride of prime PR on HN because folks may not realize who is behind this)
[1] https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/279769-42
So they basically put minimal effort into research and surrounded it by a pretty site.
millions of dollars to build a homepage with some links on it that spit out JS errors is the ultimate commentary. i think it's genius.
They also seem to be pulling some wool over journalists' eyes by misrepresenting their raise as hinging on one or the other of their "drops".
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGHxXw7Qcs8
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/curtissilver/2020/11/09/push-pa...
You won't see these publications writing about similar projects on HN, because they're not called "drops" (lol) and doesn't have an edgy site. Maybe I'm just jealous of their success, I just don't think it's noteworthy at all.
[0]https://www.theverge.com/21320127/mschf-products-jesus-shoes...
It seems like they are a factory to sprinkle some clever web design and marketing to create demand for failed products, making something out of nothing. With time as an incentive. Reminds me of the early days of Groupon.
Clever.
Where do you see a $100M+ startup?
On the page linked, I see a $12.5M Series B...
I would call them a small contraversial ultra-modern art company. A caricature more so than a startup.
The hyper expensive cooler segment of society is one I never would have predicted / don't understand.
I looked at it based on some main criteria, like:
1. Is it durable
2. How long will it keep stuff cold?
3. What’s the warranty like?
The pelican was 2-3x the cost of alternatives (but the same as a few competitors like Yeti), but ultimately scored best on each. Based on the material it’s made from and the experience I have with their other products (particularly cases, which the cooler essentially is) I felt confident the cooler would be effectively bomb proof and last ages in harsh conditions. It has a lifetime warranty, but I don’t want to have to use those. I want something to really last.
After a few years it still looks brand new and still keeps ice a ridiculously long time.
It’s kind of funny - I put fish in it when spear fishing remotely, which seems ridiculous because I’m putting gnarly stuff in a really nice cooler. Somehow though the plastic doesn’t retain the smell, and it’s still perfectly usable for regular camping trips. Having insurance that fish I catch will stay fresh is incredible though. If I stay somewhere three nights and get my limit each day, I can bring fish/crab/etc home.
Combined with our rooftop tent it means we can camp really comfortably for a long time. It was well worth the cost so far.
Edit: I should add that I don’t work for pelican or anything, I just like my cooler and have become conditioned to justify why I bought it, haha. So many people give me shit for it, it’s programmed in now. I swear it’s worth it - if you’ll actually use it. Something 1/3 the price is fine for plenty of people’s needs too.
Like, as a car-camper I always spring for the plug-in car-powered Peltier coolers.
The coolest cooler isn’t for me either, but I guess if you’re at the beach a lot it could have been nice.
I’d prefer to bring ready-made things in my pelican and a travel speaker (though I never play music in public spaces) - I’m not a fan of do-everything devices.
https://deadstartuptoys.com/_nuxt/img/cherub-animate.319d6a4...