I've been checking in on the Ubuntu Edge campaign every couple of days now, mostly because I can't decide if I want it to succeed or if I'm just watching a slow-motion pileup because it's fascinating. Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu, if you've somehow avoided Linux your whole life) put this thing up on Indiegogo back on July 22nd with a goal of $32 million in 30 days. Thirty. Two. Million. Dollars. For a phone. That's not a typo and it wasn't a typo when I first read it either, I just stared at the number for a solid minute.
For context on how insane that is: most "huge" crowdfunding campaigns at this point are hitting a million, maybe two, and everyone loses their minds about it. Pebble did something like $10 million total last year and that was treated like a moon landing. Ubuntu Edge wants more than three times that, in a month, for a phone that doesn't exist yet outside of renders and a sapphire crystal screen sample someone photographed at a trade show.
The pitch is actually kind of great though, I'll give them that. It's a phone that runs Ubuntu, but when you dock it to a monitor with the right cable it turns into an actual full desktop Ubuntu machine. Same device, two totally different computers depending on what you plug it into. It can also dual-boot Android if you want. The build was going to be genuinely nuts too, a sapphire crystal display (the same stuff they use on watch faces because regular glass scratches too easily) and enough storage crammed in that most laptops from a couple years back would look embarrassed standing next to it.
The early bird tier was $600 and from what I can tell those sold out within hours of the campaign going live, which tells you there was real appetite for this. Problem is the pricing climbs fast after that, general backers are paying more like $830 for a phone that, again, is a rendering and a promise right now. And this is a fixed-funding campaign on Indiegogo, meaning if they don't hit the full $32 million by August 21st, every single backer gets their money back and nobody gets a phone. No consolation prize, no partial ship. I actually like that part. I'd rather see an all-or-nothing swing than another Kickstarter that raises 40% of its goal, ships anyway, and everyone's stuck with a half-finished gadget and a founder who's gone quiet on the updates page (looking at you, several projects I will not name because I still feel a little burned).
Last time I checked in over the weekend the total was still sitting well under half of what they need, and there are only about two weeks left on the clock. I'd be genuinely shocked if it gets there. The math just isn't friendly. You need tens of thousands of people to drop $600-830 apiece in a really compressed window, and most of the people who were going to jump on this immediately already have by now. The remaining stretch usually has to come from some kind of viral moment or a price drop or a partner swooping in, and I haven't seen any sign of that yet.
None of which means it was a bad idea. I think it's one of the more interesting hardware pitches I've seen this year, dual-boot desktop-in-your-pocket is a genuinely fresh idea and not just another slab with a slightly better camera. I just don't think Indiegogo backers were ever going to fund it at this scale, no matter how cool the concept is. Thirty two million dollars from a crowdfunding site is asking a Kickstarter-sized audience to behave like a venture capital fund, and those are different groups of people with very different amounts of money to throw at unproven hardware.
I'll probably keep checking the totals every few days until the 21st just to see how close it gets, mostly out of morbid curiosity at this point. If by some miracle it does hit the number I will absolutely be annoyed that I didn't throw $600 at the early bird tier when I had the chance.