I'm typing this with a Pebble Time Steel on my wrist that, as of this week, has an expiration date nobody bothered to print on the box.
On Wednesday, Pebble announced its going to be swallowed by Fitbit. Not bought in the "we love your product, keep building it" sense, more in the "we want your engineers and were done sending money" sense. Eric Migicovsky, the guy who ran the first Pebble Kickstarter back in 2012, wrote a blog post that was about as polite as these things get, but the upshot is: Pebble as a company is done. The watches that already shipped will supposedly keep working, though nobody's promising for how long, and there wont be any more of them made.
Here's the part that actually stings for me personally. I backed the original 2012 Kickstarter (ten dollars a month for a smartwatch felt insane at the time, and it still kind of does), and I liked it enough that I went back and backed the 2015 campaign too, the one for Time 2, Pebble 2, and the Core. That campaign pulled in something like $12.8 million, which at the time felt like proof this company had figured something out that the big players hadn't. Instead of a Time 2 landing on my desk sometime next year, I'm apparently getting a refund. Which, fine, a refund is better than nothing, but its also just an admission that the thing I paid for isn't going to exist.
I dont think this is really about Pebble being a bad product. The Time Steel I'm wearing right now still does exactly what I wanted a smartwatch to do in 2015: buzz for texts, show the time without me unlocking my phone, last five or six days on a charge instead of one. Every Apple Watch demo I've sat through since has been more impressive on paper and somehow less appealing to actually own, mostly because Apple Watch dies by dinner if you look at it wrong. Pebble's whole pitch was "we're not trying to be a tiny iPhone, we're trying to be a watch that happens to be smart," and I think that was the right instinct. It just turns out being right about the instinct doesn't pay the rent when Apple and Google and Samsung and Fitbit are all circling the same market with infinitely deeper pockets.
What gets me is how familiar this feels if you've spent any time backing Kickstarter hardware. I've also got a drawer with a busted Coolest Cooler charging cable in it from a campaign I'm not even going to link to because I still havent fully forgiven myself for that one. Hardware is brutal in a way software just isn't — you cant patch a battery, you cant push an update to fix a supply chain. (That's the one em dash I'm allowing myself today, so make it count.) Every crowdfunded hardware company is essentially promising you a future where they've solved manufacturing, logistics, retail, and customer support all at once, on a budget that a real company would consider a rounding error. Most of them dont get there. Pebble at least got four years and multiple actual shipped products out of it before the money ran out, which honestly puts it ahead of a lot of the graveyard.
I dont know what happens to the watch on my wrist in six months. Maybe the servers stay up and nothing changes. Maybe the app quietly stops syncing one day and I find out because my notifications just stop showing up, the way you find out an old website died, by noticing the silence. Either way I dont think I'm buying a Fitbit to replace it, not out of spite exactly, more because a fitness tracker that also tells time was never really what I wanted in the first place. I wanted the watch. Turns out the watch wanted a business model that didn't show up in time.
Still ticking for now, though. Still on my wrist as I finish this post at whatever hour it is that I should really be asleep.