I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get.
You can be more expensive if you’re better, or you can be worse if you’re cheaper, but they’re both the downsides while living purely off brand recognition.
They also blew up in a time where there wasn’t any real competition. Sony had action cameras but they were bulkier and expensive, and didn’t have the features of GoPro.
These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper.
GoPro is a US company designed in U.S. with manufacturing in Thailand, China, and Mexico.
Insta360 is a Chinese company designed in Shenzhen and built there, too.
People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place.
A similar pattern happened with drones with DJI, intentionally killing all non-Chinese drone brands. And with BambuLabs (founded by ex-DJI) with 3D printers (the only good non-Chinese printer that doesn’t cost 10-100x as much is Prusa, and they’re facing extremely strong headwinds).
Legitimately better Chinese products (incredible engineering) that have massive industrial policy support, probably industrial espionage support (as in the case of DJI for certain), massive influencer marketing campaigns, and near zero cost of capital. When China wants to deindustrialize non-Chinese industries for strategic and/or natsec reasons, they are incredibly good at it. (And note it’s not US-only, China targets basically ANY brand that isn’t Chinese. China absolutely does this to Europe as well… and you can see them doing it in real-time with automotive.)
The only surprising thing to me is how people just act like it’s not happening. I guess for people who don’t have any experience working on federal government adjacent aerospace stuff, the idea of natsec considerations for IT hardware seems entirely abstract, but it’s incredibly real if you do.
If your country’s industrial and defense policy relies on individual consumers making choices that are worse for them on almost all metrics, it’s time to think about on worse payroll your politicians are.
Absolutely true. But China’s industrial dominance is also the government immiserating its people, just in a different way. Domestic consumption in China is famously low, work culture is famously bad (996,etc). And this is because of what their government, not the people of China, have chosen to do.
>But China’s industrial dominance is also the government immiserating its people
Didn't they bring hundreds of millions out of poverty, and built amazing cities and facilities in the past 30 years?
>Domestic consumption in China is famously low
Compared to what, the US? Compared to China is at a historical high, isn't it? And they're doing quite well even compared to like 70% of the world and rising.
So ridiculous. So a bit of subsidy is ok, but no more than the US does? As a country that’s suffered from the US subsidising its own industries, my sympathy is zero.
Basically every "made in USA" consumer product has a DOD contract. The DOD is mandated by law to purchase from US companies, so there is a huge sector of small-to-medium businesses which only exist because there is a guaranteed order coming every quarter for uniforms or boots or other equipment that would likely be 1/3 the price if they were contract-manufactured in China or Vietnam.
Not saying this is uniformly bad, because without the law the number of businesses with the ability to manufacture this stuff would trend toward zero, but it is a form of subsidy.
If a country hands out enormous subsidies but yet isn't leading in anything, then maybe it's time to consider what structural reasons are causing these subsidies to be squandered and whose bottom lines are being padded.
I heard that when some country wants to pay in a different currency than USD for oil, a coup suddenly happens, or a helicopter comes and the president gets kidnapped
Successful Chinese industries tend to be subsidized at the level of cities and regions. This creates fierce intra national rivalry that forces rapid evolution and excellence. Electric vehicles are an example.
Anything the federal government pumps money into tends not to do as well.
Cameras need to connect somewhere, somehow to offload their videos/photos. Whether that's network, USB, SD card, those are all attack vectors. Hell, even the files themselves can act as payloads.
People know it’s happening. What do you expect an average consumer to do about it? Pay more out of pocket due to the potential national security risks?
Yeah but muh illegal aliens and muh christianity and muh identity politics and whatever else nonsense the american voter actually seems to care about more
He’s good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Rather than actually getting real on China and their abuse of the postal system, it’s all about tarrifs on penguins.
Biden did far more with the chips act, but rather than building on that trunk failed to enact any meaningful change. And of course make billions in the side from bribery.
Perhaps a huge tell about national strategy is the fact that the owner has $10s of millions to loan to the company? US economic structure in post WWII era has increasingly focused on return on capital (and value extraction). How can that compete in long term with an economy which prioritizes reinvestment *in industry*?
One would presume that the founder is investing their money into something, probably equities, that is an investment in industry. They could be either selling those equities for a loan here or taking a loan against those equities to loan to GoPro (if the cost of capital is lower for them than GoPro, which seems plausible.)
I generally agree with your point about value extraction vs. re-investment.
Also on Avinox motors on e-mtn bikes. Originally made by DJI, then spun off into their own company, and they are starting to eat the competition on all e-mtn bikes at this point. Bosch, TQ, Shimano, et al just can't compete, especially because Avinox is iterating at startup pace and all the rest are iterating at bike pace (slowly).
I'm not sure what stops some of these industries from essentially being more nationalist like China, but more centrist as a company like Palantir. If these risks are as big as you claim, a centralized authority should reverse engineer the things that work done in China or where-ever and use open source/build a better software stack that supplants what's out on the market currently.
This is of course beyond stupid considering the pace of 3d printer vs one PET bottle blow molding machine that can produce same shape shells at thousand units /hour.
Is it? With a 3d printer you can print any piece on demand, change design without changing tooling and make pieces that are semi-hollow inside for lightness.
The western countries deindustrialized themselves though. That's just capitalism chasing ever increasing profits and moving production to where it's cheaper, i.e.from west to China. In fact this was cherished because it increased share holder profits.
>People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place.
In what way exactly? The camera will magically communicate to the mothership?
100%. It would strongly behoove the US to encourage domestic 3d printer manufacture (or friendly countries like Japan), to the point of bannning Bambu and Chinese companies. Obviously we are doing fine for industrial 3d printers, but the small scale consumer stuff is very important too.
If and when AI commiditizes professional services, it would be good to have modern industry to fall back on. With 3d printing the gap isnt insurmountable yet.
However, our country is run by lawyers, not engineers, so I dont have too much hope. At least a lot of our billionaires started out as engineers...
If you’ve spent a life and the market being supreme then it’s a shock. China’s economic system is wiping the floor with the west.
The U.K. has just nationalised a steel plant which had been bought by China to stop it from being destroyed, and of course the economic right wing hate this as steel is far cheaper to import.
As someone with both an Insta360 camera and a Bambu printer, I feel it, would love to buy GoPro and Prusa, but the value just isn't there.
For one, I had a GoPro whose sensor broke after about 20 minutes of recorded. I ended up getting 3 different replacements, all of which also broke. In the end I just forgot about it when my home burnt down in a wildfire. I got an Insta360 with better picture quality that's also been more reliable for a similar cost.
And I would have loved to buy a Prusa printer but I got a Bambu P1S combo for $600, an equivalent Prusa plus the $300 shipping to Canada would have been ~$2500 CAD. For making trinkets for my 3 year old son plus the few random other things I'd make it's not worth it to pay 4x the money.
Maybe it'll forever be this way due to the differences in cost of living but I do feel as though there's a million barriers to entry to building a business in North America, at least a business that's not fully online.
Core One+ is $1899 CAD, the MMU3 for the Core One+ is $579 CAD and shipping was quoted over $300 since they ship from Europe and not the US to Canada. Just put these into their shopping cart on their site, right now quoting $2887 (including shipping and duties).
I did get a particularly good deal on the P1S combo apparently, the price on their website already higher than what I paid and it's significantly less in Canada than the US with exchange rate. Are they exactly equivalent, dunno, but both are the cheapest Core XY models with enclosure + colour changer that either sell.
Prusa is also cheaper in the US and EU than Canada.
China does not want to deindustrialize any country. Why do you think of everything in terms of war and domination ? China has built a industry capable of taking any product and make it better and cheaper. There is no psycho strategy behind it. They will do it till every chinese will live a comfortable life equal to an american. At that point america will be able to compete again.
The CCP has publicly explained that their strategy is indeed to dominate key sectors via gov subsidies, de-industrialize other nations and gain strategic leverage in the process.
I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get.
Sounds very similar to another US company - Garmin. They are still popular, but have been raising prices a lot every generation, because for a long time there was no real competition [1]. At this point, Garmin watches that have mapping support have an introduction price of >600 Euro. Even at that price point, zooming or panning maps is excruciatingly slow (sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to re-render) because they have used the same CPU/MCU for multiple generations while increasing screen resolution. They also haven't really innovated a lot as of recently and are moving some new functionality behind a subscription.
This has opened a large gap for Chinese competition. Now you can get a Coros Nomad that goes head-to-head with models like the Garmin Enduro for 350 Euro. They don't have full feature parity yet, but they are so rapidly adding features that they will at some point. Also, in contrast to Garmin, they seem to be using modern microcontrollers, so panning or zooming a map is insanely fast in comparison, while still having ~20 days of battery for daily use.
[1] Of the traditional competitors, Apple Watch Ultra and Galaxy Watch Ultra have gotten closer, but are nowhere near the battery life, robustness, mapping support, mapping + workout support, etc.
> Garmin watches that have mapping support have an introduction price of >600 Euro. Even at that price point, zooming or panning maps is excruciatingly slow
I just got a Garmin Instinct 3 Solar. It does mapping, and cost me about $300 US.
You're right that it's slow due to a wimpy processor. But the processor isn't because they're too lazy to innovate, but because they have something sipping tiny amounts of power so that I can get a battery life of several weeks.
I just got a Garmin Instinct 3 Solar. It does mapping, and cost me about $300 US.
As a sibling commenter said, the Instinct 3 Solar only does breadcrumb navigation, it doesn't do topographic maps on the watch (there are some Connect IQ apps that can add mapping, but you don't get good integration with workouts).
I use them all the time when cycling. I often plan a route, but when some different direction looks more interesting, I can spot check whether it leads to bike paths that will eventually merge back into my grand plan, erm, route. Or sometimes even for following the route, you want to look ahead by quickly zooming out or get a lot of detail at some complex intersection, where having a full map gives you much better orientation.
Well, except on a Garmin, my Fenix 8 is often so slow that I had to pause cycling to zoom in/out (even more complicated by not being able to do gradual zooming because it does not have a crown).
Yes, I know I can also use a bike GPS or a more generic GPSr with a large screen. I have used their gpsmap line since 2010 or so and even have the gpsmap H1. But having to always carry it around when you have a break somewhere is a drag and I always have a watch on me anyway. So I primarily use the gpsmap for geocaching and switched to using a watch for other activities.
but because they have something sipping tiny amounts of power so that I can get a battery life of several weeks
Coros watches have several weeks of battery life and fast maps. It is laziness (or margin maximization), because they could reach the same power budget by moving to a processor that is on a smaller node.
> I know I can also use a bike GPS or a more generic GPSr with a large screen.
Their bike computers have a long lasting battery and are helpful for data. But wow are they frustrating. Software update regularly loses the config, the interface is just so painful (laggy touch screen or confusing buttons).
The mapping is hard to follow.
Not that Strava mapping on a phone is any better. Why can’t Strava put arrows on the direction of travel?
Sounds like the perfect use-case for big-small processors. A power-sipper for routine 99.99% of operations and a more powerful beast for the CPU intensive ops.
It's mostly because Garmin wants to maximize profits by sticking to old CPUs. The Coros watches (from what I've heard, the same applies to Suunto and Polar) are fast.
This has been an issue across the whole Garmin product line. E.g. the Garmin eTrex 32x from 2019 still used the same CPU as the eTrex 30 from 2011. 8 years without a CPU update. And the eTrex was already had miserably slow map rendering in 2011 with maps from that year.
I think they meant watches that can show actual maps, not just a line or arrow with your route. That feature has always been reserved for the more expensive watches.
The more expensive watches (Fenix) also have long battery lives: lasting up to a month on a battery that can fit in a watch. The processors still have to sip power.
The Coros watches are less than half the price, have 22 days of battery life in smartwatch mode (in the Nomad) and render maps extremely fast. If they added solar, they could probably also last a month (the Coros Apex 4 does 24 days, also without solar).
The funniest thing is that earlier versions of the Coros even used the Garmin map format (though as many small files and not a single/small number of .img). Though they have switched to the open PMTiles format in later versions.
BTW, I had a Fenix 7x solar (before a Fenix 8 AMOLED) and it would usually 'only' last about two weeks. I think you can only reach Garmin's stated time if you disable a lot of functionality.
This is correct. There are a number of excellent asymmetric multicore MCU platforms now. You don't have to choose between efficiency and performance today.
It’s interesting that you mention Garmin - they’re a good example of pivoting from your original market (standalone gps units for cars) once you see a nimble competitor eating away at it (gps-enabled smartphones). Garmin would be dead if they had held fast on the standalone GPS market.
I'm not sure you are fully aware of the markets that Garmin is in. When it comes to marine, aviation and offroad, you simply cannot run a gps app on a phone. E.g.
About 10 years ago I was looking for a rugged small camera. Found some by Garmin that were on a closeout sale. Excellent quality, never owned a GoPro so can't compare but I used them in similar applications and they never had an issue.
As a motorcyclist and sailor, their hardware is second to none in terms of build quality and robustness. The ability to look down at my Zumo GPS on my motorcycle in a rain storm on a dirt road and have it respond to my wet dirty glove is a close to magic as you will get.
Then there's the watches, the Instinct range is ok but I have a button that doesn't pop back out, my wife's vivoactive suffered the well known touch failure.
However, as a UXer I will say that across all products the software interaction model sucks balls. "China" can and will produce hardware to meet a price point, its not that they can't build good products.
As soon as "China" figures out how to do good UX, the last moat western companies have will fall.
I think the only sports watch company that has an app that is worse than Garmin's is Polar. I have used Garmin devices since 2010, but their UX is (as you say) pretty quirky. They changed the UI/UX of the gpsmap H1 to look more like a smartphone, but it is still weird. Another issue is that their software has been very buggy the last few years, with software only stabilizing 1-2 years after the release. One the largest external source for Garmin information (gpsrchive) has actively recommended against purchasing the H1 because it has been so buggy. Similarly, earlier firmware releases of the Fenix 8 had a lot of issues. Also a lot of functionality of older units hasn't been implemented yet. These are often not small bugs, but of the type, "oopsie, your device froze or rebooted while you were navigating". They basically released an alpha version as a final product.
I don't know about UX, but I've had my Coros watch for a few weeks now and I didn't find it hard to understand. I think it's much easier than when I first learned to use a Fenix watch. It misses some Garmin features though that I'd really like to see like off-course rerouting. But like I said above, they have been adding features at a good pace and a drastically undercutting Garmin on price (most watches less than half the price of the closest Garmin watch).
'China' can do UX just fine, when the incentive is there. Part of the reason UX seems rough, outside of low quality products where it's a tertiary consideration, is cultural differences. User interfaces are part of culture, like everything humans touch. Those preferences shape the resulting tech. Sometimes those choices are less optimal for western users with their own preferences.
One cool feature I've read about is that (at least some) GoPro cameras can save high-resolution IMU measurements to the recorded video files, timestamped and interleaved with video frames. This can be useful for mapping applications, e.g. https://joshi-bharat.github.io/projects/gopro/
Are there any competitors on the market that also have this feature? I've looked around a few times in the past and haven't found any. Many cameras say that they have an IMU, presumably for image stabilization, but they don't seem to record or expose that data.
According to a quick search, GoPro has an Enterprise Valuation of $160M. That would be chump change for a large tech company. The brand has name recognition value in excess of that figure. I suspect some big company will happily buy it but not sure who. It has to be a company that wants to get into the camera market. I don't think the brand name is as valuable to an existing camera company-though I could be wrong.
Apple, Google, and Amazon could all make sense. Google would see the business as an opportunity to strengthen its existing IoT portfolio. Apple an opportunity to add to its integrated consumer electronics offering. Amazon would be more a play to improve GoPro's margins. They could easily push it with prime deals, etc.
I could also see Samsung getting in.
Regardless, expect to see more integration, AI features, etc, after acquisition.
> These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper.
I had a GoPro many years ago. Eventually sold it because I needed the money for other things.
Been thinking about buying a new action camera eventually.
Got any recommendations?
The one that interests me the most of the ones I’ve seen is the Insta360 X4 Air plus an underwater case for it.
I want to be able to bring my camera swimming, bicycling, hiking, etc. And I think 360 degree cameras are pretty cool. Hopefully it’s not just a gimmick that loses its appeal after a few hours.
As someone who watches a reasonable amount of PoV outdoor activity footage shot on helmet cams and the like (base jumping, mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, etc)… I don’t love watching 360 videos uploaded in the raw because of the perspective distortion.
I’m assuming it must be possible, if the resolution is good enough, to post process a portion of each overall frame into an undistorted 1080p (or better) view of the key view of the action, but a lot of people don’t do this (perhaps it’s much more difficult or time-consuming that I’m imagining, or perhaps many viewers enjoy the distorted 360 view more than I do).
part of this is by design, which unfortunately also makes very steep terrain not look as terrifying, but gives you huge FOV. I find in all but the latest Instas its the worse low-light quality that is most notable. More annoying is that everyone is trying to compete on weird angles and perspectives, andY YT shills push attachments and niche features vs. photographic quality
If you're willing to put a little time into video editing, a 360 cam is great. The insta360 tools can make that a little easier if you want something simple.
If you just want to store a snapshot of the moment as it was captured, a regular camera that you pointed in the right direction is better.
The downside is the 360 editing tools are kind of sluggish and not great to work with, and even at 8k res in-camera, the export for a 'normal' looking FoV is pretty low quality compared to a normal action cam recording in 4k.
I have an insta360 X5, it's neat and there's a lot of flexibility, but it does have downsides.
The app is also a pile of crap, it's crammed full of ads, social media junk I don't want, it's slow as molasses, and the size of the app is massive.
I'd love to film in 3d. But being dependent on a single app of a single company (that is not even a good app right now) is literally the worst feature for a hardware I could imagine.
A gopro isn't worse than the competition, nor at a premium.
What makes gopro the standard in proper productions (and science etc) is that they're so hackable with the gopro labs software. With that, all the other cameras are toys in comparison for professional usage.
It's mostly FUD and/or paid reviewers. Both DJI and Insta have good products, but also very good at sponsoring in a way where things get reviewed very in their favor, making people have an impression that doesn't quite match reality. So the meme one constantly read online about how gopros are so much worse is false. They have their issues, but mostly trade offs.
It also doesn’t help that you could probably get by with a hero 4 black even today lol
Man I still can’t believe how bad the rollout of the karma was. I remember at the time everyone in my professional circles was buzzing about it. Then they started literally falling out of the sky. Feel like they never recovered
Eh, I have a Hero 4 black. And if you as the other commenter only think about resolution it can look like that, but the difference is enormous.
4k on a gopro 13 is far far far clearer. And the stabilization is night and day. Half my hero4 videos are mostly blurry shakes and quite jarring to watch, with a bad fov. The stabilization on modern gopros is magical. The bitrate and quality is orders of magnitude better. You can now pull good quality stills from the video if you want. Hero4 can't handle anything but perfect blue sky in the middle of the day. Etc etc
Apparently (checked with AI), Hero 4 Black was the first camera with 30 fps 4k video and was released 12 years ago already (how time flies)
Frankly, after 4k/30 and 1080p/60, there are strong diminishing returns, because most people these days watch videos on their phones in suboptimal conditions (or older desktops that may still be on 1080p), so what are they going to do with your 5k/6k video?
Sure, you can keep doing minor improvements to sensors and optics, but for a consumer it will not justify getting a new model for $500.
Also, competing with smartphone cameras which have gotten better over the years. I bet 99% of people would not be able to tell a gopro video from a phone video.
DJI Osmo cameras are good, I still have my original Osmo action and while the quality is a bit behind now, the battery life and general stability and menus are better than GoPro IMO.
I've found DJI cameras also don't discharge their batteries when sitting, my gopro 11 black is somehow always dead when I grab it even after a few weeks, but my osmo action is still at ~70% after a year.
Insta360 also has some neat offerings, but their software/app is absolutely abysmal, it's crammed full of ads and takes up several GB of space. It also requires an account login.
Many years ago had my first Gopro camera that seriously overheated, sent it for repairs, they said there was nothing wrong with it. It literally turned too hot to handle after taking a few clips and wouldn't work. I think there was some serious hardware issue that caused it to then drain the whole battery.
Gave the brand a second chance some years ago. Couldn't export my videos from the app, it always hanged. So I couldn't share footage. Apparently a common long standing problem on forums.
It’s the classic situation. China can outcompete all this stuff. It doesn’t really matter. Roomba, GoPro, they’re all going to be crushed by Chinese manufacturers. You just can’t get the margins to work anywhere else and if you do the R&D you’re a sucker.
I’ve had a few GoPros and a few GoPro 360s. I also had Roombas so you can blame me as the brand killer.
As a cyclist (and former racer), I still want to know how to capture videos with telemetry overlays (speed, power, HR, etc) from my head unit in a straightforward way. NorCal Cycling's videos - https://www.youtube.com/@NorCalCycling - are an excellent demonstration of this at work.
Yes, I've done the Garmin VIRB Edit thing, which is the very approach recommended by Jeff (NorCalCycling) in his tutorial videos on the subject. It feels like something out of 2005. It is incredibly labour-intensive and imprecise unless you're fortunate enough to be in relatively short criteriums where you've got the battery runtime to just record the whole race. Most real-world events and rides require one to turn the camera on and off at certain moments, which then requires _hours_ of stitching together clips and correlating them to GPS fixes from the head unit (in the FIT file), and quite imprecisely at that.
There has to be a more 2026 solution to this. All you need to do is correlate the footage to the FIT data points by timestamp, in the temporal domain.
If Garmin came out with one, it would absolutely annihilate this space. To the best of my knowledge, there is no competition that offers anything turn-key, though perhaps the best of my knowledge has not aged well and by now there is something. It's maddening.
Dunno if useful, but in RC hobby area we have had OSD (on-screen displays) for decades. Both in analog and digital video, with recording (analog OSD there's just a small chip). Although analog is probably not relevant for you -- quality is crap and you don't care about milliseconds latency as we do, so go with digital (and not HDZero, they are technically digital, but heavily invested in low-latency, for pro racers).
Just don't buy DJI -- they absolutely want lock you in to their tools, parts are often not compatible even within DJI, require to create an online account, require an app (from a custom .apk on android) and in general have questionable privacy.
Of the open-source systems there's a new OpenIPC system with a most popular implementation of RunCam WifiLink 2 that supports onboard SD card recording [1] [2].
More proprietary (but still cross-compatible with others) is Walksnail Avatar V2 [3] with 32GB of internal storage.
For your case, you don't need a VRX (receiver), although you can totally give it your your buddies to see your race (with OSD) in real time. VRX can be built-in to goggles (if the same company), or as a separate module that connects to your preferred goggles over mini-HDMI, also with recording. [4] [5]
Sounds like you want https://goprotelemetryextractor.com/telemetry-overlay-gps-vi... — feed it your GoPro footage, your Garmin FIT file, set up your gauges as you so desire and you’re off to the races (or the rendering at least). I suspect a lot of cycling Vloggers use it.
No, it doesn't. Gopro actually hss gps and sensors built in, most dji cameras don't (does any?). You need extra hardware, or provide the data yourself. While in gopro you just enable it on the clip.
Of courses, for more advanced stuff you might want to provide the telemetry yourself (like the gopro doesn't know your wattage). But it does have much more than dji out of the box.
I guess I should say it has some capabilities in this area.
Been a while since I used it, but it will generate the overlays and you can sync it with your ride data (eg Strava or Apple Health in my case, but iirc it also supports Garmin Connect).
There are some capability differences between the mobile app and the Insta360 studio desktop app.
I'm pretty sure it handled multiple files, but in my case they were the chunks that the camera splits its recording into, which is a bit different than than having multiple clips as you described.
Am I wrong in thinking you could do this with ffmpeg, your video files, and your data from Strava/Garmin/whatever? This feels like a program an LLM (or human!) could write pretty easily
You would think it would be that straightforward. However, accurate synchronisation on GPS or temporal attributes would be required.
Judging by the paucity of software to do this, historically, it is not a straightforward problem, or all the devices involved don't generate all the data points required.
The real mess is when you have 26 clips from a long event to string together. It can easily take a day and a half to make a 3 minute montage out of that.
This sounds like something Claude Code could do very easily. If you need to actually look at the videos that's harder but still possible, but if it's just aligning GPS times and timestamps with reasonably accurate clocks, Claude Could probably do the ffmpeg commands unsupervised. I wouldn't be surprised if Haiku (the cheapest model) could do it, or an open-source agent harness with another small 30B model.
Just prompting claude (probably I would start with Opus) "I would like a HUD display of the following metrics from my Fit file overlayed on these GoPro videos, and I'd like the videos stitched together (there are some gaps, I want seamless playback) it would probably do it in 30 minutes or less, and the majority of the time would probably be ffmpeg.
Yeah I had a little script to do something similar (no video, but merging data) just for Strava recording a while back. Had forgotten all about it until this description & 'FIT files'.
Video's a bit more complex no doubt, but like you say all the pieces are there, SMoP.
Extremely similar to iRobot (Roomba). They both practically genericized themselves by inventing and dominating the product category, then just couldn't keep up with the competition. GoPro does feel more self inflicted though. Their drone was a failure, and they burnt a lot of money trying to do some kind of pivot to being a media company.
Got any you'd recommend? I've been paying the Hue tax because they're the only bulbs I've had with zero connectivity issues ever across several years, whereas every other brand I've tried has been very unreliable.
When I was looking to buy an action camera last year, I was deciding between Insta360 and DJI, with many YouTubers suggesting outright against GoPro since they haven't kept up with image quality.
Action cameras sound like a tough business, since most of them are built to last ages, and they need to keep the vast majority of content creators happy trying to increase image quality in a small form factor.
Anyway, I bought the Insta360 Go Ultra I had my mind on from the start, which I'm still reasonably happy with.
Having owned a number of GoPros, I made the same switch last year.
The Insta360 has super annoying/intrusive software that always feels like it's trying to sell me something, but it's pretty excellent in terms of actual video quality.
I don't really use the software, not even for updates.
I copy out the footage directly using a USB-C cable (wish it had USB 3.0), and do firmware updates by just dropping the update file into the microSD card.
It's friggin' fabulous that everything is doable without having to use an app. (Also the app takes up somewhere between 1-2GB of storage on my phone, and I don't have that kind of space.)
That's fine for flat videos, but 360 videos usually need processing before they're usable. I'm unsure if there are other software options that handle Insta360 360 videos well.
When 360 videos first started to become viable, all we had were looking at the flattened image. It took a bit to get used to. Eventually, the filters caught up so you could slide the rotation around to keep action centered which made things simple in comparison.
It's factually incorrect that gopro hasn't kept up with image quality. One independent comparison I saw for instance put the gp13 in front of the others in most situations except low light. So if anything it's contested who's better/worse, far far from the statement in those videos.
It's factually correct and widely known that lots of tech "reviewers" get paid by the competition to shill products, was a whole scandal even with how Insta360 was caught telling reviewers not to mention their sponsorship. The contracts also often forbid them do do direct comparisons. Also funny how there will be a hundred identical reviews, as they all got the same script.
So, my statement is true. If you've watched a couple of videoes telling you to buy dji/insta360, it's very very likely you've been lied to.
A whole bunch of American and Western multinational companies design hardware in Western countries and manufacture them in China.
The manufacturing isn’t usually the most valuable part of the value chain. E.g., Apple makes the most money when you sell you an iPhone, not their Chinese and Indian factory suppliers and assemblers.
GoPro isn’t failing because they’re an American brand. They’re failing because they’re mismanaged and they made a bunch of product mistakes.
If you want more examples I can give them to you: Google hardware/phones, HP, Dell, Sonos, Bose, Ubiquiti, Cisco, Nvidia, Qualcomm.
Most Japanese corporations still do a lot of their design work in Japan. Sony even does manufacturing of Raspberry Pi devices in Wales.
And of course, speaking of Sony, the money maker for that console is in software, and most of Sony’s studios are in Western countries like the US and Japan. The manufacture of the console is the lowest value part of the business.
Companies that have significant manufacturing and fabrication outside of China/Taiwan: Intel, IBM, GlobalFoundries, ON Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Whisker (Litter Robot), and a very large percentage of the automotive industry.
Large appliances brands have a heavy presence in the US, Canada, and Mexico, including LG, Samsung, Whirlpool, GE appliances, Speed Queen, SubZero/Wolf/Cove, BSH Home Appliances (Bosch/Thermador), Electrolux.
Most of those appliance brands have become expensive enshittified garbage, or are legendary brands that have been bought up (e.g. KitchenAid used to be a Hobart brand, it's now owned by Whirlpool. Their stand mixers used to last generations; the new ones have a lot of plastic parts inside them). I have one of the original Cuisinart food processors that my mom bought in the 1970s. The base/motor unit is heavy and it still works today. The brand today is now just a label on Conair kitchen gadgets.
Some have held out. Speed Queen are still made in Wisconsin. I will be looking at them when I need to replace my laundry machines, which I expect in the next couple of years.
A lot of what you’re saying is essentially not relevant, because even the enshittified brands are still designing and manufacturing/performing final assembly in Western countries.
Not their entire product lineups, but still a good chunk of them, especially for heavier and physically larger appliances. Your future speed queen might be just as American as if you had bought a cheap GE.
I don’t know where it’s made (probably not the US) but Cuisinart still makes the classic heavy AF food processor, if you’re interested in that.
As a side note, I don’t find that heavy weight or an older design/more metal parts has that much to do with quality or longevity. A lot of old stuff was heavy because material science had fewer options to work with. A motor assembly being made of cast iron doesn’t make it magically last longer. For example, my KitchenAid stand mixer is definitely the newer kind that has plastic parts inside, but it has never needed service and has been getting regular use for a decade with no degradation. Believe it or not I even have a notoriously unreliable Samsung washer and dryer from 2012 that are still going with zero maintenance. It even has a stupid touch screen and, yep, that works flawlessly.
Maybe the bar is low to consider that impressive but I think the point is that a lot of things getting cost cut has been somewhat logical. I see new buy it for life toasters on the market like the Lotus brand selling for $350. I just replaced a $40 Cuisinart garbage toaster that lasted 3 years and died. Chinese off brands built to similar quality by the same factories without the western brand name cost about $20.
So, do the math on that. The Lotus toaster has to last somewhere between 25 and 50 years to reach cost break-even compared to a cheap toaster.
The same math maths for speed queen washers and dryers. They are a great kit but they cost 4x more than a normal washer and dryer. If you conservatively estimate that a cheap washer/dryer lasts 6 years, you’re at 24 years before that speed queen breaks even.
If we are going to combat the economic reality of numbers like these then we need to start taxing disposal.
This puts no value on the costs that unreliable and poorly built appliances add to your life.
A dead toaster is a minor inconvenience. You can go without toast for quite a while. and a toaster can be replaced at any department store. You can carry it home and plug it in. Or order one online and have it at your door the next day. They are cheap enough and unimportant enough that there's no real downside to making price the dominant consideration.
A dead washing machine is a bigger deal, especially if your household has a few kids. You can't go without doing the laundry for very long. Replacing a large appliance involves scheduling a delivery and possibly installation, and maybe the schedule is already full until next week and you'll have to take a day off work to be home for that. I'll pay quite a bit extra to avoid that any more often than necessary. And that doesn't consider the value of the daily satisfaction of using well made appliances. They feel solid, they work without glitches, they are quiet, they are consistent, you don't worry about them.
Even with a toaster some of that applies. I've had toasters that were a daily annoyance to use. They burnt the toast, or toasted unevenly, sometimes randomly, or if you were making a lot of toast the subsequent batches would come out differently from the first. It's worth something to have a toaster that just reliably makes toast, the same way, every day.
> The GoPros aren’t manufactured in the US either.
True. Virtually nothing is.
Though its probably worth noting that Apple's approach to China exists at a much more integrated and larger scale than your average US (or other western) electronics company and is more akin to a fully integrated partnership with various entities like Foxconn than the typical "let's offshore the manufacturing stage" that most other companies take.
At the manufacturing level it largely isn't, no, though as others have pointed out Apple at least still has the ability to explore options outside China. But Apple represents a lack of vertical integration for its big Chinese suppliers like Foxconn, an American middleman taking a big slice of the revenues and profits which come from the customer. One thing to note is that Android isn't all that different, as phone makers still have to tithe to Google.
One factor (mentioned at https://bsky.app/profile/rajakorman.bsky.social/post/3mqubnh... for instance) is Western distrust of the Chinese government and the regulatory barriers erected from both sides. TikTok's probably a good case study. There was a conspicuous lack of Chinese software companies having success in the Western consumer market before TikTok. Building TikTok involved creating a new product aimed at RoW which was separate from its original Chinese model, Douyin. And then after TikTok Western success was still elusive, to some extent, as the US government snatched away Bytedance's toy.
Though even beyond tech and other politically sensitive areas China's generally been pretty slow at generating RoW-consumer-facing products and brands. There's also the slightly remarkable fact that historically (and even to some extent still today) GUIs have been extremely, mysteriously hard for large companies worldwide to do well. The main exception have tended to either be called "Apple" or have dedicated themselves to copying Apple's homework:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288221 .
Is it common in American factories to have US flags hanging on the walls similar to how dictators like to hang their portraits in factories? Never seen that in the (admitted small amount) of factories I've visited around in Europe, but tends to also give off a bit of "too much nationalism" vibe around here unless there is a special event, the US flag seems to be treated differently in the US so maybe it's a common sight?
I keep forgetting that there is a requirement to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in US schools [1], which is just mind-boggling to me, and it's never something they proudly advertise through their propaganda arm of Hollywood. In hundreds of US-produced shows set in US schools, that detail is always conveniently omitted.
Here's how it works for the non-Americans of us:
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," should be rendered by standing at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart.
Remembering this often-forgotten detail puts a lot of US culture and behaviour in perspective. Also let's not forget the Bellamy salute, in use for 50 years until 1942: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
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1: and in congressional sessions, government meetings at local levels, and meetings held by many private organizations, according to Wikipedia
> I keep forgetting that there is a requirement to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in US schools
There most certainly is not. The pledge is common in schools but the Supreme Court has ruled no one is required to participate and cannot be punished for non-participation. Is it still weird? Sure. But it’s not required.
"Not required" but my teachers made it abundantly clear what they thought of being forced to allow ungrateful troublemakers to disrespect their country.
I always disliked the Pledge and began to strongly dislike it after moving away from the religion it tries to establish as the national religion, but I was keenly aware that picking this fight would cost me considerable political capital and chose not to.
In the US schools I'm familiar with, it's "not required" kind of like how it's not required to attend meetings at work. Nobody's forcing you, but it will be noticed and there will be consequences.
What sort of consequences? I'm guessing the US got rid of corporal punishment, and since it's optional, could they give like detention and stuff for it? Or is this more about being bullied/similar by peers?
When I was in school decades ago, the consequences were that the teacher would single you out and scold you to “follow directions”, maybe they’d do whatever write up for not following directions. I’m sure in some places kids got detention or letters sent home to their parents, etc.
The irony of (teacher) reciting a pledge in support of 'liberty and justice for all' and then falling apart because a child has tried to use some of that liberty, then wishing and perpetuating injustice upon them in retaliation, is strong.
If one's ideals fall over so easily, what would happen in the event of an actual serious attack on those ideals?
Sometimes it's not even direct consequences. You stand out as "that kid" and suddenly, you aren't given the benefit of the doubt the next time there is some kind of conflict at school. Or you are held to the rules -just a bit- more strictly than everyone else. Or, if your grade is on the border between a B+ and A-, they'll give you the B where they give the more obedient kids the A. When you become "that kid" the consequences can be almost invisible and insidious.
At least in the US, teachers and administrators are given rather broad latitude to treat students differently, without requiring justification and very often based on their own personal biases and prejudices.
I had to do the pledge in early elementary school. It didn't continue forever. Not sure if people still do it. I do agree it's disturbing. Interestingly we once read a book in school that featured a character who refused to say the pledge and got in trouble for it. IIRC it was a case of "you aren't technically required to do this but they'll give you a hard time if you're the only one not doing it".
In general, we Americans really, really love our country. Our flag still represents values tied closely to our revolutionary war and and independence. Obviously the flag gets wrapped around all sorts of causes, even contradictory ones, but that core kernel of shared values is truly universal.
So as individuals we choose to fly the flag a lot.
> "but that core kernel of shared values is truly universal."
Which values? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." does not seem to be upheld very strongly in the USA.
What about women's rights and abortion upturned by the current government, why are Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality needed 50 years after Martin Luther King, what about thousands of people disappeared by Trump's ICE, what about the enormous wealth inequality where the wealthy seem to be a lot more 'equal' than the plebs, what about nobody being punished for the 2008 financial crisis or the Epstein events or the Jan 6th attempted coup? Or the unwillingness of so many people to wear masks during COVID out of respect for their fellow Americans?
How can you claim a "core kernel of universal shared values" without nation-wide universal health care, workers rights, liveable minimum wage, things that demonstrate a fundamental belief in equality and shared values??
I'm not american but afaik it's very common. The US is on a different level though, see the flags in the suburbia, the pledge of allegiance in school's every morning etc.
But I'd say it's not "too much nationalism" rather the average american is defintiely more patriotic than an average european (who can then again be anyone from the UK to Poland to Moldova) but you get my point
I am American who has lived in many countries around the world, and I think this is distinctly wrong and the source of many problems in the US.
It would be more correct to say that the average American values outward displays of nationalism more, and has a more negative perception of those who do not appreciate or want to participate in those displays than people in most other countries. And yes, they conflate this with 'patriotism'. However, this is almost completely performative and lacks real substance, as is proven by the typically far more selfish attitude towards their fellow citizens, and is exemplified by the constant historical failures to provide significant funding for projects designed to help rather than harm others.
Europeans and people from other countries around the world are often fiercely in love with their countries. They just tend not to love the idea of noisily jumping up to gaudily beat their own drum. So yes, the average American thinks they are more nationalistic, when in fact they are just more tribal and crude about their nationalism than what is typically found in other countries around the world. If only our nationalism were taken a bit more seriously than our affiliation with a sports team, which is in theory just for fun and entertainment, that would be an improvement.
I disagree with this, I've noticed that the countries rising to prominence are quite nationalistic and the ones fading into obscurity are very post-national.
> Europeans and people from other countries around the world are often fiercely in love with their countries.
I would also disagree with this, I think it's profoundly uncool to love your country in many parts of Europe—think the UK and especially Germany.
The Europeans that did actually fiercely love their country that I've met were all Poles or Serbs that were gaudily beating their own drum.
What problems do you think arise from nationalism in it's current form in the US?
I don't think they value displaying nationalism more, nationalists tend to be very vocal and visible, it's just that the US is full of nationalists. It really is the biggest issue with the US, and why the orange man is president.
I think you missed my point, which is that in the US, people typically described as nationalists tend to be pseudo-nationalists who value pomp and ceremony, but not substantial concrete actions to better their country or actual real care and love for their fellow countrymen. In terms of percentage of the population who value and love their national identity, we are no different than anywhere else.
Leadership in European countries is so routinely in conflict with their people who understand the inalienable rights of the people so well. I wonder where that comes from.
You're not wrong that the American public is largely out of touch with the fundamentals of a free society.
> Leadership in European countries is so routinely in conflict with their people
> I wonder where that comes from.
> Leadership
Democracy is great but that elected leaders seek reelection at the expense of the common folk isn't something new, those in power will naturally seek more power.
The problem is that Americans look at vulnerable people and billionaires like they individually deserved their fate. The cult of merit.
When I was younger, I would have thought that, but now I have trouble distinguishing nationalism and white supremacism when I see enthusiastic usage of flags/pledges.
It is common but I think these displays in the press release are for the photo. I would expect to see a large flag on a tall pole outside most large factories, but inside the decorations will range from bland, to company-oriented, to patriotic.
A defense plant probably has more outward signs of patriotism.
The US is weird about its flag, I think because nationalism wasn't seen as a bad thing up until recently. These days it's much weirder to see an American flag, and usually you know it has something to do with MAGAs. The weird thing to me is how you see one massive one in the luggage retrieval area when you arrive in JFK (in New York). Always makes me sigh
It is not uncommon to have national and state flags, but it is not similar to how dictators like to hang their portraits. It is meant more to show pride of what you build together as a people, rather than to evoke fear and obeisance.
That said, this may have also been a photo op, and given the image is from texas, there are probably portraits of a dictator hanging around, too.
Also he dictatorship are (officially) pride of doing their work for the state as Americans work multiple jobs in fear of losing their paychecks, their health insurance.
Is it? The car dealership near where I grew up had a 100 foot tall pole with a Canadian flag at least 10 feet wide, probably more. And that's a car dealership... Flags were everywhere: gyms, offices, banks, schools, etc... Can't say I toured any factories to specifically know if they were there, but I'm guessing yes.
Of course now it's different, the flag is less common, to the point in my home province (Alberta) you see more Albertan flags than Canadian ones...
US flag is everywhere. Indoor weightlifting gyms, hanging inside large hangers for aircraft, in schools, factories outside your company HQ on the flagpole, etc.
In my country you, as a civilian, fly the national flag for the equivalent of July 4th, and for big personal events like graduations. Flag merchandise is of course also worn in support of the national sports teams.
Outside of that the main people flying national flags are government institutions, who usually have it up right next to a European flag and a flag of the institution, like a local municipality.
The European flag is also plastered over billboards next to all kinds of EU-funded construction projects, of course, and is on literally every single Euro bill.
So no, someone's feelings about an institution are not inherently linked to the success of its empty propaganda campaigns.
I'm not a friend of nationalism, but I believe that it's a trade-off: of you want to be open to immigration, of the kind that pulls in newcomers, inviting them to become a part of the place they move to, instead of remaining outsiders, you have to give them plenty of opportunity to identify with their new home. Of course these days, we see the American flag used a lot in ways completely opposite to this, but that does not change the great progressive value national symbols could provide.
Apple reigns supreme because of China - and the two are inextricably linked. China would not have its high-tech manufacturing prowess if it were not for Apple. The book Apple In China [1] highlights how millions of cheap laborers and the country's engineers took the lessons of working with Apple to solidify its edge in this space in a way nobody can catch up to today.
China took the long-term greedy approach to invest in the relationship. We see the US today taking equity stakes in Intel and trying to play catchup by using elements of the same playbook. The US's advantage remains in the more "intangible" side of the process: creativity, design, new tech. In a global economy with free trade, this is all fine. But China never "westernized" itself as was expected from the increase in global trade. Now the US is back pedaling, trying to jump start its manufacturing. It will take a long time...
The book is a good page-turning read. I recommend it.
Apple has an excellent mobile OS, which is enough of a loyal userbase that they can make a hardware mistake once in a while and still retain customers. They're less hardware-dependent than most device manufacturers. This also enables them to lag behind the state of the art if it means more reliable/consistent performance. Which is why you don't see a folding Apple phone yet, and why Samsung was able to score points against Apple by having longer battery life and a better camera. This also allows them to demand high quality from their factories.
Apple still stand because of Software which China sucks at. Good thing the US is not about to destroy its software industry by investing all of its money on AI.
Manufacturing is primarily in China - that's true for Go Pro & everyone else and almost needless to say. The point is China usually eats the design layer too, making Apple a little unique in that they survived Chinese competition completely unscathed.
Apple is one of the few brands I completely expect to be able to genuinely pull this off.
Their volumes are high enough that they will literally build an entire factory from scratch to produce a single product line, they are far enough up the luxury ladder that a few extra dollar in labour won't hurt them too badly, and the contracts with their suppliers are significant enough that they don't need the short supply lines of a Shenzhen and can just demand their suppliers Get It Done.
Having a domestic factory won't hurt Apple, and with an erratic President who'll flip on tariffs twice a week it's a sensible hedge against his inevitable next meltdown.
I bought my first GoPro for a scuba diving trip in Mexico once. Was super excited, it was my first scuba diving experience too.
As soon as we hit deeper waters the capture button pressed itself down due the pressure and it wouldn’t come back up. That, unfortunately happened in a way that I couldn’t start a capture. Lost the entire thing, despite the camera being perfectly fine after we came back to surface.
For scuba diving you will want to have a house for the camera regardless of brand. It not only lower the risk of damages, but it is also more explicitly designed for depth without needing to compromising for non-divers.
That said, GoPro is not the best for low light environments, and the battery is a bit temperature sensitive, both which can be an issue when diving.
GoPros (at least the early generations) required a special housing for use in water. My first GoPro was a 2 I believe and I bought it for scuba and it was terrible. Then the newer models came out promising better performance for diving, so I upgraded... and it was terrible as well. Gave up on GoPros after being sucked in twice and not getting the results I was hoping for. It was ok for other things, but anything involving water was not great.
I believe things eventually got sorted out for water use, but I was no longer a customer.
Hahahah. Do you seriously just take random objects deep underwater and expect them to be designed to withstand that sort of an environment?
Was the GoPro you bought rated up to that depth or something? After a cursory look online, they're only rated down to 10m, which is about what I'd expect.
I remember using these on movie sets as crash cams - a cheap camera that could be mounted on something fast-moving so you could get cool action shots without risking the $100k primary camera. But the main selling point for this use-case is that they were cheap, and that’s a fight the Chinese companies will always win.
They missed the chance to make PC camera just before Covid or during it or now as another revenue stream. They have a hacky way to get it to work but they should have made one specifically for the PC and meeting settings.. Cisco and others make a killing in that space
we barely ever use our GoPro 8 BLACK. I decided to take it with me skiing and turned it on for a crazy ride down. When I got back I wanted to show my GF the footage and it just had frozen video, only playing sound.
I thought they were meant to be really robust and hardy but it decided not to work when I needed it and now I don't really trust them tbh. It's sort of opposite of what the brand was leading me to believe.
I stopped buying go pros when I drove from the top of Mt Blue Sky to the base. Had the camera mounted on my dashboard, planned to make a cool time lapse down the mountain road.
Turns out it overheated 15 minutes into the drive, and corrupted all the footage from my whole ski trip.
I'm also still salty that they cancelled my favorite fast video editing software (can't remember the name).
Contrary to the popular opinion in the rest of the comments, I do like my GoPro (Hero 11). Good and robust hardware, a lot of thought into usability for professionals, many accessories, and hackable with official firmware from the company.
The "problem" is that I don't use it that often. Most people do not need action footage regularly. It was more like a impulse/hobby buy rather than a need.
I've owned a bunch of gopros and I feel like they've always had the same kind of bugs. Random crashes, things not working anymore. It's really bad, so bad that I had plenty of videos that were missing sound, or just corruption in general.
Then they started this subscription thing and I was like, finally, they're going the SaaS way, they will make so much money, and they will be able to improve that camera that basically never seems to improve much version after version. I bought a bunch of put options, and I lost all my money, every time I put back some in the put options.
Now I have the insta360 go ultra and... I think go pro is going to die. It's just so good.
My guess is that action cameras are 20 % need (professionals, documentary crews etc) and 80 % fashion (people buying them and them using them for a few shots twice a year on the holiday), and the fashion component peak is over.
I slept on GoPro for a long time because, but then wanted to document some outdoor activities. I went with two Hero 5 units and as a photographer, I was shocked by how overhyped these devices seemed to be.
The first surprise was just shoddy electrical engineering: unlike any camera from a big-name manufacturer, they drain the batteries in storage, to the point where they're dead after 2-3 weeks. But that aside, image quality is just poor for the price. It's oversharpened and oversaturated to cover up deficiencies, and that may work for some YouTube videos, but it's a $400 device that's miles behind any $500 mirrorless.
So I get it that if really want to go snorkeling or mountain biking with a camera, this might be a good choice, but that's a tiny market, and for everything else, why would you buy it? If you want cell phone quality video, you can use your cell phone. If you want professional quality, you can spend the same amount of money on a mirrorless from Canon, Panasonic, Sony, or whatever.
> So I get it that if really want to go snorkeling or mountain biking with a camera, this might be a good choice, but that's a tiny market, and for everything else, why would you buy it?
I don't think people are cross-shopping action cameras and mirrorless cameras. Either you want a wearable light-weight shockproof, waterproof camera or not.
Worth pointing out that your experience is with a model from a decade ago. The current Hero model is the 13.
The GoPro has always been explicitly marketed as an action camera - to the point that people for a long time called any action camera "a GoPro". Comparing them to smartphones or mirrorless cameras is completely missing their point: nobody would buy them for regular point-and-shoot activity.
You buy a GoPro to mount onto a dirt bike, or on your helmet during caving, or on a chest harness during a skydive, or on the front of your surfboard: all activities where a smartphone or a mirrorless would die on their first use.
GoPro isn't failing because the concept is wrong - the market is massive. GoPro is failing because its competitors started releasing clones which are both better and cheaper. They are the expensive premium brand in a market where buyers expect their product will need to be replaced when it inevitably can't handle the abuse anymore.
it’s very much like iRobot vacuums - more expensive and less performant than the chinese competitors that have totally overtaken the market. iRobot sad story, but so behind. i have a chinese robot from 3i that fills its mop water tank from humidity in the air. and my action camera is an Insta360 that does great 360 video underwater without a case.
No, that's precisely my point. It's only an action camera, and you assert that the market is massive, but I don't see it. Just how many millions of units can you sell to YouTuber spelunkers, YouTuber mountain bikers, YouTuber paragliders, YouTuber divers, and so on?
The reality is that even in "action" situations - the situations where normal people want to capture memories of hiking, biking, boating, etc - normal cameras, including cell phones, are usually more than enough and GoPro somehow managers to be worse.
Just how many millions of people do those outdoors activities?
You can't survive selling solely to YouTubers, that's definitely true, but you don't need to. Just like tennis companies don't need to survive solely on selling to Grand Slam competitors. Plenty of people are willing to spend a few hundred bucks on their hobbies if it gives them nice pictures and videos for InstaSnapBookTok and to show off at parties.
And no, normal cameras and smartphones are not enough. They'll do for a casual hike, but they will not survive being attached to a mountain bike going downhill and being shaken to bits. I found out the hard way, it is how I killed my first smartphone. If you disagree: why not try it out yourself with a $1500 flagship phone and report back how it went?
> Just how many millions of people do those outdoors activities?
Many, but that's irrelevant. There are hundreds of thousand of bicycles in my city, and very, very of them have cameras. That's kinda the point: what you're selling is the dream of being a YouTube influencer, pretty much. Otherwise, there's little value to having a big library of videos from every ride you've taken, especially since let's face it, most people ride the same routes / trails most of the time.
Now, the dream of being an influencer may be a strong selling point, but you can only do it once. People are not gonna keep upgrading.
My strong photographer opinion is that you should buy the oldest action camera that meets any resolution/framerate needs and treat it almost like a disposable. Buy on sales or used units. Use them on shots you genuinely are unwilling to use a mirrorless for - strapped to the front of a bike, magnetically attached to the side of a car, strapped to someone jumping in a lake.
If you just need Good, there are dozens of no-brand options on Amazon and Ali that do 4K60fps with output that is more than sufficient for any non-professional use.
I don't have a brand recommendation off hand, because the ones I've bought have been random names, but they've all been more than enough. As a reference, I've used them for capturing footage for training machine vision systems, and some general purpose marketing videos. I'm not a "creator", so I paid no attention to editing features, clip hosting, or any of those things.
Amazon sometimes gets some hate here, but I usually just buy there because the returns process is so simple. In the random case I get a product that turned out to be deceptive advertising, I drop it at Whole Foods and have a credit before I leave the parking lot. And I have the product in hand in 48 hours at most.
> there are dozens of no-brand options on Amazon and Ali that do 4K60fps
I have to very strongly disagree with this sentiment. I have personally tested quite a few no-name "4K 60fps" cameras from Amazon and AliExpress. Many of them upscale from 1080 - which is fine I guess - but then in 60fps will use a crop sensor and upscale from like ~640. Even with the more recognizable SJCam and Akaso brands, unless you're paying ~$200 - you're going to get upscaling, bad color science, bad image distortion. When comparing against a GoPro 5 (first 4k 60 entry) or 8 (first with USB C) the difference is astounding.
Though perhaps this is the difference between good and great that you refer to - but for me, it's certainly worth getting a used GoPro vs any of these modern cheap alternatives.
Unfortunately current new GoPros don't improve on their existing line enough to justify paying current prices. I wish I could get a new 2018 quality GoPro knockoff for <$200
I'll have to try and dig out a couple of the ones I bought and re-verify this. Really though the 60fps doesn't matter for the majority of users. Even the 4K aspect is overkill for most common things.
ISTR GoPro moved away from Ambarella SoCs several years ago and rolled their own, but most of the other cameras are using Amba, Novatek, etc., and certainly offer great performance for a fraction of the cost of GoPro.
I saw a review on YouTube of a lot of these alternatives, along with the established brands, and in bright sunlight and little movement some were ok but quality was all over.
However once it got a bit darker, or heavy movement, the big brands left the rest in the dust pretty much.
So yeah, do a bit of research and figure out your use-case.
American manufacturing is a rounding error, especially when it comes to consumer electronics.
Western manufacturing can't compete with a Shenzhen. Our supply lines suck, our labour is too expensive for any kind of manual work, and we didn't bother to invest in automation as decades of outsourcing made our manufacturers focus on low-volume high-margin products.
No need to steal when our own companies willingly export core competency for a few cents of shareholder value!
You are a country. You have to decide on your country’s economic model before starting the game. Choose:
- a free market economy. Companies are unhindered by the state to make their own decisions to maximize shareholder value. Decisions therefore lean towards short term profit margins rather than long term success. Influence of the state via elected politicians on a short term is expensive but effective to ensure you are unhindered by regulation. Success here is not aligned with the long term success of the state.
- a quasi free market where there is partial state ownership and control, but also supports free market principles to encourage private investment. The state will heavily subsidize your economy and decisions can be made to prioritize long term global success rather than short term shareholder value.
- a state controlled and state owned economy. All decisions are made by committee. There are no shareholders apart from the state. Success benefits all within the state. Failure also tied directly to the state. Long term goals are preference over short term goals.
Choose carefully. Once your have made your decision the costs to change it are extremely high and will result in societal and economic collapse.
> While GoPro action cameras are built to withstand shock, the brand itself is looking distinctly shaky right now. Latest reports[1] are that founder Nicholas Woodman is propping the company up by extending it a loan of his own money to the tune of $20 million, at an annual interest rate of 6.5%, while a buyer is desperately sought. It’s believed GoPro may not survive the year without a new owner or fresh injection of cash, with Woodman’s intervention acting as a stopgap rather than bail-out per se.
Memory is the acute issue causing their struggles; their most recent quarter saw a gross margin of 4.5% (that's revenue minus the direct cost of producing the cameras, divided by the revenue). That's a hefty fall from their previous margin of ~31%. This contributed to their operating loss of $57M in the last 3 months.
Thag being said, they haven't had a positive quarterly operating income since the last quarter of 2022, even when the margin was higher than 4.5%. So it's not like they were succeeding before the memory crunch, just losing money slower.
IMO the image quality on GoPro is still the best. I don't understand why people say it's horrible. For flat video it outperforms Insta360 and definitely DJI.
Red Bull really ran the marketing playbook that GoPro should have done: become known for athletes doing extreme things. Instead they stayed too technical and product-based and didn't build a brand beyond "we make action cameras."
They don't have the type of insane cashflow that RedBull does to sponsor tons of athletes and weird events, but their video contests are kind of a big deal in the action sports community.
AKA, their Line of the Winter[1] competition for skiing, or their Best Line conest for MTB[2] that they used to run. And they're the title sponsor for the GoPro Mountain Games[3].
They're still THE action sports cameara carried in a lot of outdoor equipment stores, but the Insta360 has really dominated social media recently, and their products are currently a better value for cost/performance.
As a long-time GoPro owner who recently added an Insta360 X5 to his collection, I can't really see any meaningful difference in software horribleness. They are both really really bad, with ads everywhere constantly pushing subscriptions to their cloud services.
At least with the normal cameras the software can be entirely ignored, I can take video from my Hero5 straight in to any ordinary NLE and go from there, but the 360 camera requires their software to convert from the native format to anything usable, even if I'm keeping it as 360 footage.
The worst part IMO for both is that they prioritize mobile apps over their PC software so if you want to edit on a computer like a normal reasonable person you lose features compared to idiotically doing things on a phone.
>The worst part IMO for both is that they prioritize mobile apps over their PC software so if you want to edit on a computer like a normal reasonable person you lose features compared to idiotically doing things on a phone.
This was my main gripe, but also:
* Image stabilization (Hypersmooth Pro/ReelSteady) as a subscription feature.
* Auto-rotate and orientation lock don't work in streaming mode. (I reported this as a bug on the Hero7, was told it was being looked at, still a problem on the Hero10 when I stopped paying attention)
For what it's worth, DJI does offer desktop software for their Osmo action cams. They also have a direct NAS/cloud storage upload option from the camera, as well as allowing normal transfer over USB or by pulling the SD card.
Agree. Gopro recently released a DaVinci plugin for 360 videoes, which is great. But I often would like something in between the advanced DaVinci and the simple mobile editing. After the release of Max2, the Quik app got a big overhaul and is quite capable now. But it's still mobile, and Gopro Player (for desktop) is then now even further behind on capabilities. Same issue with Insta360 (both mobile and desktop, never tried Dji's apps)
> The worst part IMO for both is that they prioritize mobile apps over their PC software so if you want to edit on a computer like a normal reasonable person you lose features compared to idiotically doing things on a phone.
This is my biggest issue as well. It's actually the one "real" thing I use the iPad for. It still gets the mobile app interface whilst being on a bigger screen and being almost usable.
On top of that, when GoPro first launched mobile phones generally did not have cameras capable of producing production-quality images, and especially video. 20 years later, the game is much different.
Remember the Flip video camera that was all the rage for like 2 years and then just disappeared when cellphones could shoot video? GoPro is like a rugged Flip, so it took a little longer for the world to catch up to them, but now there are lots of options, and a "cheap" sports camera that is 1/4 the price of a GoPro is good enough, even if it only lasts 1/2 as long.
It's honestly embarrassing that our leaders still haven't realized why this is happening, and still aren't taking any actions to prevent it from getting worse.
Giving billions of free money to shareholders of Intel & friends is going to do absolutely nothing to change the tide. Want domestic manufacturing? Invest in building a JLCPCB alternative: automated to the fullest extent possible in order to save fractions of a cent on ops, then operated on a razor-thin margin but making up for it in volume.
Chinese people aren't the lazy dumb manual workers we have long pretended they are. After we have freely given them all of our engineering knowledge with outsourcing, they are now beating us on the free market. If we don't internalize this, stop with the silly competition-destroying tariffs, and try to compete again, we are doomed to slide into irrelevancy - and we've got only ourselves to blame.
It's a testament to how broken modern business practices are that GoPro can sell 1.2 Million cameras per year and still go out of business.
It's possible they are just poorly run, and they spend more in R&D than they recoup in revenue, but I strongly suspect they were set up to only be profitable if they sold millions of cameras per year as an attempt to maximize profits at that volume, without consideration of other scenarios.
What does one buy if they want a 1080p60 action cam with stabilisation that doesn't overheat, has good battery life and acceptable low light performance (think rainy day in the woods)?
Ah damn I just bought their new Mission One a few weeks ago (upgrading from a Hero 10). Already quite angry though since it seems the batteries are basically the same shape for both, except the connector is in a different location, so the 3 existing batteries I have for the Hero 10 are not compatible, which is a shitty move from GoPro. Well I guess either way I won’t be buying gopros anymore in the future.
They could spur a lot of innovation by open sourcing their firmware or introducing plugins. They don't really have a channel to take asks like "ring buffer style recording" but I would do it myself.
Betteridge enters the chat. GoPro's market is changing: strong competitors now make solid, low cost alternatives. GoPro is moving deep into professional markets where margins are high, and leveraging their position as a US company whose products can be utilized by sensitive customers.
GoPro will be fine. They just won't be the go-to for every YouTuber any longer.
I don't see a use case for these cameras. Phone takes amazing pictures and videos and is always on hand and if I need something more polished, I just get DSLR. Sure DSLR is more expensive, but if I want to do something well, I'd rather go all in.
The use case is niche but there. I ride mountain bikes and off-road motorcycles and have a GoPro on my helmet. A phone is the wrong form factor and a DSLR is too heavy.
Same with surfers, or people who race cars etc. Having a physically small camera, with robust mounting and stabilization is not something a phone in a gimbal or a "real camera" can provide.
Saw some sponsored videos on YouTube where they out GoPro compeititor (Insta360 with it's logo) on a Korean/Chinese baby, and the baby enjoying his day.
Very good marketing I would say.
Attached Example (you will find many such videos on Social Media)
I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get.
You can be more expensive if you’re better, or you can be worse if you’re cheaper, but they’re both the downsides while living purely off brand recognition.
They also blew up in a time where there wasn’t any real competition. Sony had action cameras but they were bulkier and expensive, and didn’t have the features of GoPro.
These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper.
GoPro is a US company designed in U.S. with manufacturing in Thailand, China, and Mexico.
Insta360 is a Chinese company designed in Shenzhen and built there, too.
People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place.
A similar pattern happened with drones with DJI, intentionally killing all non-Chinese drone brands. And with BambuLabs (founded by ex-DJI) with 3D printers (the only good non-Chinese printer that doesn’t cost 10-100x as much is Prusa, and they’re facing extremely strong headwinds).
Legitimately better Chinese products (incredible engineering) that have massive industrial policy support, probably industrial espionage support (as in the case of DJI for certain), massive influencer marketing campaigns, and near zero cost of capital. When China wants to deindustrialize non-Chinese industries for strategic and/or natsec reasons, they are incredibly good at it. (And note it’s not US-only, China targets basically ANY brand that isn’t Chinese. China absolutely does this to Europe as well… and you can see them doing it in real-time with automotive.)
The only surprising thing to me is how people just act like it’s not happening. I guess for people who don’t have any experience working on federal government adjacent aerospace stuff, the idea of natsec considerations for IT hardware seems entirely abstract, but it’s incredibly real if you do.
If your country’s industrial and defense policy relies on individual consumers making choices that are worse for them on almost all metrics, it’s time to think about on worse payroll your politicians are.
Absolutely true. But China’s industrial dominance is also the government immiserating its people, just in a different way. Domestic consumption in China is famously low, work culture is famously bad (996,etc). And this is because of what their government, not the people of China, have chosen to do.
>But China’s industrial dominance is also the government immiserating its people
Didn't they bring hundreds of millions out of poverty, and built amazing cities and facilities in the past 30 years?
>Domestic consumption in China is famously low
Compared to what, the US? Compared to China is at a historical high, isn't it? And they're doing quite well even compared to like 70% of the world and rising.
Consumption is not just low, it’s intentionally suppressed.
Its more like lack of policy. To be clear, we are talking about China winning IoT hardware industry in this case. That’s not a policy.
You could ban Chinese IoT devices. Or spur local industry. But we aren’t talking about the military relying on Chinese hardware or something.
> who’s payroll your politicians are on
It doesn’t even have to be foreign - it can just be corrupt self interest.
What other explanation is there for attacking Venezuela and Iran?
You’re getting downvoted for this which is crazy.
Reads to me like it's free market doing its job, if you think of countries as companies. US just needs to step up its game.
It's not really a free market when one country is heavily subsidizing it's industries
So ridiculous. So a bit of subsidy is ok, but no more than the US does? As a country that’s suffered from the US subsidising its own industries, my sympathy is zero.
and the US famously never subsidizes any of its industries...
> Between 2005 and 2024, Chinese firms received on average three to eight times more subsidies than competitors in OECD economies.
https://www.oecd.org/en/blogs/2026/06/industrial-subsidies-h...
I can't read this seriously while being unable to buy any Chinese EVs here in the US.
You can't buy Chinese EVs in the US because China is overtly running a dumping campaign for them. It's an interesting story, read up on it!
What’s the level of subsidy that’s ok?
Which industries are the US leading in because of subsidies?
Arms, weapons, fighter jets and so on. The US sounds a trillion $ a year subsidizing the military industrial complex.
The US chose their market (arms). The Chinese chose consumer goods. Go figure.
Basically every "made in USA" consumer product has a DOD contract. The DOD is mandated by law to purchase from US companies, so there is a huge sector of small-to-medium businesses which only exist because there is a guaranteed order coming every quarter for uniforms or boots or other equipment that would likely be 1/3 the price if they were contract-manufactured in China or Vietnam.
Not saying this is uniformly bad, because without the law the number of businesses with the ability to manufacture this stuff would trend toward zero, but it is a form of subsidy.
Sadly, consumer goods are the new arms (drones, batteries, etc)
Oil, natural gas, corn (for fuel), soybeans (for cattle feed)
If a country hands out enormous subsidies but yet isn't leading in anything, then maybe it's time to consider what structural reasons are causing these subsidies to be squandered and whose bottom lines are being padded.
What US industries get anywhere near Chinese level subsidies.
I heard that when some country wants to pay in a different currency than USD for oil, a coup suddenly happens, or a helicopter comes and the president gets kidnapped
The US dollar being the global reserve currency makes exports more expensive though.
EVs, mobile phones, are two massive industries where Chinese competitors are not only way ahead, but also basically banned.
Successful Chinese industries tend to be subsidized at the level of cities and regions. This creates fierce intra national rivalry that forces rapid evolution and excellence. Electric vehicles are an example.
Anything the federal government pumps money into tends not to do as well.
Does it matter? When has capitalism cared about fair or free
> GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place.
What would the attack vector be? I’m not saying there isn’t any, I don’t know much about aerospace and this sounds interesting.
> What would the attack vector be?
The cameras. But quite how, I don’t know.
Cameras need to connect somewhere, somehow to offload their videos/photos. Whether that's network, USB, SD card, those are all attack vectors. Hell, even the files themselves can act as payloads.
People know it’s happening. What do you expect an average consumer to do about it? Pay more out of pocket due to the potential national security risks?
You can't pay more to get a better drone than DJI's. You can pay more (although it's difficult) to get a worse drone. Much worse.
Next year you'll have a fair old choice of drones from Ukrainian manufacturers though, when they're no longer needed to defeat Putin.
In today's environment people can't even make the choice to pay more. The productn are just priced out of reach!
Simon Wardley has been shouting this from the rooftops, including detailed per industry timelines when China will take over, in 2015.
Yeah but muh illegal aliens and muh christianity and muh identity politics and whatever else nonsense the american voter actually seems to care about more
orange man bad indeed
He’s good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Rather than actually getting real on China and their abuse of the postal system, it’s all about tarrifs on penguins.
Biden did far more with the chips act, but rather than building on that trunk failed to enact any meaningful change. And of course make billions in the side from bribery.
Imagine if he had effectively coordinated with Mexico, Canada and the EU to curb Chinese trade practices.
Perhaps a huge tell about national strategy is the fact that the owner has $10s of millions to loan to the company? US economic structure in post WWII era has increasingly focused on return on capital (and value extraction). How can that compete in long term with an economy which prioritizes reinvestment *in industry*?
One would presume that the founder is investing their money into something, probably equities, that is an investment in industry. They could be either selling those equities for a loan here or taking a loan against those equities to loan to GoPro (if the cost of capital is lower for them than GoPro, which seems plausible.)
I generally agree with your point about value extraction vs. re-investment.
Also on Avinox motors on e-mtn bikes. Originally made by DJI, then spun off into their own company, and they are starting to eat the competition on all e-mtn bikes at this point. Bosch, TQ, Shimano, et al just can't compete, especially because Avinox is iterating at startup pace and all the rest are iterating at bike pace (slowly).
I'm not sure what stops some of these industries from essentially being more nationalist like China, but more centrist as a company like Palantir. If these risks are as big as you claim, a centralized authority should reverse engineer the things that work done in China or where-ever and use open source/build a better software stack that supplants what's out on the market currently.
I think the engineering is actually pretty irrelevant in terms of the competitiveness
> the only good non-Chinese printer that doesn’t cost 10-100x as much is Prusa
They hardly have time to compete, busy as they are with foot-shooting practice.
Not sure what you mean. Had a mk 4 or what the last one was - excellent. Now on core one (or what the name is for the enclosed one), also great.
Dunno, Prusa seems to have mostly forgotten about consumers as their industrial business is booming.
Stuff like this: https://sensofusion.com/dronefactory/
This is of course beyond stupid considering the pace of 3d printer vs one PET bottle blow molding machine that can produce same shape shells at thousand units /hour.
Is it? With a 3d printer you can print any piece on demand, change design without changing tooling and make pieces that are semi-hollow inside for lightness.
The western countries deindustrialized themselves though. That's just capitalism chasing ever increasing profits and moving production to where it's cheaper, i.e.from west to China. In fact this was cherished because it increased share holder profits.
>People think this doesn’t matter, but GoPros are used all over in aerospace. If we replaced the brand with Insta360, that puts a big attack vector all over the place.
In what way exactly? The camera will magically communicate to the mothership?
100%. It would strongly behoove the US to encourage domestic 3d printer manufacture (or friendly countries like Japan), to the point of bannning Bambu and Chinese companies. Obviously we are doing fine for industrial 3d printers, but the small scale consumer stuff is very important too.
If and when AI commiditizes professional services, it would be good to have modern industry to fall back on. With 3d printing the gap isnt insurmountable yet.
However, our country is run by lawyers, not engineers, so I dont have too much hope. At least a lot of our billionaires started out as engineers...
If GoPro is manufactured in China then it’s no more secure than Insta360.
If you’ve spent a life and the market being supreme then it’s a shock. China’s economic system is wiping the floor with the west.
The U.K. has just nationalised a steel plant which had been bought by China to stop it from being destroyed, and of course the economic right wing hate this as steel is far cheaper to import.
Britain is on a hell of a trajectory. First Brexit then the rise of Reform.
If that scam of a man wins the next election, it’ll be quite the show.
As someone with both an Insta360 camera and a Bambu printer, I feel it, would love to buy GoPro and Prusa, but the value just isn't there.
For one, I had a GoPro whose sensor broke after about 20 minutes of recorded. I ended up getting 3 different replacements, all of which also broke. In the end I just forgot about it when my home burnt down in a wildfire. I got an Insta360 with better picture quality that's also been more reliable for a similar cost.
And I would have loved to buy a Prusa printer but I got a Bambu P1S combo for $600, an equivalent Prusa plus the $300 shipping to Canada would have been ~$2500 CAD. For making trinkets for my 3 year old son plus the few random other things I'd make it's not worth it to pay 4x the money.
Maybe it'll forever be this way due to the differences in cost of living but I do feel as though there's a million barriers to entry to building a business in North America, at least a business that's not fully online.
Unless Canadian prices are much much higher than US, the only Prusa that costs that much is a Core One L or a Prusa XL.
Neither one of those are equivalent to a P1S. They’re 2 tiers above it. Equivalent Bambu printers sell for about the same price.
I have printers from both companies. There are tradeoffs for each, but Prusa isn’t 4x more for an equivalent printer.
Core One+ is $1899 CAD, the MMU3 for the Core One+ is $579 CAD and shipping was quoted over $300 since they ship from Europe and not the US to Canada. Just put these into their shopping cart on their site, right now quoting $2887 (including shipping and duties).
I did get a particularly good deal on the P1S combo apparently, the price on their website already higher than what I paid and it's significantly less in Canada than the US with exchange rate. Are they exactly equivalent, dunno, but both are the cheapest Core XY models with enclosure + colour changer that either sell.
Prusa is also cheaper in the US and EU than Canada.
boo hoo china bad, buy my more expensive and shitty american product
China does not want to deindustrialize any country. Why do you think of everything in terms of war and domination ? China has built a industry capable of taking any product and make it better and cheaper. There is no psycho strategy behind it. They will do it till every chinese will live a comfortable life equal to an american. At that point america will be able to compete again.
The CCP has publicly explained that their strategy is indeed to dominate key sectors via gov subsidies, de-industrialize other nations and gain strategic leverage in the process.
government first intervened in British Steel last year to prevent its then-owner, the Chinese company Jingye Group, from shutting it down https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/business/britain-national...
I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get.
Sounds very similar to another US company - Garmin. They are still popular, but have been raising prices a lot every generation, because for a long time there was no real competition [1]. At this point, Garmin watches that have mapping support have an introduction price of >600 Euro. Even at that price point, zooming or panning maps is excruciatingly slow (sometimes taking up to 10 seconds to re-render) because they have used the same CPU/MCU for multiple generations while increasing screen resolution. They also haven't really innovated a lot as of recently and are moving some new functionality behind a subscription.
This has opened a large gap for Chinese competition. Now you can get a Coros Nomad that goes head-to-head with models like the Garmin Enduro for 350 Euro. They don't have full feature parity yet, but they are so rapidly adding features that they will at some point. Also, in contrast to Garmin, they seem to be using modern microcontrollers, so panning or zooming a map is insanely fast in comparison, while still having ~20 days of battery for daily use.
[1] Of the traditional competitors, Apple Watch Ultra and Galaxy Watch Ultra have gotten closer, but are nowhere near the battery life, robustness, mapping support, mapping + workout support, etc.
> Garmin watches that have mapping support have an introduction price of >600 Euro. Even at that price point, zooming or panning maps is excruciatingly slow
I just got a Garmin Instinct 3 Solar. It does mapping, and cost me about $300 US.
You're right that it's slow due to a wimpy processor. But the processor isn't because they're too lazy to innovate, but because they have something sipping tiny amounts of power so that I can get a battery life of several weeks.
I just got a Garmin Instinct 3 Solar. It does mapping, and cost me about $300 US.
As a sibling commenter said, the Instinct 3 Solar only does breadcrumb navigation, it doesn't do topographic maps on the watch (there are some Connect IQ apps that can add mapping, but you don't get good integration with workouts).
I use them all the time when cycling. I often plan a route, but when some different direction looks more interesting, I can spot check whether it leads to bike paths that will eventually merge back into my grand plan, erm, route. Or sometimes even for following the route, you want to look ahead by quickly zooming out or get a lot of detail at some complex intersection, where having a full map gives you much better orientation.
Well, except on a Garmin, my Fenix 8 is often so slow that I had to pause cycling to zoom in/out (even more complicated by not being able to do gradual zooming because it does not have a crown).
Yes, I know I can also use a bike GPS or a more generic GPSr with a large screen. I have used their gpsmap line since 2010 or so and even have the gpsmap H1. But having to always carry it around when you have a break somewhere is a drag and I always have a watch on me anyway. So I primarily use the gpsmap for geocaching and switched to using a watch for other activities.
but because they have something sipping tiny amounts of power so that I can get a battery life of several weeks
Coros watches have several weeks of battery life and fast maps. It is laziness (or margin maximization), because they could reach the same power budget by moving to a processor that is on a smaller node.
> I know I can also use a bike GPS or a more generic GPSr with a large screen.
Their bike computers have a long lasting battery and are helpful for data. But wow are they frustrating. Software update regularly loses the config, the interface is just so painful (laggy touch screen or confusing buttons). The mapping is hard to follow.
Not that Strava mapping on a phone is any better. Why can’t Strava put arrows on the direction of travel?
Sounds like the perfect use-case for big-small processors. A power-sipper for routine 99.99% of operations and a more powerful beast for the CPU intensive ops.
It's mostly because Garmin wants to maximize profits by sticking to old CPUs. The Coros watches (from what I've heard, the same applies to Suunto and Polar) are fast.
This has been an issue across the whole Garmin product line. E.g. the Garmin eTrex 32x from 2019 still used the same CPU as the eTrex 30 from 2011. 8 years without a CPU update. And the eTrex was already had miserably slow map rendering in 2011 with maps from that year.
> It's mostly because Garmin wants to maximize profits
I see people riding bikes worth tens of thousands regularly. They should try a top tier models and see what happens.
One of the benefits of these old eTrex models is that they run on AA's, so they're used for things like long distance cycling (across countries).
I don't know if there are top tier models that run on replaceable batteries you can get at any gas station.
They have solar ones, but judging by reviews, they get about 10 minutes extra battery life per hour in the sun.
Yes, this ships in basically every smartwatch since the Snapdragon Wear 3100 launched in 2018.
I think they meant watches that can show actual maps, not just a line or arrow with your route. That feature has always been reserved for the more expensive watches.
The more expensive watches (Fenix) also have long battery lives: lasting up to a month on a battery that can fit in a watch. The processors still have to sip power.
The Coros watches are less than half the price, have 22 days of battery life in smartwatch mode (in the Nomad) and render maps extremely fast. If they added solar, they could probably also last a month (the Coros Apex 4 does 24 days, also without solar).
The funniest thing is that earlier versions of the Coros even used the Garmin map format (though as many small files and not a single/small number of .img). Though they have switched to the open PMTiles format in later versions.
BTW, I had a Fenix 7x solar (before a Fenix 8 AMOLED) and it would usually 'only' last about two weeks. I think you can only reach Garmin's stated time if you disable a lot of functionality.
A modern powerful MCU should be able to do both due to advanced power saving modes. Or youcan even have a power MCU and very low power standby MCU.
This is correct. There are a number of excellent asymmetric multicore MCU platforms now. You don't have to choose between efficiency and performance today.
How do you like the Instinct 3 Solar? I'm considering one for the exceptional battery life.
It’s interesting that you mention Garmin - they’re a good example of pivoting from your original market (standalone gps units for cars) once you see a nimble competitor eating away at it (gps-enabled smartphones). Garmin would be dead if they had held fast on the standalone GPS market.
I'm not sure you are fully aware of the markets that Garmin is in. When it comes to marine, aviation and offroad, you simply cannot run a gps app on a phone. E.g.
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/aviation/general/
Yep, also, they had gpsr units way before their gpsunits for cars became popular. They started making GPS receivers in (I think) 1993:
https://static.garmin.com/pumac/GPS95AVD_PilotsGuide.pdf
Thanks! I’m clearly not aware.
About 10 years ago I was looking for a rugged small camera. Found some by Garmin that were on a closeout sale. Excellent quality, never owned a GoPro so can't compare but I used them in similar applications and they never had an issue.
I have a love/hate relationship with Garmin.
As a motorcyclist and sailor, their hardware is second to none in terms of build quality and robustness. The ability to look down at my Zumo GPS on my motorcycle in a rain storm on a dirt road and have it respond to my wet dirty glove is a close to magic as you will get.
Then there's the watches, the Instinct range is ok but I have a button that doesn't pop back out, my wife's vivoactive suffered the well known touch failure.
However, as a UXer I will say that across all products the software interaction model sucks balls. "China" can and will produce hardware to meet a price point, its not that they can't build good products.
As soon as "China" figures out how to do good UX, the last moat western companies have will fall.
I think the only sports watch company that has an app that is worse than Garmin's is Polar. I have used Garmin devices since 2010, but their UX is (as you say) pretty quirky. They changed the UI/UX of the gpsmap H1 to look more like a smartphone, but it is still weird. Another issue is that their software has been very buggy the last few years, with software only stabilizing 1-2 years after the release. One the largest external source for Garmin information (gpsrchive) has actively recommended against purchasing the H1 because it has been so buggy. Similarly, earlier firmware releases of the Fenix 8 had a lot of issues. Also a lot of functionality of older units hasn't been implemented yet. These are often not small bugs, but of the type, "oopsie, your device froze or rebooted while you were navigating". They basically released an alpha version as a final product.
I don't know about UX, but I've had my Coros watch for a few weeks now and I didn't find it hard to understand. I think it's much easier than when I first learned to use a Fenix watch. It misses some Garmin features though that I'd really like to see like off-course rerouting. But like I said above, they have been adding features at a good pace and a drastically undercutting Garmin on price (most watches less than half the price of the closest Garmin watch).
'China' can do UX just fine, when the incentive is there. Part of the reason UX seems rough, outside of low quality products where it's a tertiary consideration, is cultural differences. User interfaces are part of culture, like everything humans touch. Those preferences shape the resulting tech. Sometimes those choices are less optimal for western users with their own preferences.
https://youtu.be/WSMFnJnY7EA?si=NMz0wd94gM5abxyj
One cool feature I've read about is that (at least some) GoPro cameras can save high-resolution IMU measurements to the recorded video files, timestamped and interleaved with video frames. This can be useful for mapping applications, e.g. https://joshi-bharat.github.io/projects/gopro/
Are there any competitors on the market that also have this feature? I've looked around a few times in the past and haven't found any. Many cameras say that they have an IMU, presumably for image stabilization, but they don't seem to record or expose that data.
According to a quick search, GoPro has an Enterprise Valuation of $160M. That would be chump change for a large tech company. The brand has name recognition value in excess of that figure. I suspect some big company will happily buy it but not sure who. It has to be a company that wants to get into the camera market. I don't think the brand name is as valuable to an existing camera company-though I could be wrong.
Apple, Google, and Amazon could all make sense. Google would see the business as an opportunity to strengthen its existing IoT portfolio. Apple an opportunity to add to its integrated consumer electronics offering. Amazon would be more a play to improve GoPro's margins. They could easily push it with prime deals, etc.
I could also see Samsung getting in.
Regardless, expect to see more integration, AI features, etc, after acquisition.
> These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper.
I had a GoPro many years ago. Eventually sold it because I needed the money for other things.
Been thinking about buying a new action camera eventually.
Got any recommendations?
The one that interests me the most of the ones I’ve seen is the Insta360 X4 Air plus an underwater case for it.
I want to be able to bring my camera swimming, bicycling, hiking, etc. And I think 360 degree cameras are pretty cool. Hopefully it’s not just a gimmick that loses its appeal after a few hours.
As someone who watches a reasonable amount of PoV outdoor activity footage shot on helmet cams and the like (base jumping, mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, etc)… I don’t love watching 360 videos uploaded in the raw because of the perspective distortion.
I’m assuming it must be possible, if the resolution is good enough, to post process a portion of each overall frame into an undistorted 1080p (or better) view of the key view of the action, but a lot of people don’t do this (perhaps it’s much more difficult or time-consuming that I’m imagining, or perhaps many viewers enjoy the distorted 360 view more than I do).
Just my two cents, YMMV, etc.
part of this is by design, which unfortunately also makes very steep terrain not look as terrifying, but gives you huge FOV. I find in all but the latest Instas its the worse low-light quality that is most notable. More annoying is that everyone is trying to compete on weird angles and perspectives, andY YT shills push attachments and niche features vs. photographic quality
Yes it's possible, and yes it's time-consuming.
If you're willing to put a little time into video editing, a 360 cam is great. The insta360 tools can make that a little easier if you want something simple.
If you just want to store a snapshot of the moment as it was captured, a regular camera that you pointed in the right direction is better.
The downside is the 360 editing tools are kind of sluggish and not great to work with, and even at 8k res in-camera, the export for a 'normal' looking FoV is pretty low quality compared to a normal action cam recording in 4k.
I have an insta360 X5, it's neat and there's a lot of flexibility, but it does have downsides.
The app is also a pile of crap, it's crammed full of ads, social media junk I don't want, it's slow as molasses, and the size of the app is massive.
Have you tried resolve's 3d editing?
I'd love to film in 3d. But being dependent on a single app of a single company (that is not even a good app right now) is literally the worst feature for a hardware I could imagine.
Why are you dependent on a single app? Pretty much any NLE has ability to edit 3D footage.
I didn't know that. I've got told it's a proprietary format while got shown the insta360 app.
Good to know, and reconsider!
A gopro isn't worse than the competition, nor at a premium.
What makes gopro the standard in proper productions (and science etc) is that they're so hackable with the gopro labs software. With that, all the other cameras are toys in comparison for professional usage.
>other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper
Would you mind providing a recommendation you have first hand experience with?
It's mostly FUD and/or paid reviewers. Both DJI and Insta have good products, but also very good at sponsoring in a way where things get reviewed very in their favor, making people have an impression that doesn't quite match reality. So the meme one constantly read online about how gopros are so much worse is false. They have their issues, but mostly trade offs.
It also doesn’t help that you could probably get by with a hero 4 black even today lol
Man I still can’t believe how bad the rollout of the karma was. I remember at the time everyone in my professional circles was buzzing about it. Then they started literally falling out of the sky. Feel like they never recovered
Eh, I have a Hero 4 black. And if you as the other commenter only think about resolution it can look like that, but the difference is enormous.
4k on a gopro 13 is far far far clearer. And the stabilization is night and day. Half my hero4 videos are mostly blurry shakes and quite jarring to watch, with a bad fov. The stabilization on modern gopros is magical. The bitrate and quality is orders of magnitude better. You can now pull good quality stills from the video if you want. Hero4 can't handle anything but perfect blue sky in the middle of the day. Etc etc
> Then they started literally falling out of the sky.
Yep, something must have gone horribly wrong with QA.
Apparently (checked with AI), Hero 4 Black was the first camera with 30 fps 4k video and was released 12 years ago already (how time flies)
Frankly, after 4k/30 and 1080p/60, there are strong diminishing returns, because most people these days watch videos on their phones in suboptimal conditions (or older desktops that may still be on 1080p), so what are they going to do with your 5k/6k video?
Sure, you can keep doing minor improvements to sensors and optics, but for a consumer it will not justify getting a new model for $500.
Also, competing with smartphone cameras which have gotten better over the years. I bet 99% of people would not be able to tell a gopro video from a phone video.
Transparency on AI use is a sin now, I guess.
The greatest advantage of greater resolution is that you can cut for a better framing. But who has time to go through good of video for editing?
That larger image size allows for more aggressive image stabilization as well.
> These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper.
Such as?
DJI Osmo cameras are good, I still have my original Osmo action and while the quality is a bit behind now, the battery life and general stability and menus are better than GoPro IMO.
I've found DJI cameras also don't discharge their batteries when sitting, my gopro 11 black is somehow always dead when I grab it even after a few weeks, but my osmo action is still at ~70% after a year.
Insta360 also has some neat offerings, but their software/app is absolutely abysmal, it's crammed full of ads and takes up several GB of space. It also requires an account login.
Many years ago had my first Gopro camera that seriously overheated, sent it for repairs, they said there was nothing wrong with it. It literally turned too hot to handle after taking a few clips and wouldn't work. I think there was some serious hardware issue that caused it to then drain the whole battery.
Gave the brand a second chance some years ago. Couldn't export my videos from the app, it always hanged. So I couldn't share footage. Apparently a common long standing problem on forums.
Woved to never buy anything from them again.
It’s the classic situation. China can outcompete all this stuff. It doesn’t really matter. Roomba, GoPro, they’re all going to be crushed by Chinese manufacturers. You just can’t get the margins to work anywhere else and if you do the R&D you’re a sucker.
I’ve had a few GoPros and a few GoPro 360s. I also had Roombas so you can blame me as the brand killer.
As a cyclist (and former racer), I still want to know how to capture videos with telemetry overlays (speed, power, HR, etc) from my head unit in a straightforward way. NorCal Cycling's videos - https://www.youtube.com/@NorCalCycling - are an excellent demonstration of this at work.
Yes, I've done the Garmin VIRB Edit thing, which is the very approach recommended by Jeff (NorCalCycling) in his tutorial videos on the subject. It feels like something out of 2005. It is incredibly labour-intensive and imprecise unless you're fortunate enough to be in relatively short criteriums where you've got the battery runtime to just record the whole race. Most real-world events and rides require one to turn the camera on and off at certain moments, which then requires _hours_ of stitching together clips and correlating them to GPS fixes from the head unit (in the FIT file), and quite imprecisely at that.
There has to be a more 2026 solution to this. All you need to do is correlate the footage to the FIT data points by timestamp, in the temporal domain.
If Garmin came out with one, it would absolutely annihilate this space. To the best of my knowledge, there is no competition that offers anything turn-key, though perhaps the best of my knowledge has not aged well and by now there is something. It's maddening.
Dunno if useful, but in RC hobby area we have had OSD (on-screen displays) for decades. Both in analog and digital video, with recording (analog OSD there's just a small chip). Although analog is probably not relevant for you -- quality is crap and you don't care about milliseconds latency as we do, so go with digital (and not HDZero, they are technically digital, but heavily invested in low-latency, for pro racers).
Just don't buy DJI -- they absolutely want lock you in to their tools, parts are often not compatible even within DJI, require to create an online account, require an app (from a custom .apk on android) and in general have questionable privacy.
Of the open-source systems there's a new OpenIPC system with a most popular implementation of RunCam WifiLink 2 that supports onboard SD card recording [1] [2].
More proprietary (but still cross-compatible with others) is Walksnail Avatar V2 [3] with 32GB of internal storage.
For your case, you don't need a VRX (receiver), although you can totally give it your your buddies to see your race (with OSD) in real time. VRX can be built-in to goggles (if the same company), or as a separate module that connects to your preferred goggles over mini-HDMI, also with recording. [4] [5]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP7Ns7H9wvI&t=49s
[2] https://shop.runcam.com/action-camera-categorie/
[3] https://www.caddxfpv.com/products/walksnail-avatar-hd-kit-v2
[4] https://shop.runcam.com/runcam-wifilink-rx/
[5] https://www.caddxfpv.com/products/walksnail-avatar-fpv-vrx-o...
Sounds like you want https://goprotelemetryextractor.com/telemetry-overlay-gps-vi... — feed it your GoPro footage, your Garmin FIT file, set up your gauges as you so desire and you’re off to the races (or the rendering at least). I suspect a lot of cycling Vloggers use it.
That’s really impressive - to anyone passing through, the video is with a watch.
Thank you! This looks like it might be the ticket.
Insta360 does this out of the box.
Does it?
No, it doesn't. Gopro actually hss gps and sensors built in, most dji cameras don't (does any?). You need extra hardware, or provide the data yourself. While in gopro you just enable it on the clip.
Of courses, for more advanced stuff you might want to provide the telemetry yourself (like the gopro doesn't know your wattage). But it does have much more than dji out of the box.
I guess I should say it has some capabilities in this area.
Been a while since I used it, but it will generate the overlays and you can sync it with your ride data (eg Strava or Apple Health in my case, but iirc it also supports Garmin Connect).
There are some capability differences between the mobile app and the Insta360 studio desktop app.
I'm pretty sure it handled multiple files, but in my case they were the chunks that the camera splits its recording into, which is a bit different than than having multiple clips as you described.
Am I wrong in thinking you could do this with ffmpeg, your video files, and your data from Strava/Garmin/whatever? This feels like a program an LLM (or human!) could write pretty easily
You would think it would be that straightforward. However, accurate synchronisation on GPS or temporal attributes would be required.
Judging by the paucity of software to do this, historically, it is not a straightforward problem, or all the devices involved don't generate all the data points required.
The real mess is when you have 26 clips from a long event to string together. It can easily take a day and a half to make a 3 minute montage out of that.
This sounds like something Claude Code could do very easily. If you need to actually look at the videos that's harder but still possible, but if it's just aligning GPS times and timestamps with reasonably accurate clocks, Claude Could probably do the ffmpeg commands unsupervised. I wouldn't be surprised if Haiku (the cheapest model) could do it, or an open-source agent harness with another small 30B model.
Just prompting claude (probably I would start with Opus) "I would like a HUD display of the following metrics from my Fit file overlayed on these GoPro videos, and I'd like the videos stitched together (there are some gaps, I want seamless playback) it would probably do it in 30 minutes or less, and the majority of the time would probably be ffmpeg.
Yeah I had a little script to do something similar (no video, but merging data) just for Strava recording a while back. Had forgotten all about it until this description & 'FIT files'.
Video's a bit more complex no doubt, but like you say all the pieces are there, SMoP.
I truly hate to suggest this, but the meta vanguard nails this to a tee.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/10/oakley-meta-vanguard-rev...
Hey, there has to be a legitimate use-case somewhere. Thank you!
Extremely similar to iRobot (Roomba). They both practically genericized themselves by inventing and dominating the product category, then just couldn't keep up with the competition. GoPro does feel more self inflicted though. Their drone was a failure, and they burnt a lot of money trying to do some kind of pivot to being a media company.
Was just about to say Roomba too! Next up IMO is Philips Hue, which don't support Matter and cost $25, vs. Matter-enabled Amazon brands that cost $7.
Got any you'd recommend? I've been paying the Hue tax because they're the only bulbs I've had with zero connectivity issues ever across several years, whereas every other brand I've tried has been very unreliable.
Hue also peaks at 20 W sources which leave even small room in the dark (for comparison, I have 70 W of LED lighting in the kitchen central light).
When I was looking to buy an action camera last year, I was deciding between Insta360 and DJI, with many YouTubers suggesting outright against GoPro since they haven't kept up with image quality.
Action cameras sound like a tough business, since most of them are built to last ages, and they need to keep the vast majority of content creators happy trying to increase image quality in a small form factor.
Anyway, I bought the Insta360 Go Ultra I had my mind on from the start, which I'm still reasonably happy with.
Having owned a number of GoPros, I made the same switch last year.
The Insta360 has super annoying/intrusive software that always feels like it's trying to sell me something, but it's pretty excellent in terms of actual video quality.
I don't really use the software, not even for updates.
I copy out the footage directly using a USB-C cable (wish it had USB 3.0), and do firmware updates by just dropping the update file into the microSD card.
It's friggin' fabulous that everything is doable without having to use an app. (Also the app takes up somewhere between 1-2GB of storage on my phone, and I don't have that kind of space.)
That's fine for flat videos, but 360 videos usually need processing before they're usable. I'm unsure if there are other software options that handle Insta360 360 videos well.
When 360 videos first started to become viable, all we had were looking at the flattened image. It took a bit to get used to. Eventually, the filters caught up so you could slide the rotation around to keep action centered which made things simple in comparison.
> many YouTubers suggesting outright against GoPro since they haven't kept up with image quality.
Fyi: This is a lie, the youtubers are paid to tell you this.
Your statement is so broad that it cannot be true.
It's factually incorrect that gopro hasn't kept up with image quality. One independent comparison I saw for instance put the gp13 in front of the others in most situations except low light. So if anything it's contested who's better/worse, far far from the statement in those videos.
It's factually correct and widely known that lots of tech "reviewers" get paid by the competition to shill products, was a whole scandal even with how Insta360 was caught telling reviewers not to mention their sponsorship. The contracts also often forbid them do do direct comparisons. Also funny how there will be a hundred identical reviews, as they all got the same script.
So, my statement is true. If you've watched a couple of videoes telling you to buy dji/insta360, it's very very likely you've been lied to.
So, ball is in your court.
I'm just surprised that an American brand making electronics lasted this long. Even Japanese companies are giving up. No one can compete with China.
Apple somehow reigns supreme still. Anyone else?
A whole bunch of American and Western multinational companies design hardware in Western countries and manufacture them in China.
The manufacturing isn’t usually the most valuable part of the value chain. E.g., Apple makes the most money when you sell you an iPhone, not their Chinese and Indian factory suppliers and assemblers.
GoPro isn’t failing because they’re an American brand. They’re failing because they’re mismanaged and they made a bunch of product mistakes.
If you want more examples I can give them to you: Google hardware/phones, HP, Dell, Sonos, Bose, Ubiquiti, Cisco, Nvidia, Qualcomm.
Most Japanese corporations still do a lot of their design work in Japan. Sony even does manufacturing of Raspberry Pi devices in Wales.
And of course, speaking of Sony, the money maker for that console is in software, and most of Sony’s studios are in Western countries like the US and Japan. The manufacture of the console is the lowest value part of the business.
Companies that have significant manufacturing and fabrication outside of China/Taiwan: Intel, IBM, GlobalFoundries, ON Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Whisker (Litter Robot), and a very large percentage of the automotive industry.
Large appliances brands have a heavy presence in the US, Canada, and Mexico, including LG, Samsung, Whirlpool, GE appliances, Speed Queen, SubZero/Wolf/Cove, BSH Home Appliances (Bosch/Thermador), Electrolux.
KitchenAid mixers, Vitamix, Viking Range, BlueStar.
Igloo coolers, All-Clad, Lodge, Post-It notes, Darn Tough Socks…
That’s a great list of targets to kill. Things like Vitamix should get undercut by 300 % with same or better quality.
Most of those appliance brands have become expensive enshittified garbage, or are legendary brands that have been bought up (e.g. KitchenAid used to be a Hobart brand, it's now owned by Whirlpool. Their stand mixers used to last generations; the new ones have a lot of plastic parts inside them). I have one of the original Cuisinart food processors that my mom bought in the 1970s. The base/motor unit is heavy and it still works today. The brand today is now just a label on Conair kitchen gadgets.
Some have held out. Speed Queen are still made in Wisconsin. I will be looking at them when I need to replace my laundry machines, which I expect in the next couple of years.
A lot of what you’re saying is essentially not relevant, because even the enshittified brands are still designing and manufacturing/performing final assembly in Western countries.
Not their entire product lineups, but still a good chunk of them, especially for heavier and physically larger appliances. Your future speed queen might be just as American as if you had bought a cheap GE.
I don’t know where it’s made (probably not the US) but Cuisinart still makes the classic heavy AF food processor, if you’re interested in that.
As a side note, I don’t find that heavy weight or an older design/more metal parts has that much to do with quality or longevity. A lot of old stuff was heavy because material science had fewer options to work with. A motor assembly being made of cast iron doesn’t make it magically last longer. For example, my KitchenAid stand mixer is definitely the newer kind that has plastic parts inside, but it has never needed service and has been getting regular use for a decade with no degradation. Believe it or not I even have a notoriously unreliable Samsung washer and dryer from 2012 that are still going with zero maintenance. It even has a stupid touch screen and, yep, that works flawlessly.
Maybe the bar is low to consider that impressive but I think the point is that a lot of things getting cost cut has been somewhat logical. I see new buy it for life toasters on the market like the Lotus brand selling for $350. I just replaced a $40 Cuisinart garbage toaster that lasted 3 years and died. Chinese off brands built to similar quality by the same factories without the western brand name cost about $20.
So, do the math on that. The Lotus toaster has to last somewhere between 25 and 50 years to reach cost break-even compared to a cheap toaster.
The same math maths for speed queen washers and dryers. They are a great kit but they cost 4x more than a normal washer and dryer. If you conservatively estimate that a cheap washer/dryer lasts 6 years, you’re at 24 years before that speed queen breaks even.
If we are going to combat the economic reality of numbers like these then we need to start taxing disposal.
This puts no value on the costs that unreliable and poorly built appliances add to your life.
A dead toaster is a minor inconvenience. You can go without toast for quite a while. and a toaster can be replaced at any department store. You can carry it home and plug it in. Or order one online and have it at your door the next day. They are cheap enough and unimportant enough that there's no real downside to making price the dominant consideration.
A dead washing machine is a bigger deal, especially if your household has a few kids. You can't go without doing the laundry for very long. Replacing a large appliance involves scheduling a delivery and possibly installation, and maybe the schedule is already full until next week and you'll have to take a day off work to be home for that. I'll pay quite a bit extra to avoid that any more often than necessary. And that doesn't consider the value of the daily satisfaction of using well made appliances. They feel solid, they work without glitches, they are quiet, they are consistent, you don't worry about them.
Even with a toaster some of that applies. I've had toasters that were a daily annoyance to use. They burnt the toast, or toasted unevenly, sometimes randomly, or if you were making a lot of toast the subsequent batches would come out differently from the first. It's worth something to have a toaster that just reliably makes toast, the same way, every day.
Apple is China.. hence "Designed by Apple in California"
The GoPros aren’t manufactured in the US either.
> The GoPros aren’t manufactured in the US either.
True. Virtually nothing is.
Though its probably worth noting that Apple's approach to China exists at a much more integrated and larger scale than your average US (or other western) electronics company and is more akin to a fully integrated partnership with various entities like Foxconn than the typical "let's offshore the manufacturing stage" that most other companies take.
Apple isn't exactly competing with China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China
At the manufacturing level it largely isn't, no, though as others have pointed out Apple at least still has the ability to explore options outside China. But Apple represents a lack of vertical integration for its big Chinese suppliers like Foxconn, an American middleman taking a big slice of the revenues and profits which come from the customer. One thing to note is that Android isn't all that different, as phone makers still have to tithe to Google.
One factor (mentioned at https://bsky.app/profile/rajakorman.bsky.social/post/3mqubnh... for instance) is Western distrust of the Chinese government and the regulatory barriers erected from both sides. TikTok's probably a good case study. There was a conspicuous lack of Chinese software companies having success in the Western consumer market before TikTok. Building TikTok involved creating a new product aimed at RoW which was separate from its original Chinese model, Douyin. And then after TikTok Western success was still elusive, to some extent, as the US government snatched away Bytedance's toy.
Though even beyond tech and other politically sensitive areas China's generally been pretty slow at generating RoW-consumer-facing products and brands. There's also the slightly remarkable fact that historically (and even to some extent still today) GUIs have been extremely, mysteriously hard for large companies worldwide to do well. The main exception have tended to either be called "Apple" or have dedicated themselves to copying Apple's homework: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288221 .
(I am not an expert on anyhthing.)
Apple manufacturing is entirely Indian and Chinese.
While GoPro is made in Thailand.
America is just where their marketing teams hang out...
Mac Mini will be made in Houston (they already make their own servers there) https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/02/apple-accelerates-us-...
Is it common in American factories to have US flags hanging on the walls similar to how dictators like to hang their portraits in factories? Never seen that in the (admitted small amount) of factories I've visited around in Europe, but tends to also give off a bit of "too much nationalism" vibe around here unless there is a special event, the US flag seems to be treated differently in the US so maybe it's a common sight?
I keep forgetting that there is a requirement to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in US schools [1], which is just mind-boggling to me, and it's never something they proudly advertise through their propaganda arm of Hollywood. In hundreds of US-produced shows set in US schools, that detail is always conveniently omitted.
Here's how it works for the non-Americans of us:
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all," should be rendered by standing at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart.
Remembering this often-forgotten detail puts a lot of US culture and behaviour in perspective. Also let's not forget the Bellamy salute, in use for 50 years until 1942: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
---
1: and in congressional sessions, government meetings at local levels, and meetings held by many private organizations, according to Wikipedia
> I keep forgetting that there is a requirement to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in US schools
There most certainly is not. The pledge is common in schools but the Supreme Court has ruled no one is required to participate and cannot be punished for non-participation. Is it still weird? Sure. But it’s not required.
"Not required" but my teachers made it abundantly clear what they thought of being forced to allow ungrateful troublemakers to disrespect their country.
I always disliked the Pledge and began to strongly dislike it after moving away from the religion it tries to establish as the national religion, but I was keenly aware that picking this fight would cost me considerable political capital and chose not to.
Somehow nobody ever bothers to mention to the kids that it's not required.
How many schools still do it, though? Honestly you could tell me it was almost universal or very rare, and I'd have to believe you either way.
Of course, Canada was doing the freaking Lord's Prayer in schools until freaking 1988. I don't know about other countries, but wouldn't be surprised.
In the US schools I'm familiar with, it's "not required" kind of like how it's not required to attend meetings at work. Nobody's forcing you, but it will be noticed and there will be consequences.
> there will be consequences
What sort of consequences? I'm guessing the US got rid of corporal punishment, and since it's optional, could they give like detention and stuff for it? Or is this more about being bullied/similar by peers?
When I was in school decades ago, the consequences were that the teacher would single you out and scold you to “follow directions”, maybe they’d do whatever write up for not following directions. I’m sure in some places kids got detention or letters sent home to their parents, etc.
Also the US did not get rid of corporal punishment entirely, the south still has it in some places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_corporal_punishment_in_...
The irony of (teacher) reciting a pledge in support of 'liberty and justice for all' and then falling apart because a child has tried to use some of that liberty, then wishing and perpetuating injustice upon them in retaliation, is strong.
If one's ideals fall over so easily, what would happen in the event of an actual serious attack on those ideals?
Sometimes it's not even direct consequences. You stand out as "that kid" and suddenly, you aren't given the benefit of the doubt the next time there is some kind of conflict at school. Or you are held to the rules -just a bit- more strictly than everyone else. Or, if your grade is on the border between a B+ and A-, they'll give you the B where they give the more obedient kids the A. When you become "that kid" the consequences can be almost invisible and insidious.
At least in the US, teachers and administrators are given rather broad latitude to treat students differently, without requiring justification and very often based on their own personal biases and prejudices.
I had to do the pledge in early elementary school. It didn't continue forever. Not sure if people still do it. I do agree it's disturbing. Interestingly we once read a book in school that featured a character who refused to say the pledge and got in trouble for it. IIRC it was a case of "you aren't technically required to do this but they'll give you a hard time if you're the only one not doing it".
I stopped doing it when I was in high school (I just stood there) and no one cared. This would have been about 22 years ago
It didn't seem mind-boggling during the cold war. But I guess it does now.
In general, we Americans really, really love our country. Our flag still represents values tied closely to our revolutionary war and and independence. Obviously the flag gets wrapped around all sorts of causes, even contradictory ones, but that core kernel of shared values is truly universal.
So as individuals we choose to fly the flag a lot.
> "but that core kernel of shared values is truly universal."
Which values? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." does not seem to be upheld very strongly in the USA.
What about women's rights and abortion upturned by the current government, why are Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality needed 50 years after Martin Luther King, what about thousands of people disappeared by Trump's ICE, what about the enormous wealth inequality where the wealthy seem to be a lot more 'equal' than the plebs, what about nobody being punished for the 2008 financial crisis or the Epstein events or the Jan 6th attempted coup? Or the unwillingness of so many people to wear masks during COVID out of respect for their fellow Americans?
How can you claim a "core kernel of universal shared values" without nation-wide universal health care, workers rights, liveable minimum wage, things that demonstrate a fundamental belief in equality and shared values??
And if you don’t worship the flag in just the right way you suffer the consequences.
Make America Great Again!
I'm not american but afaik it's very common. The US is on a different level though, see the flags in the suburbia, the pledge of allegiance in school's every morning etc.
But I'd say it's not "too much nationalism" rather the average american is defintiely more patriotic than an average european (who can then again be anyone from the UK to Poland to Moldova) but you get my point
I am American who has lived in many countries around the world, and I think this is distinctly wrong and the source of many problems in the US.
It would be more correct to say that the average American values outward displays of nationalism more, and has a more negative perception of those who do not appreciate or want to participate in those displays than people in most other countries. And yes, they conflate this with 'patriotism'. However, this is almost completely performative and lacks real substance, as is proven by the typically far more selfish attitude towards their fellow citizens, and is exemplified by the constant historical failures to provide significant funding for projects designed to help rather than harm others.
Europeans and people from other countries around the world are often fiercely in love with their countries. They just tend not to love the idea of noisily jumping up to gaudily beat their own drum. So yes, the average American thinks they are more nationalistic, when in fact they are just more tribal and crude about their nationalism than what is typically found in other countries around the world. If only our nationalism were taken a bit more seriously than our affiliation with a sports team, which is in theory just for fun and entertainment, that would be an improvement.
I disagree with this, I've noticed that the countries rising to prominence are quite nationalistic and the ones fading into obscurity are very post-national.
> Europeans and people from other countries around the world are often fiercely in love with their countries.
I would also disagree with this, I think it's profoundly uncool to love your country in many parts of Europe—think the UK and especially Germany.
The Europeans that did actually fiercely love their country that I've met were all Poles or Serbs that were gaudily beating their own drum.
What problems do you think arise from nationalism in it's current form in the US?
I don't think they value displaying nationalism more, nationalists tend to be very vocal and visible, it's just that the US is full of nationalists. It really is the biggest issue with the US, and why the orange man is president.
I think you missed my point, which is that in the US, people typically described as nationalists tend to be pseudo-nationalists who value pomp and ceremony, but not substantial concrete actions to better their country or actual real care and love for their fellow countrymen. In terms of percentage of the population who value and love their national identity, we are no different than anywhere else.
See https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/02/17/what-makes-peo... and especially note that the US is one of the top countries for percentage of population with primarily negative views of their country, at 20%.
Leadership in European countries is so routinely in conflict with their people who understand the inalienable rights of the people so well. I wonder where that comes from.
You're not wrong that the American public is largely out of touch with the fundamentals of a free society.
> Leadership in European countries is so routinely in conflict with their people
> I wonder where that comes from.
> Leadership
Democracy is great but that elected leaders seek reelection at the expense of the common folk isn't something new, those in power will naturally seek more power.
The problem is that Americans look at vulnerable people and billionaires like they individually deserved their fate. The cult of merit.
If the current events don't make you think it's not nationalism, then I'm wondering what nationalism even is
When I was younger, I would have thought that, but now I have trouble distinguishing nationalism and white supremacism when I see enthusiastic usage of flags/pledges.
Patriotism is soft nationalism, and any of either is too much.
It is common but I think these displays in the press release are for the photo. I would expect to see a large flag on a tall pole outside most large factories, but inside the decorations will range from bland, to company-oriented, to patriotic.
A defense plant probably has more outward signs of patriotism.
The US is weird about its flag, I think because nationalism wasn't seen as a bad thing up until recently. These days it's much weirder to see an American flag, and usually you know it has something to do with MAGAs. The weird thing to me is how you see one massive one in the luggage retrieval area when you arrive in JFK (in New York). Always makes me sigh
It is not uncommon to have national and state flags, but it is not similar to how dictators like to hang their portraits. It is meant more to show pride of what you build together as a people, rather than to evoke fear and obeisance.
That said, this may have also been a photo op, and given the image is from texas, there are probably portraits of a dictator hanging around, too.
Also he dictatorship are (officially) pride of doing their work for the state as Americans work multiple jobs in fear of losing their paychecks, their health insurance.
Do you really think someone waving their country's flag is the same as waving a flag with the face of a dictator? Worldwide?
This thread was about omnipresent flag presence in factories and such. And the way it's done in America is different from many other countries.
Is it? The car dealership near where I grew up had a 100 foot tall pole with a Canadian flag at least 10 feet wide, probably more. And that's a car dealership... Flags were everywhere: gyms, offices, banks, schools, etc... Can't say I toured any factories to specifically know if they were there, but I'm guessing yes.
Of course now it's different, the flag is less common, to the point in my home province (Alberta) you see more Albertan flags than Canadian ones...
US flag is everywhere. Indoor weightlifting gyms, hanging inside large hangers for aircraft, in schools, factories outside your company HQ on the flagpole, etc.
you have no idea. lol
In Canada it used to be common to have Canadian flags everywhere. It's only recently that we became a self-hating country.
> similar to how dictators like to hang their portraits
Insane comparison as the idea of a free country is fundamentally different than the cult of personality that dictators create.
The fact that the European flag isn't seen anywhere in Europe tells you a lot about how people really feel about the E.U.
In my country you, as a civilian, fly the national flag for the equivalent of July 4th, and for big personal events like graduations. Flag merchandise is of course also worn in support of the national sports teams.
Outside of that the main people flying national flags are government institutions, who usually have it up right next to a European flag and a flag of the institution, like a local municipality.
The European flag is also plastered over billboards next to all kinds of EU-funded construction projects, of course, and is on literally every single Euro bill.
So no, someone's feelings about an institution are not inherently linked to the success of its empty propaganda campaigns.
People in these comments are saying the US flag just represents white supremacy to them now...
The media has really done a number on us, basically throughout the West. I don't know enough about other area's media to comment.
I'm not a friend of nationalism, but I believe that it's a trade-off: of you want to be open to immigration, of the kind that pulls in newcomers, inviting them to become a part of the place they move to, instead of remaining outsiders, you have to give them plenty of opportunity to identify with their new home. Of course these days, we see the American flag used a lot in ways completely opposite to this, but that does not change the great progressive value national symbols could provide.
> Apple somehow reigns supreme still.
Apple reigns supreme because of China - and the two are inextricably linked. China would not have its high-tech manufacturing prowess if it were not for Apple. The book Apple In China [1] highlights how millions of cheap laborers and the country's engineers took the lessons of working with Apple to solidify its edge in this space in a way nobody can catch up to today.
China took the long-term greedy approach to invest in the relationship. We see the US today taking equity stakes in Intel and trying to play catchup by using elements of the same playbook. The US's advantage remains in the more "intangible" side of the process: creativity, design, new tech. In a global economy with free trade, this is all fine. But China never "westernized" itself as was expected from the increase in global trade. Now the US is back pedaling, trying to jump start its manufacturing. It will take a long time...
The book is a good page-turning read. I recommend it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1668053373
I'm looking at GoPro packaging here that says "Made in Thailand".
Consumer electronics, yes. For defense, though, American companies very much still make electronics.
> Apple somehow reigns supreme still.
That's because America ban anything that starts to compete, like Huawei or Chinese car companies
Huawei had spyware and backdoors in their gear, and they use forced labor in their factories. I think they earned a ban.
Apple reigns because you can't buy Chinese brands in the US
> Apple somehow reigns supreme still.
Largely because they've been producing in China for quite awhile. Now India too.
Apple has an excellent mobile OS, which is enough of a loyal userbase that they can make a hardware mistake once in a while and still retain customers. They're less hardware-dependent than most device manufacturers. This also enables them to lag behind the state of the art if it means more reliable/consistent performance. Which is why you don't see a folding Apple phone yet, and why Samsung was able to score points against Apple by having longer battery life and a better camera. This also allows them to demand high quality from their factories.
Apple still stand because of Software which China sucks at. Good thing the US is not about to destroy its software industry by investing all of its money on AI.
Is apple making electronics? I thought they are made in India and China.
Manufacturing is primarily in China - that's true for Go Pro & everyone else and almost needless to say. The point is China usually eats the design layer too, making Apple a little unique in that they survived Chinese competition completely unscathed.
Mac Mini will be made in Houston (they already make their own servers there) https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/02/apple-accelerates-us-...
Apple is one of the few brands I completely expect to be able to genuinely pull this off.
Their volumes are high enough that they will literally build an entire factory from scratch to produce a single product line, they are far enough up the luxury ladder that a few extra dollar in labour won't hurt them too badly, and the contracts with their suppliers are significant enough that they don't need the short supply lines of a Shenzhen and can just demand their suppliers Get It Done.
Having a domestic factory won't hurt Apple, and with an erratic President who'll flip on tariffs twice a week it's a sensible hedge against his inevitable next meltdown.
I bought my first GoPro for a scuba diving trip in Mexico once. Was super excited, it was my first scuba diving experience too.
As soon as we hit deeper waters the capture button pressed itself down due the pressure and it wouldn’t come back up. That, unfortunately happened in a way that I couldn’t start a capture. Lost the entire thing, despite the camera being perfectly fine after we came back to surface.
Hated them ever since.
For scuba diving you will want to have a house for the camera regardless of brand. It not only lower the risk of damages, but it is also more explicitly designed for depth without needing to compromising for non-divers.
That said, GoPro is not the best for low light environments, and the battery is a bit temperature sensitive, both which can be an issue when diving.
GoPros (at least the early generations) required a special housing for use in water. My first GoPro was a 2 I believe and I bought it for scuba and it was terrible. Then the newer models came out promising better performance for diving, so I upgraded... and it was terrible as well. Gave up on GoPros after being sucked in twice and not getting the results I was hoping for. It was ok for other things, but anything involving water was not great.
I believe things eventually got sorted out for water use, but I was no longer a customer.
Hahahah. Do you seriously just take random objects deep underwater and expect them to be designed to withstand that sort of an environment?
Was the GoPro you bought rated up to that depth or something? After a cursory look online, they're only rated down to 10m, which is about what I'd expect.
I remember using these on movie sets as crash cams - a cheap camera that could be mounted on something fast-moving so you could get cool action shots without risking the $100k primary camera. But the main selling point for this use-case is that they were cheap, and that’s a fight the Chinese companies will always win.
They missed the chance to make PC camera just before Covid or during it or now as another revenue stream. They have a hacky way to get it to work but they should have made one specifically for the PC and meeting settings.. Cisco and others make a killing in that space
All GoPros since HERO 8 (released 2019) works as a webcam without any hacks, just plug it in.
not on the macos. Hero9 (or 10 i dont remember) owner here.
we barely ever use our GoPro 8 BLACK. I decided to take it with me skiing and turned it on for a crazy ride down. When I got back I wanted to show my GF the footage and it just had frozen video, only playing sound.
I thought they were meant to be really robust and hardy but it decided not to work when I needed it and now I don't really trust them tbh. It's sort of opposite of what the brand was leading me to believe.
I stopped buying go pros when I drove from the top of Mt Blue Sky to the base. Had the camera mounted on my dashboard, planned to make a cool time lapse down the mountain road.
Turns out it overheated 15 minutes into the drive, and corrupted all the footage from my whole ski trip.
I'm also still salty that they cancelled my favorite fast video editing software (can't remember the name).
This was 8 years ago.
Contrary to the popular opinion in the rest of the comments, I do like my GoPro (Hero 11). Good and robust hardware, a lot of thought into usability for professionals, many accessories, and hackable with official firmware from the company.
The "problem" is that I don't use it that often. Most people do not need action footage regularly. It was more like a impulse/hobby buy rather than a need.
> and hackable with official firmware from the company.
GoPro Labs works really well, https://gopro.com/en/us/info/gopro-labs
But it's a bit sad how long their expirements lives there before making it into the default firmware.
I loved the product early on, but they became the Adobe Creative Cloud of cameras. Play dumb subscription games win dumb prizes.
I've owned a bunch of gopros and I feel like they've always had the same kind of bugs. Random crashes, things not working anymore. It's really bad, so bad that I had plenty of videos that were missing sound, or just corruption in general.
Then they started this subscription thing and I was like, finally, they're going the SaaS way, they will make so much money, and they will be able to improve that camera that basically never seems to improve much version after version. I bought a bunch of put options, and I lost all my money, every time I put back some in the put options.
Now I have the insta360 go ultra and... I think go pro is going to die. It's just so good.
If you thought they were going to finally improve with SaaS why did you buy put options?
"Ah so that's why I kept losing money!"
But seriously, safe to assume they meant to say calls and just accidentally wrote the wrong one.
My guess is that action cameras are 20 % need (professionals, documentary crews etc) and 80 % fashion (people buying them and them using them for a few shots twice a year on the holiday), and the fashion component peak is over.
I slept on GoPro for a long time because, but then wanted to document some outdoor activities. I went with two Hero 5 units and as a photographer, I was shocked by how overhyped these devices seemed to be.
The first surprise was just shoddy electrical engineering: unlike any camera from a big-name manufacturer, they drain the batteries in storage, to the point where they're dead after 2-3 weeks. But that aside, image quality is just poor for the price. It's oversharpened and oversaturated to cover up deficiencies, and that may work for some YouTube videos, but it's a $400 device that's miles behind any $500 mirrorless.
So I get it that if really want to go snorkeling or mountain biking with a camera, this might be a good choice, but that's a tiny market, and for everything else, why would you buy it? If you want cell phone quality video, you can use your cell phone. If you want professional quality, you can spend the same amount of money on a mirrorless from Canon, Panasonic, Sony, or whatever.
the action part of “action camera” is the reason why you buy an action camera. if a normal camera is fine then yeah, you don’t need it.
> So I get it that if really want to go snorkeling or mountain biking with a camera, this might be a good choice, but that's a tiny market, and for everything else, why would you buy it?
I don't think people are cross-shopping action cameras and mirrorless cameras. Either you want a wearable light-weight shockproof, waterproof camera or not.
Worth pointing out that your experience is with a model from a decade ago. The current Hero model is the 13.
The GoPro has always been explicitly marketed as an action camera - to the point that people for a long time called any action camera "a GoPro". Comparing them to smartphones or mirrorless cameras is completely missing their point: nobody would buy them for regular point-and-shoot activity.
You buy a GoPro to mount onto a dirt bike, or on your helmet during caving, or on a chest harness during a skydive, or on the front of your surfboard: all activities where a smartphone or a mirrorless would die on their first use.
GoPro isn't failing because the concept is wrong - the market is massive. GoPro is failing because its competitors started releasing clones which are both better and cheaper. They are the expensive premium brand in a market where buyers expect their product will need to be replaced when it inevitably can't handle the abuse anymore.
it’s very much like iRobot vacuums - more expensive and less performant than the chinese competitors that have totally overtaken the market. iRobot sad story, but so behind. i have a chinese robot from 3i that fills its mop water tank from humidity in the air. and my action camera is an Insta360 that does great 360 video underwater without a case.
> i have a chinese robot from 3i that fills its mop water tank from humidity in the air.
Okay, I definitely want a link for that one. That's either the most awesome hack or the biggest marketing lie ever.
No, that's precisely my point. It's only an action camera, and you assert that the market is massive, but I don't see it. Just how many millions of units can you sell to YouTuber spelunkers, YouTuber mountain bikers, YouTuber paragliders, YouTuber divers, and so on?
The reality is that even in "action" situations - the situations where normal people want to capture memories of hiking, biking, boating, etc - normal cameras, including cell phones, are usually more than enough and GoPro somehow managers to be worse.
> Just how many millions of units can you sell
Just how many millions of people do those outdoors activities?
You can't survive selling solely to YouTubers, that's definitely true, but you don't need to. Just like tennis companies don't need to survive solely on selling to Grand Slam competitors. Plenty of people are willing to spend a few hundred bucks on their hobbies if it gives them nice pictures and videos for InstaSnapBookTok and to show off at parties.
And no, normal cameras and smartphones are not enough. They'll do for a casual hike, but they will not survive being attached to a mountain bike going downhill and being shaken to bits. I found out the hard way, it is how I killed my first smartphone. If you disagree: why not try it out yourself with a $1500 flagship phone and report back how it went?
> Just how many millions of people do those outdoors activities?
Many, but that's irrelevant. There are hundreds of thousand of bicycles in my city, and very, very of them have cameras. That's kinda the point: what you're selling is the dream of being a YouTube influencer, pretty much. Otherwise, there's little value to having a big library of videos from every ride you've taken, especially since let's face it, most people ride the same routes / trails most of the time.
Now, the dream of being an influencer may be a strong selling point, but you can only do it once. People are not gonna keep upgrading.
I use it as a dashcam.
plenty of companies seem to live just fine off selling scuba gear to divers
My strong photographer opinion is that you should buy the oldest action camera that meets any resolution/framerate needs and treat it almost like a disposable. Buy on sales or used units. Use them on shots you genuinely are unwilling to use a mirrorless for - strapped to the front of a bike, magnetically attached to the side of a car, strapped to someone jumping in a lake.
> treat it almost like a disposable
And that's why GoPro is dying: they are selling a premium product in a market of disposables.
Gopro has been garbage for years now.
Heck in youtube videos you'll occasionally hear "for some reason my gopro is really hot and smells like burning plastic".
Happens to every big brand, really.
These days you can buy mini cameras for a few bucks on AliExpress, so no wonder.
any recommendation?
Are you looking for Good or Great?
If you just need Good, there are dozens of no-brand options on Amazon and Ali that do 4K60fps with output that is more than sufficient for any non-professional use.
I don't have a brand recommendation off hand, because the ones I've bought have been random names, but they've all been more than enough. As a reference, I've used them for capturing footage for training machine vision systems, and some general purpose marketing videos. I'm not a "creator", so I paid no attention to editing features, clip hosting, or any of those things.
Amazon sometimes gets some hate here, but I usually just buy there because the returns process is so simple. In the random case I get a product that turned out to be deceptive advertising, I drop it at Whole Foods and have a credit before I leave the parking lot. And I have the product in hand in 48 hours at most.
> there are dozens of no-brand options on Amazon and Ali that do 4K60fps
I have to very strongly disagree with this sentiment. I have personally tested quite a few no-name "4K 60fps" cameras from Amazon and AliExpress. Many of them upscale from 1080 - which is fine I guess - but then in 60fps will use a crop sensor and upscale from like ~640. Even with the more recognizable SJCam and Akaso brands, unless you're paying ~$200 - you're going to get upscaling, bad color science, bad image distortion. When comparing against a GoPro 5 (first 4k 60 entry) or 8 (first with USB C) the difference is astounding.
Though perhaps this is the difference between good and great that you refer to - but for me, it's certainly worth getting a used GoPro vs any of these modern cheap alternatives.
Unfortunately current new GoPros don't improve on their existing line enough to justify paying current prices. I wish I could get a new 2018 quality GoPro knockoff for <$200
I'll have to try and dig out a couple of the ones I bought and re-verify this. Really though the 60fps doesn't matter for the majority of users. Even the 4K aspect is overkill for most common things.
ISTR GoPro moved away from Ambarella SoCs several years ago and rolled their own, but most of the other cameras are using Amba, Novatek, etc., and certainly offer great performance for a fraction of the cost of GoPro.
I saw a review on YouTube of a lot of these alternatives, along with the established brands, and in bright sunlight and little movement some were ok but quality was all over.
However once it got a bit darker, or heavy movement, the big brands left the rest in the dust pretty much.
So yeah, do a bit of research and figure out your use-case.
For professional action shots people want 180 degree immersive VR video nowadays.
No one wants this, nobody is watching action footy in VR
Are you serious? Watching skydiving footage in VR is amazing. Flat pictures are nothing compared to it.
> Are you looking for Good or Great?
What about equal-or-better-than-the-same-or-similar-GoPro?
didn't they moved actual hardware production elsewhere outside of US?
typical story. first move out production, loose core competency, let competitors copy it with own brands in own jurisdictions, and shut down business.
American manufacturing is a rounding error, especially when it comes to consumer electronics.
Western manufacturing can't compete with a Shenzhen. Our supply lines suck, our labour is too expensive for any kind of manual work, and we didn't bother to invest in automation as decades of outsourcing made our manufacturers focus on low-volume high-margin products.
No need to steal when our own companies willingly export core competency for a few cents of shareholder value!
This sounds like a choose your path story…
You are a country. You have to decide on your country’s economic model before starting the game. Choose:
- a free market economy. Companies are unhindered by the state to make their own decisions to maximize shareholder value. Decisions therefore lean towards short term profit margins rather than long term success. Influence of the state via elected politicians on a short term is expensive but effective to ensure you are unhindered by regulation. Success here is not aligned with the long term success of the state.
- a quasi free market where there is partial state ownership and control, but also supports free market principles to encourage private investment. The state will heavily subsidize your economy and decisions can be made to prioritize long term global success rather than short term shareholder value.
- a state controlled and state owned economy. All decisions are made by committee. There are no shareholders apart from the state. Success benefits all within the state. Failure also tied directly to the state. Long term goals are preference over short term goals.
Choose carefully. Once your have made your decision the costs to change it are extremely high and will result in societal and economic collapse.
> All decisions are made by committee. There are no shareholders apart from the state. Success benefits all within the state.
I cannot believe there are people on this planet that still believe this. Astounding.
There’s a really good video out there about how GoPro fumbled their position:
https://youtu.be/frrhSJF__Mc
Insta360 is the company that has essentially taken over this space.
> While GoPro action cameras are built to withstand shock, the brand itself is looking distinctly shaky right now. Latest reports[1] are that founder Nicholas Woodman is propping the company up by extending it a loan of his own money to the tune of $20 million, at an annual interest rate of 6.5%, while a buyer is desperately sought. It’s believed GoPro may not survive the year without a new owner or fresh injection of cash, with Woodman’s intervention acting as a stopgap rather than bail-out per se.
$20m is really not much money to operate a company for 6 months. They must be close to break-even at least?
Is this because of the cost of memory or because the product is no longer competitive?
This article is not very satisfying to read, because it doesn't explore the reasons why GoPro is on the ropes.
From the financials, it's a little of both?
Memory is the acute issue causing their struggles; their most recent quarter saw a gross margin of 4.5% (that's revenue minus the direct cost of producing the cameras, divided by the revenue). That's a hefty fall from their previous margin of ~31%. This contributed to their operating loss of $57M in the last 3 months.
Thag being said, they haven't had a positive quarterly operating income since the last quarter of 2022, even when the margin was higher than 4.5%. So it's not like they were succeeding before the memory crunch, just losing money slower.
Adventure cams lose a market when people can’t afford to go on adventures?
IMO the image quality on GoPro is still the best. I don't understand why people say it's horrible. For flat video it outperforms Insta360 and definitely DJI.
Red Bull really ran the marketing playbook that GoPro should have done: become known for athletes doing extreme things. Instead they stayed too technical and product-based and didn't build a brand beyond "we make action cameras."
Red Bull doesn’t just market, they bankroll and support.
Most companies just sponsor a team or something, but Red Bull has paid for the baseline infrastructure of many sports.
There is an old saying that Red Bull is a marketing company that happens to sell energy drinks
Well that is pretty much true. It's founder was a marketing director for a consumer goods brand.
yep, and there's no reason why a company with that brand couldn't be selling action cameras, or shoes (Nike), or anything adjacent to extreme sports
They really have tried.
They don't have the type of insane cashflow that RedBull does to sponsor tons of athletes and weird events, but their video contests are kind of a big deal in the action sports community.
AKA, their Line of the Winter[1] competition for skiing, or their Best Line conest for MTB[2] that they used to run. And they're the title sponsor for the GoPro Mountain Games[3].
They're still THE action sports cameara carried in a lot of outdoor equipment stores, but the Insta360 has really dominated social media recently, and their products are currently a better value for cost/performance.
[1] https://gopro.com/en/us/awards/line-of-the-winter [2] https://www.pinkbike.com/news/enter-the-gopro-of-the-world-b... [3] https://mountaingames.com/
It’s not just the cash flow, it’s the margins.
Redbulls gross margins are probably 90%. It’s basically just water, sugar, and caffeine sold for $3.
You can do a lot of great promotions if the cost of your product is a rounding error.
> It’s basically just water, sugar, and caffeine sold for $3.
... and some of their products don't even have sugar!
So how many minutes of that playbook do you suppose the annual budget of Gopro would be able to pay for?
I had no ifea they were struggling. Tldr; their competitor Insta360 is battling them, and they have YoY revenue drop.
Gopro has this cool reliable aura around them. How could they he struggling? So bizarre
They rode the novelty train so hard they missed that everyone is doing it better than them now.
Their hardware is unimpressive and expensive, and their software is horrible.
> and their software is horrible
As a long-time GoPro owner who recently added an Insta360 X5 to his collection, I can't really see any meaningful difference in software horribleness. They are both really really bad, with ads everywhere constantly pushing subscriptions to their cloud services.
At least with the normal cameras the software can be entirely ignored, I can take video from my Hero5 straight in to any ordinary NLE and go from there, but the 360 camera requires their software to convert from the native format to anything usable, even if I'm keeping it as 360 footage.
The worst part IMO for both is that they prioritize mobile apps over their PC software so if you want to edit on a computer like a normal reasonable person you lose features compared to idiotically doing things on a phone.
>The worst part IMO for both is that they prioritize mobile apps over their PC software so if you want to edit on a computer like a normal reasonable person you lose features compared to idiotically doing things on a phone.
This was my main gripe, but also:
* Image stabilization (Hypersmooth Pro/ReelSteady) as a subscription feature.
* Auto-rotate and orientation lock don't work in streaming mode. (I reported this as a bug on the Hero7, was told it was being looked at, still a problem on the Hero10 when I stopped paying attention)
For what it's worth, DJI does offer desktop software for their Osmo action cams. They also have a direct NAS/cloud storage upload option from the camera, as well as allowing normal transfer over USB or by pulling the SD card.
Agree. Gopro recently released a DaVinci plugin for 360 videoes, which is great. But I often would like something in between the advanced DaVinci and the simple mobile editing. After the release of Max2, the Quik app got a big overhaul and is quite capable now. But it's still mobile, and Gopro Player (for desktop) is then now even further behind on capabilities. Same issue with Insta360 (both mobile and desktop, never tried Dji's apps)
> The worst part IMO for both is that they prioritize mobile apps over their PC software so if you want to edit on a computer like a normal reasonable person you lose features compared to idiotically doing things on a phone.
This is my biggest issue as well. It's actually the one "real" thing I use the iPad for. It still gets the mobile app interface whilst being on a bigger screen and being almost usable.
Another area where an American technology brand is losing to the Chinese alternative. Alongside EVs, drones, robot vacuums, solar panels.
Not surprising, it's a commoditized sector.
On top of that, when GoPro first launched mobile phones generally did not have cameras capable of producing production-quality images, and especially video. 20 years later, the game is much different.
Remember the Flip video camera that was all the rage for like 2 years and then just disappeared when cellphones could shoot video? GoPro is like a rugged Flip, so it took a little longer for the world to catch up to them, but now there are lots of options, and a "cheap" sports camera that is 1/4 the price of a GoPro is good enough, even if it only lasts 1/2 as long.
It's honestly embarrassing that our leaders still haven't realized why this is happening, and still aren't taking any actions to prevent it from getting worse.
Giving billions of free money to shareholders of Intel & friends is going to do absolutely nothing to change the tide. Want domestic manufacturing? Invest in building a JLCPCB alternative: automated to the fullest extent possible in order to save fractions of a cent on ops, then operated on a razor-thin margin but making up for it in volume.
Chinese people aren't the lazy dumb manual workers we have long pretended they are. After we have freely given them all of our engineering knowledge with outsourcing, they are now beating us on the free market. If we don't internalize this, stop with the silly competition-destroying tariffs, and try to compete again, we are doomed to slide into irrelevancy - and we've got only ourselves to blame.
Beaten on quality and price by competitors.
The same thing is happening to BMW, Toyota,Mercedes...
> How could they he struggling?
They are just not as good. I bought GoPro10 ~5 years ago and it constantly overheats. Very unreliable. It was the first and last time I bought GoPro.
no one is mentioning DJI? they are also crushing go pro with DJI Osmo lineup, action or nano.
It's a testament to how broken modern business practices are that GoPro can sell 1.2 Million cameras per year and still go out of business.
It's possible they are just poorly run, and they spend more in R&D than they recoup in revenue, but I strongly suspect they were set up to only be profitable if they sold millions of cameras per year as an attempt to maximize profits at that volume, without consideration of other scenarios.
What does one buy if they want a 1080p60 action cam with stabilisation that doesn't overheat, has good battery life and acceptable low light performance (think rainy day in the woods)?
Ah damn I just bought their new Mission One a few weeks ago (upgrading from a Hero 10). Already quite angry though since it seems the batteries are basically the same shape for both, except the connector is in a different location, so the 3 existing batteries I have for the Hero 10 are not compatible, which is a shitty move from GoPro. Well I guess either way I won’t be buying gopros anymore in the future.
They could spur a lot of innovation by open sourcing their firmware or introducing plugins. They don't really have a channel to take asks like "ring buffer style recording" but I would do it myself.
They already have Open GoPro: https://gopro.com/en/us/info/open-gopro
Idk if the firmware is open source, but there's a whole SDK you can use to implement stuff like that
I would want to put stuff on the camera, which this SDK doesn't do. But it's good it is part of their DNA.
Betteridge enters the chat. GoPro's market is changing: strong competitors now make solid, low cost alternatives. GoPro is moving deep into professional markets where margins are high, and leveraging their position as a US company whose products can be utilized by sensitive customers.
GoPro will be fine. They just won't be the go-to for every YouTuber any longer.
I don't see a use case for these cameras. Phone takes amazing pictures and videos and is always on hand and if I need something more polished, I just get DSLR. Sure DSLR is more expensive, but if I want to do something well, I'd rather go all in.
When you want to film your kid jumping into a pool (from inside the pool), do you do it with your phone or with your DSLR?
The use case is niche but there. I ride mountain bikes and off-road motorcycles and have a GoPro on my helmet. A phone is the wrong form factor and a DSLR is too heavy.
Same with surfers, or people who race cars etc. Having a physically small camera, with robust mounting and stabilization is not something a phone in a gimbal or a "real camera" can provide.
Who is mounting a DSLR on bike, helmet, chest? Taking it in the ocean, etc.
This has been on the cards for about a decade. I guess Insta360's YouTube advertising barrage worked.
Saw some sponsored videos on YouTube where they out GoPro compeititor (Insta360 with it's logo) on a Korean/Chinese baby, and the baby enjoying his day.
Very good marketing I would say.
Attached Example (you will find many such videos on Social Media)
https://youtube.com/shorts/2KNOx5oMXWk?feature=shared