Didn’t GoPro start requiring online activation of their cameras a while back? Like customers couldn’t use it out of the box until they installed the smartphone app and activated it?
Edit: Looks like GoPro did try doing it by using dark patterns first and then getting more aggressive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gopro/comments/16n6xyr/so_you_need_the_gopro_quik_app_to_activate_the/
Hah, and here I was thinking of getting a GoPro as a dash cam/rear cam. Sucks to suck GoPro lost another customer.
Nice to see that at least in the hardware market, competition still works. It is normal for companies who don’t offer competitive value for the money to just fail. This is how market economies are meant to work.
GoPro hasn’t really done anything for the past 5 years at least. Totally on them.
What should they be doing? They are an action camera company, they make action cameras. Do you think they needed to branch out to do energy drinks and lunchables or whatever?
They could try and make a camera that doesn’t overheat and shut down.
They doubled down hard on editing via the phone app with cloud storage via subscription. I have zero desire to edit video on my phone. Their desktop apps are frankly horrendous. They have cameras that capture footage at higher than 4K but their phone app only allowed export at 4K at least on an iPhone. This seemed to be a limit on the h265 libraries on the iPhone so it might be different on Android.
If you wanted to export their 5.6K 360 footage on a desktop from a GoPro Max you couldn’t do that in any sane way. You had to export it in their cine* whatever format and an hour of footage was over 400GB. This also used your graphics card to accelerate it. You could export the h265 files in 4K if memory serves which was obviously smaller and faster but you dropped the resolution as a trade off.
YouTube in a desktop browser supports 360 footage in 5K+ resolutions. I believe the mobile app is still 4K only.
If they have a solid product and do not want to make “energy drinks and lunchables”, the best financial move would be to optimize it. Find ways to make it smaller, lighter, and most importantly, reduce costs.
But if I were in charge, I’d seriously think about trying to eat DJI’s drone lunch now that there are FAA rules around foreign drone companies. GoPro is headquartered in San Mateo. Drone design is well known enough that there aren’t any hard problems in the way of introducing a decent DJI mini replacement. There may be patents or other non-technical stuff in the way though. But if they could get in on that, it could be immensely lucrative, especially if they can get government contracts.
They’re still feeling the burn from when they tried entering the drone space. The GoPro Karma almost bankrupted them on its own, and marked the end of their perception as a quality brand. It was a disaster they never recovered financially or reputationally.
The concept was great. The gimbal and camera could actually be removed from the drone to use independently. People were excited for their entry into the space, and they built a TON of the drones.
But they were also missing features. They didn’t have an API for third-party integration and flight automation like DJI. They had no collision avoidance features, which had started to become standard in the market by the time the entered. Their battery life was pretty bad.
Oh - and upon release the drones constantly lost connection to GPS and would suddenly shut off mid-flight and fall out of the sky. The FAA actually advised all users to ground them.
They eventually recalled all of the Karma drones over safety concerns, took a huge stock hit, and went through a round of layoffs.
Frankly, that second idea seems really consistent with whatever residual brand value they have.
Unfortunately, they got burned by doing it poorly around 2017 and seem to have been scared off of playing in that space ever.
The first is probably already done but maybe not enough to keep the niche afloat. If the GoPro’s need replacement, then they won’t have a reputation for durability. If they keep going, then why replace your old one when it already does 4k 60fps? Problem is either they need replacement and erode brand strength, or are durable and can’t compete with already owned product. That path probably most likely ends with selling themselves to some other company that will probably slap the name on random Chinese cameras.
Mini drone that follows/records the user and wide angle panoramas of the surrounding area at the same time.
Get to it, gopro. Be the change you wish to see.
make action cameras that people want to buy?
instead of pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs which bring no benefit to the consumer?
make action cameras that people want to buy?
instead of pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs which bring no benefit to the consumer?
They might try making cameras that don’t overheat and shut down after 10 minutes…
Precisely. They used to make better products than they do now.
The problems with their products got worse generation on generation. Their older products were more reliable.
Same as it ever was. Line must go up.
1- make good product, make money
2 - make product worse/charge for standard features
3 - cripple existing products, force people to buy new version
pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs
Works for smartphone manufactuters though
the smartphone space has way more competition and their market is literally everyone on the planet. there are 6 billion smart phone buyers.
the vast vast majority of whom, do not need the power in most phones. there is no demand for improving phones, they have peaked. Phones are a commodity at this point, like your average desktop/laptop.
My old Hero 7 is going strong. Yes, there might be cheaper options now, but they were strong options at some point at least.
The paradox of a good company and product.
Make a good product with good ownership terms by the customer, and why would there be repeat business?
I’m on my second gopro (a hero 10). It will overheat in the shade outside in summer. The battery also crapped out quite early, though they did find another one to send me (I bought it new from them directly, but after newer models released). I don’t see myself buying another of their cameras.
They all overheat.
Between DJI Action 6 and Insta360 X5 on the high end, and the cheap knockoffs on the low end, GoPro is in a big pinch. Unless they pull a totally new rabbit out of the hat.
How did they fuck it up that bad. All thry need to do is keep selling an ok camera
They stopped selling an OK camera and started selling cameras that overheat in the shade with dark patterns to try and force you into using their mobile app for video processing.
I disagree there, the market of people who record their outdoors activities was always limited and quickly got boring. Eventually, competitors caught up and many of them focused on products in better form factors for non-extreme sports that were better for a wider range of people. There is a reason why the likes of DJI and Insta360 are the goto products for those that don’t utilize larger cameras.
Yeah I got my hero 7 many years ago and have sat on it. Does the job. If I were to upgrade I’d go the i360 route.
Everyone is talking about how bad gopros are? My 11 has been fine. Only overheated once on a hot day. My only other complaint is that occasionally the stabilisation doesn’t work.
Their cloud storage is completely shit though, didn’t use it even when I had it for free.
That sounds pretty bad, since you can get a better camera cheaper
…sooooo what you’re saying is they’ll be coming out with a GonePro soon?
thank you, thank you…I’ll see my way out
The new GoBlo Yourself.
I appreciate a good amateur comedian, but I really think you have the chops to GoPro.
angryupvote
Gone Pro sounds like maybe they leveled up from amateur. A lack of them in the future would be NoPro
What a crazy fuckup. You have a household name almost for action cameras and you keep releasing overpriced crappy products.
The Harley Davidson or Fender business model.
They’ve always been kinda crappy. I don’t think that changed so much as competition got better. And then as competition got better, they started doing things like stupidly priced dongles for external audio input. This has been a slow burn in the works for a long time.
And the exact same model just rebranded!
Meanwhile my old GoPro Hero 4 is somehow the most reliable action camera I own, and my newer one constantly stops recording due to something. I bought an Insta360 as an alternative a couple years ago and the batteries are all already toast, and last maybe 30 seconds of recording.
my newer one constantly stops recording due to something.
For a while they kept putting the same old processor in that couldn’t handle the load. GoPros shutting off due to overheating or recording too long was just normal.
Dunno if it’s still the case. I switched to DJI and you can’t even compare the two. Quality, smart design, price, reliability; these are not GoPro things. I record for an hour plus sometimes and just flawless. Don’t have to think about it.
I really regret not buying one of the earlier GoPros. The Insta360 frankly has been a huge disappointment. The batteries are really awful.
I see a lot of action cams on the used marketplace selling for cheap. What’s a good one to buy? Or are they all toast?
Theyre all really good now, and all priced very similarly. All have strengths and weaknesses but you can’t really go wrong with any of them.
Unfortunately they all require a proprietary app and associated account so I’ll never buy another one.
GoPro rested on their laurels and DJI and Insta360 are eating their lunch now.
I got a gopro for a project and basically gave up on copying the video files to my computer…
Insta360 really wants to take the higher end of gopro. As in, beating them at quality. There’s a bazillion lower end models with varying quality, some rather decent.
I have the insta360 acepro 2, and recording quality is really good, i think better than gopro. But it’s a brick of a camera to hold, rather heavier. I didn’t have issues with batteries myself, i have an original one and 2 off market ones, so far all working Ok.
I still have an original GoPro HD Hero and it still works fine. Battery is like 50% capacity as expected, but yeah, otherwise still working.
Agreed. I have a Hero 10 Black and basically every time I go to use it I wind up wanting to hurl it into the sun by the time I’m done. My wife bought it for me as a birthday present a couple of years ago because I asked for one specifically (I didn’t know any better, apparently) so it would probably be rude to do so, though.
It overheats, it randomly shuts off, it routinely experiences a firmware crash that renders all of its buttons inoperable and requires pulling the battery to cure. Oh, and it also has a battery life best measured in seconds so you need to keep it plugged in to external power all the time which requires an aftermarket accessory. Brilliant.
With any luck mine will get taken out in some spectacular and marketable fashion, preferably while recording at top quality so I can post it and use the video revenue to buy an Insta Ace or something.
Cries in Hero 7.
I can’t even plug mine into my PC and use it as a 4k webcam :/
Not almost, “GoPro” is absolutely a household name, they were the only realistic choice for action cameras for an incredibly long time.
It’s also a verb, I’ve heard people talk about “GoPro-ing” something many times before.
Absolutely nuts how far they’ve fallen.
Now that they’ve milked the brand dry, my bet is they’ll either:
Let it go bankrupt and walk away with the profits, or
Sell to someone who will use what’s left of the brand’s credibility to drain any remaining suckers hoping for a revival.
3 Get a government bailout and then walk away with the profits
Not surprising, honestly. DJI had been eating their lunch and GoPro never could figure out how to keep their damn cameras from overheating all the time. Everyone I know switched to DJI.
This is what seriously limited my use of the GP10. It’s a real shame as I love the camera but it just stopped me from using it due to that unreliability.
The specs on that new camera are insane. It can do like 1000 fps.
Edit: 960 fps @ 1080
By the time it gets to frame 900 it will just overheat lol
I had one a awhile back. The videos looked great but battery life was a joke. I remember behind baffled by how un-user friendly it was. For a $400 dollar item it’s felt oddly outdated when it was new. I just preferred using my phone.
Again? This is a recurring event with gopro.
