> We considered this but decided not to for several reasons:
> You'd probably lose the charger before the battery runs out!
> Adding charge circuitry and including a charger would make the product larger and more expensive.
> You send it back to us to recycle.
I don't think this is true. The charging circuit could have been in the charger itself. To provide access to the battery, one of the terminals could be behind a transistor enabled by the micro. The charger could then send a signal to the ring to unlock the battery terminal. Then all you needed to do was expose two/three pads externally.
Yeah, that's really not great at all! From their website:
> Wait, it's single use?
Yes. We know this sounds a bit odd, but in this particular circumstance we believe it's the best solution to the given set of constraints
I don't want to be too harsh, since it seems like the pebble team are working hard at producing some exciting tech. But intentionally making a single use device is phenomenally irresponsible in today's climate.
I know they say they'll recycle them, but it'd be naive to expect anything other than a tonne of these becoming e-waste.
I was initially put off by the lack of recharging too, but I've changed my mind a bit.
I think the amount of ewaste is pretty small. My uneducated guess is that it's probably about the same as a musical birthday card. And unlike a singing card that probably gets used a dozen times and thrown away, the Index can be used >10,000 times before it's time to recycle it (assuming it lives up to the specs)
For comparison, check out the rechargable Stream ring. It's bulkier, costs >2x as much (before including subscription... The sub alone costs more than buying an index every 2 years), and needs to be recharged every night. It's sort of in line with Pebbles advantage over other smart watches- doesn't need to sleep on a charger every night
The ring can record for 12-15 hours before it's empty. I'd guess it's incredibly rare that people throw away their phone before reaching 15h * 20 = 12.5 days of active screen time.
- Human impact on the environment, which e-waste is a big part of, is causing damage to wildlife, and serious climate change.
- There's huge awareness of and push back against bad hardware practices (often around non-replacable batteries) so they must have at least considered this.
I can't tell if you're being serious, but if so, this is a bit silly. It feels like saying Covid 19 was no big thing because the Black Death of the 1300s was much worse.
But even more so than that, your own wikipedia article seems to fly in the face of your point:
> Estimated annual temperatures in 1540 were by far the highest between 1500 and 2000, while estimated precipitation was by far the lowest registered until 2025
The weather events we're seeing now are even more extreme that those of 1540, but the impact hasn't been as severe because our food and water supply chains are more resilient.
HOT WEATHER. Many a man has mopped his brow during the summer months of 1884, declaring it was the hottest weather the world ever knew, which, of course, would not be true for the extreme heat in the records of the past, which has not been approached during the late summer.
In 627, the heat was so great in France and Germany, says the London Standard, that all springs dried up, water became so scarce that many people died of thirst.
In 879, work in the field had to be given up; agricultural laborers persisting in their work were struck down in a few minutes—so powerful was the sun.
In 993, the sun's rays were so fierce that vegetation burned up as under the action of fire.
In 1000, rivers ran dry; under the protracted heat, the fish were left dry in heaps and putrefied in a few hours. Men and animals venturing in the sun in the summer of 1022 fell down dying.
In 1132, not only did the rivers dry up, but the ground cracked and became baked to the hardness of stone. The Rhine in Alsace nearly dried up. Italy was visited with terrific heat in 1139; vegetation and plants were burned up. During the battle of Bela in 1200, there were more victims made by the sun than by weapons; men fell down sunstruck in regular rows. The sun of 1277 was also severe; there was an absolute dearth of forage.
In 1303 and 1304, the Rhine, Loire, and Seine ran dry. In 1615, the heat throughout Europe became excessive; Scotland suffered particularly. In 1625, men and beasts died in scores. Meat could be cooked by merely exposing it to the sun. Not a soul dared to venture out between noon and 4 PM. In 1718, many shops had to be closed; the theatres were never opened for several months. Not a drop of water fell during six months.
In 1753, the thermometer rose to one hundred and eighteen degrees. In 1779, the heat at Bologna was so great that a large number of people died. In July 1793, the heat became intolerable; vegetables were burned up and fruit dried upon the trees. The furniture and woodwork in dwelling houses cracked and split up; meat became bad in an hour.
In Paris, in 1846, the thermometer marked one hundred and twenty-five degrees in the sun. The summers of 1859, 1860, 1869, 1870, 1874, etc., although excessively hot, were not attended by any disaster.
Exposed terminals would need a lot more than a single transistor. It would need ESD protection and it would change the outer case from being a complete sealed over mold into something that had to seal against two exposed terminals. That’s a big change.
They would also need to ship a separate charger device to go with it, which approaches the complexity of the simple ring product.
These are solvable problems, but it would increase the cost, decrease their margins, or both.
For a niche, low volume product with an unknown market demand I think making the simplest possible version of the product is a good idea to start, but at $99 it’s getting into the range where buyers don’t want to think of it as a disposable item.
The bigger problem is that the 2 year battery life depends on the device being used for only short notes like “Add milk to the grocery list”. The people who expect to use this for taking notes or thinking out loud could exhaust the battery in a couple months.
> Exposed terminals would need a lot more than a single transistor. It would need ESD protection and it would change the outer case from being a complete sealed over mold into something that had to seal against two exposed terminals. That’s a big change.
This is a solved problem though. Wireless earbuds can do it. We're probably just talking about a TVS diode.
> For a niche, low volume product with an unknown market demand I think making the simplest possible version of the product is a good idea to start, but at $99 it’s getting into the range where buyers don’t want to think of it as a disposable item.
> The bigger problem is that the 2 year battery life depends on the device being used for only short notes like “Add milk to the grocery list”. The people who expect to use this for taking notes or thinking out loud could exhaust the battery in a couple months.
$75 for a use once device that could last as little as a few months under normal usage, or $100 for something that could operate for 5+ years. Knowing whether there is a market is always difficult, but if you do crack a market you typically only get one chance to get people onboard.
> This is a solved problem though. Wireless earbuds can do it
They’re all solved problems!
That doesn’t change the fact that every additional complication adds cost, complexity, failure points, more warranty returns, and time to market.
Saying it’s just a transistor and a TVS ignores the hard parts like sealing the enclosure and building an entire second device to charge it.
Solvable, but less so for a low volume product with unproven demand. You have to be building a lot of a product to offset the costs of developing it.
> $75 for a use once device that could last as little as a few months under normal usage, or $100 for something that could operate for 5+ years.
The retail price of this device is $99. The $75 is only for the promotional preorder period.
It’s already a $100 product. Adding charging ports and a separate charger is going to be even more expensive unless they start shipping 100,000s of these to build at scale.
Not only that, the charger thing also implies charging it weekly if not more often. I got a pebble watch because I can wear it for 2 weeks without charging. Would hate to have to charge a ring.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone complain about that, and I know a good amount of people who use Garmin watches. My own forerunner is still going strong after 5 (I think) years of use, with multiple runs a week for most of that time.
I've had my Fenix 5 Plus swapped once during warranty because of this. And the replacement's contacts started to corrode again when I sold the watch. It might not happen to all models, but some are very prone to it.
They make little ~rubber caps to cover the charging port when you're not using it. That, and make sure it's dry when you charge it to rule out galvanic nonsense.
I know someone whose garmin watch refused to charge after a few years, not sure if it was caused by sweat. Mine is starting to get wonky after a few years. I keep worrying I'll plug in some time and it will stop. anec-data is not that reliable of course.
> Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That's up to 2 years of usage.
2 years is optimistic I think. 3-6 second thoughts is not much, most ideas I'm having past TODOs are >15 seconds. Plus this would definitely depend also on how regularly you sync to the app.
Bare in mind, these devices have not yet been used in the wild on people outside of the product creator. Maybe one of the use cases is to note down monologues, or to easily record conversations with clients for later review.
1 month battery life is also highly usable, but there at least should be a way to charge it.
Seeing the index in action next to an oura I appreciate how much smaller/thinner the index is (or at least how much less it seems to “spread” my fingers apart with of a width of 6.5mm vs 8mm).
It’s effectively a regular ring with a button on it that’s smaller than a typical 1ct engagement ring. The oura by contrast (even the 4) is a chonker compared to “regular” wedding bands. I’ve tried in the past but personally a very thick ring is a non-starter for me. Might just be a personal sensitivity thing. Clearly the oura sells.
From a V1/MVP/founder lens I am sensitive to the value in shipping a product that just works rather than doubling the complexity with a bms, custom charger, wrap around flex pcb, and associated engineering effort to mitigate ignition hazards. Especially when there’s platform risk in seeing if this thing even gets used. There’s no platform risk on the watch side which has comes miles from my first pebble/Alerta that was one day charge and blackberry phone compatible only.
As for the ewaste argument? If the market demands a rechargeable product then that’s the right move. But from a weight perspective? This feels performative. Even pessimistically three-four 5g device that are 0% recyclable will generate less ewaste than a 200g phone with 55% recovery and a 5% recapture rate of obsolete devices thats turn over every 3.5 years. It’s like 10x less and probably in the ballpark of what a hypothetical “rechargeable” index would look like.
A piezo button would be neat, might be able to generate enough electricity for each use without having to rely on a battery at all. Not sure about the form factor here though.
Or even a thin-film amorphous silicon solar panel + capacitor.
Assuming most of the weight of that ring is the battery, it appears to be storing around 0.5Wh, so two years of operation should amount to approximately 30uW of power.
It should be possible to squeeze this much from a 0.5mm2 amorphous cell in direct sunlight. Considering the ring is 6.6mm wide at the widest point, they could get orders of magnitude more power even in poor lighting conditions, by just wrapping a thin-film solar panel around the ring.
Not sure that would work. Charging is not 100% efficient, and if I remember correctly most batteries need to reach a minimum current to start actual charging. When you're talking micro or pico amps, it barely registers as a signal in most cases.
I’m also baffled that they didn’t do this. If I am buying something that becomes so precious to my workflow then I don’t want a hardware subscription. I also want peace of mind that the company will not be gone, or the product discontinued in a few years.
I dunno. If you need to record your thoughts often enough that you're wearing a smart-ring to do it, then it seems like you're going to burn through the 12 hours of recording time pretty quick.
IIRC EU markets now mandate the USB-C charger for devices (which is not a bad thing, too many throwaway custom chargers....). Adding the port, the USB-C PD circuitry may take up too much room. I think this approach would require some kind of custom charging cradle (probably usb-c connected..). Is having a custom usb-c adapter to charge a device allowed under the rules?
I think the "dock" itself could be USB C easily, it would probably also significantly reduce the cost of the dock.
> Adding the port, the USB-C PD circuitry may take up too much room.
You don't need PD circuitry for this. 5V 500mA over USB2 is more than enough. But the actual port and battery charging circuit is a bit ridiculous at this size.
I'm not sure precisely what the EU rules are, but the requirement should really depend on the dimensions/power of the device.
> Why can't it be recharged?
> We considered this but decided not to for several reasons:
> You'd probably lose the charger before the battery runs out!
> Adding charge circuitry and including a charger would make the product larger and more expensive.
> You send it back to us to recycle.
I don't think this is true. The charging circuit could have been in the charger itself. To provide access to the battery, one of the terminals could be behind a transistor enabled by the micro. The charger could then send a signal to the ring to unlock the battery terminal. Then all you needed to do was expose two/three pads externally.
[1] https://repebble.com/index