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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Yep, something must have gone horribly wrong with QA.

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

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.

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.

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.

They hardly have time to compete, busy as they are with foot-shooting practice.

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.

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...

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.

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.

In what way exactly? The camera will magically communicate to the mothership?

    > GoPros are used all over in aerospace

Wasn't that the thing like ~30 years ago? All the western companies pushing manufacturing into China for increased profit?

Capitalism and the west gave all that power away :), you deindustrialised yourselves.

No. Not even close

China wants its place at the table.

With Erope and USA

People seem to think a developed China is a threat. But they are not staying in rural poverty for ever for our sake. That is not a threat.

They are not trying to "deindustrialise" anybody, just finding a place amongst equals

So if we're getting spied on anyway, why not buy a better product?

FWIW current administration wants to play this same game, but they def won’t do it as well.

I'm actually surprised to hear that GoPro is used in aerospace applications. I assumed that they would use cameras from companies like Teledyne that have a more industrial/military customer base. That is to say, there are almost certainly options for domestic camera manufacturers if required.

You are right about China. The West (especially Apple) taught China how to manufacture while losing the ability ourselves and for some reason didn't consider that they would figure out how to design products themselves and bring the entire product chain within the country.

Individuals at the end of the day mostly care about buying the cheapest thing that does the job. They don't consider where it comes from. Even those that do care have limits in how they will compromise (there is a reason why I bought Bambu Labs 3D printer even though I would have preferred a Prusa).

Oh right, because the US has never done that ? Its public knowledge the US does supply-chain interdiction, see the infamous NSA “upgrade” factories as just one example.

The US is also just as capable of writing buggy code full of security holes as everyone else. Even more so today with the advent of "vibe code it and ship it".

It is only an attack vector if you allow it to be so, defence in depth and all that ...

> 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 its all magically ok if its got a "designed in the USA" and/or "made in the USA" badge on it ?

The problem I see here is a desire to use COTS stuff out-of-the-box in natsec environments led by a desire to save money and/or save time. Seems to me like one of those "pick two" moments where the "security" option was thrown in the trash.

The core points are:

  - we can't trust a connected GoPro device any more than a connected DJI device

  - Just because a device is developed in China doesn't make it a vulnerability.

  - Just because a device is made in the US doesn't make it resistant to vulnerabilities.

  - US politicians don't have any incentive to tell us the truth. Because of the nature of national security, they could completely lie about any accusations of Chinese involvement and we would never know, especially now that the US president fired anyone who resists his demands for fealty.

  - GoPro was first to market but stopped adding value once they IPOed. US public companies depending on IP protections / rent seeking rather than cutthroat competition is the core reason DJI is beating GoPro, not Chinese government subsidies to the sector.

  - China's middle and upper classes are far larger than the US's. Similarly, they are training more college grads. China also has more companies being created and more creative destruction than the US. It doesn't matter if we build a better v1.0 product because their innovation engine is moving at least as fast as ours.

  - the US has had a 70 year head start on "a near zero cost of capital". Being the west's financier after WW2 and later the world's reserve currency.

They were made irrelevant by Insta360 and DJI, both with legitimately better products.

In my view, the only entity to blame for that is GoPro. And I believe that the shortfall was not only in matters of technology. My limited interactions with them painted a picture of an organisation with some super clever people, but paralysed by slow bureaucracy and high risk aversion.

By contrast, Insta360 was much more aggressive and enterprising, while DJI just did what DJI does: build amazing products.

Trying to blame this on some arcane Chinese plot to destroy the West is just a weak attempt to cope with reality: in China today there is simply much higher number of hard working, highly intelligent, highly educated people that are hungry for success then there are in the West.

One thing we forget is that the two great Chinese companies in this space (Insta and DJI) had first to compete against hundreds (thousands?) of other Chinese camera companies before they could come out on the top and compete globally.

They are not a product of a CCP plot. They are a result of a ruthlessly competitive and capable local ecosystem, itself a result of decades of consistent industrial and innovation policy.

Nothing is stopping us in the EU and US to do the same.

> 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.)

First, Gopros are made and assembled in China (with I think some in Mexico now to avoid tariffs). And absolutely nothing stops them from just sending potentially malicious firmware to the non-china made ones too

Second China didn't make Gopros fucking overheat, shoddy engineering did. They rested on their laurels while competition worked hard on making better product. If it was just production costs the top end GoPros would be the best in the niche, just more expensive, but no they are both more expensive and worse product.

Third, it is not "Chinese govt. doing it" (tho they are certainly helping), it is west constantly sending their tech advantage away just to get some cheap production there. Whether directly like Apple or Tesla, or indirectly, by allowing chinese capital to buy western car companies and instantly get all the tech then just apply their more integrated production to make same stuff cheaper.

West gave China their advantage willingly, for a short term profits, and continue to do so, then try to mask it as some kind of malicious push (not saying it isn't happening, just saying the western companies are complicit in it) rather than corporate greed ruining everything yet again.

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.

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.

However, my understanding is that Coros just doesn't have an SDK. At all. So it's not really "lagging on features", it's a totally closed platform, that doesn't any have 3rd party apps at all, and will not have them, because it's impossible to write them. I don't know if it's enough of a reason to completely write them off as a competitor, but that does give me a pause. I mean, if I don't have a feature on Garmin, I can theoretically implement it myself, or even hope that somebody else did. If I don't have it on Coros, I will just have to make do.

The real competition is Apple Watch and for sport-intensive application Garmin wins because of battery and simplicity of usage in harder conditions.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

And that's why GoPro is dying: they are selling a premium product in a market of disposables.

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.

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.

Video's a bit more complex no doubt, but like you say all the pieces are there, SMoP.

It wasn't a random object, it was a camera marketed for such environment.

But seriously, safe to assume they meant to say calls and just accidentally wrote the wrong one.