I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.

As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.

So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.

But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.

I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.

Yeah, almost a decade ago I had a dream of creating a drone startup with some very specific tech that would have required several years of R&D to create. The end product would have been relatively cheap to manufacture, being basically a PCB with a large FPGA plus a bunch of relatively cheap sensors.

I actually got about 6 months into the project, and then realised that although it was a great project and if it worked well, I'd be able to make units for about 25% of a viable RRP and be able to recoup all my time doing R&D without an income with maybe 5k units in direct sales. And then it slowly dawned on me that if I could build it for 25% of a viable RRP, then the Chinese cloners could do it even cheaper, and all they'd have to do was reverse engineer the protection on the FPGA bitstream to clone it and clone a pretty simple PCB. At the time, the drone market was full of cloned components for a fraction of the price of the original price, or of open source projects sold for half the price of the official boards to support the project.

In such a situation, the only way to really survive is to innovate faster than the cloners can copy it, but that's kind of predicated on making a product that you know isn't what you want the final product to be from the start, so that you can drip feed the improvements into the market every time the previous version was cloned. That would also have the side effect of alienating the early adopters, as well as making new customers wonder how long it'd be before the new product was obsolete. Ultimately, I decided that realistically it wasn't viable to continue doing R&D for another couple of years, unsure if I'd actually be able to pay myself going forward.

You need a lot of money to make hardware, so you get vc money and eventually shareholder money. But if you're not selling new hardware all the time, the company isn't making money. So they dictate that you need to make new hardware, yearly.

Making new hardware yearly is enough of an undertaking that you no longer have time to iterate on the software that could enable new features. And often hardware iterations aren't going to change that much, it's hard to "invent" new hardware. It's better to make a hardware platform that enables new exciting features, and iterate on the software. But that isn't going to sell yearly.

So unless you have a software subscription model that people love, every hardware company tends to stagnate because they are too busy making hardware yearly to make "better" products.

You see this very clearly in cameras vs phones. The camera companies are still making cameras yearly but none of them incorporate the software features that have led phones to outpace them. A lot of phones with so so cameras take better pictures (to the average eye) than actual cameras because the software features enhance the photos.

I worked on firmware for such a "noun and verb" product that IPOd a decade ago, and lived the struggle realtime.

Or - turn it into a subscription.

Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that:

* is well designed

* can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing

* prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability

* uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit

If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.

Isn't it more like "if society has time to think about and can afford those qualities"?

If most folks out there have limited finances (CoL-relative, of course) and are just scrapping by, they'll buy the cheapest thing out there that just does the job (vacuums) and tend to ignore any extra luxuries, even if those would be more economically advantageous long-term (repairs/maintenance part of the TCO). That's simply because of the focus - it's more on the account balance, due bills and next paycheck, than on the implications for a more distant future. Crazy volatility and all the global rollercoasters like pandemics, wars, and all the crazy politicians around the world doesn't help regular folks' sensible decision-making at all, of course. The more stressed one is, the less rational they act.

People don't buy cheap junk because they don't value quality. They buy it primarily because of affordability reasons, or because their focus is forced to be elsewhere.

The focus, thanks to years of advertising, is shifted towards features, new features sell, quality doesn’t, so to keep the price point and “innovate” manufacturers need to lower the quality knowing that a new version will replace the device soon, most consumers see this as normal so when a poorly designed and cheaply made thing for what there’s no replacement parts , no repair info, no software/ firmware fails is just an excuse to purchase the new shiny iteration with all the the bells and whistles (and AI!, copilot toaster!) wich is gonna last les than the previous one but now needs an “app” an activation and a subscription for the premium features .

I feel like people forget that the entire purpose of factories/ automation/ modern manufacturing was to divorce human skill from product worth (so that companies wouldn't have to pay workers based on skill). That also means that in the realm of physical goods, "moats" are not maintainable unless you have a manufacturing technique or technology that others don't. Since companies rarely create their own production line machinery, anyone else who can afford the same machines can produce the same products.

The actual "viable strategy for hardware companies" has to be about market penetration; make products that aren't on Amazon, for example, and Amazon can't be used to out-maneuver you. Firearms are a great example of where manufacturing capability does not equal competitiveness; China can absolutely produce any firearm that you can buy in the US, but they don't because other factors (mostly related to regulatory controls) created a moat for manufacturers. Vehicles are another good example. Good luck buying an Avatr car in the US.

But yes, if you plan to make a vacuum, which is just you iterating on what others have done as well, you should probably expect that people are going to trivially iterate on your variant too.

But you're totally right that enforcing them is extremely expensive, slow and risky.

That said, Roomba isn't exactly a startup but wasn't a tech giant either, and did enforce their patents often.

And especially against imported infringing products, the ITC provides a much cheaper, faster mechanism to get protection via injunctions.

If you win? Good luck collecting damages from China, and have fun suing the next brand that starts selling the same machine in different plastic

Or, said another way: unwillingness to enforce.

People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.

> Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA?

Where are the new ones?

Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing.

> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.

So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.

Manufacturer of what, exactly, though?

What do you export? What do you sell?

Food? Nope, illegal in most of the world.

Cars? Nope, uncompetitive in most of the world. "High end" American cars lack even basic features fitted to poverty-spec cars in the EU, like heated windscreens.

Computers? I'm typing this on a computer assembled in Scotland onto a Latvian-made chassis using a Chinese-made motherboard populated with Korean memory chips and an Israeli microprocessor.

What does the US actually make and sell, any more?

There isn't one.

AVIC owns Xi'an and Chengdu, who make large commercial aircraft and light bizjets, but they're in no way comparable to Boeing.

Unlike Boeing, they actually care about worker's rights, and product safety.

Zhaoxin makes X86 and countless make ARM and RiscV chips. SMIC being a foundry.

> The Chinese Microsoft?

Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance.

>The Chinese Boeing?

Comac makes passenger and Chengdu fighter jets.

>The Chinese NVIDIA?

Huawei makes AI GPUs.

>People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world

Considering the US never had its industry blown up in any war and could reap the benefits of 150+ years worth of stability, higher education, skilled immigration, compounding wealth, and taking over the vacuum and brains of Europe's post-war industrial powers, that's not really something THAT impressive.

>and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.

If it isn't halfway trying, why does it feel the need to sanction or ban chinese competitors?

Because it's easier than actually trying, as witnessed by this very story.

Germans also said the same thing about Chinese EVs in 2014. They ain't laughing now, especially in Dresden.

That's an opinion, and not one I agree with.

If you and your competitor are racing to develop a thing, whoever wins by a couple months shouldn't get a monopoly for decades.

Most of the time when things get patented, it's strictly worse for innovation in that space until the patents expire. 3d printing is a great example.

It's asinine to think you can outsource manufacturing of whatever object to some other company in another country, but that no one on the planet can make the same thing because "the idea is yours".

What happens at expiration is an important and intended feature of patents. They trade a legally guaranteed headstart against the requirement of publishing your methods for your competitors to learn from.

The fact that it takes decades for that to come about is harmful to society.

Lots of places sell unique/novel things that are not patented, successfullyn

Isn't this why patents exist?

There’s also a good after market ecosystem and 3D models you and print for various attachments.

  * built a lithium refinery
  * produces its own battery cells
  * makes its own motors and drivetrains
  * makes its own car seats
  * owns and operates a fast-charging network
  * sells direct, bypassing dealerships
  * offers insurance integrated with vehicle data
  * develops its own autopilot AI

A lot of Chinese EVs are much better and cheaper than the Cybertruck.

Except it's not winning on that at all. It's "winning" because Chinese EV brands are barred from selling in the US. You can't buy an Avatr if you want. It's in fact protectionist regulations that allowed Tesla to retain EV dominance in the US, in the face of Chinese competition.

It's not that rare that Chinese products are sold below cumulative costs of Western equivalent products and services, let alone prices. Chinese(<-substitute this with appropriate East Asian nations past and future) economy just isn't coupled well with the rest of the world that USD converted cost calculations would work. This in economic theories is sometimes explained as exports of starvation and/or overproduction, but IMO that make less sense when they've been doing it at scale of multiple decades.

The craziest example of these is Chinese PCB prototyping services: as cheap as $2 per 5 pieces with $5 extra for complete assembly and $15 shipping. $5 each would be darn cheap in the rest of the world, even $50 each for the board and $150 per assembly work would not be so absurd. There's just no competing that.

I think there are a lot of different reasons:

1. A lot of those Chinese competitors are involved in extremely intense cut-throat competition, which drives a lot of innovation that benefits a lot of stakeholders except investors (IIRC the term is "involution"). The the US, the investors a almost literal kings and their returns are paramount, and they'll even throw their own country under the bus if it means their returns are higher.

2. The US (in-general) has been letting its manufacturing capabilities wither for decades, while China has been building them up. Even if you wanted to beat the Chinese companies at their own game, the skills, suppliers, and scale to do that aren't available in the US anymore.

3. Working conditions in China are atrocious and pay is lower, which really helps if you're trying to undercut on cost.

If the EU was concerned enough about Amazon taking them over in early 2024 to block the deal, I'm still concerned about a foreign owner in 2026...

Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.

The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.

Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.

Cords suck. So I bought a cordless vacuum, and was able to vacuum more. But I also needed a mop because vacuums don't do well enough on my laminate, stuff still gets stuck on. So I bought a cordless mop, so I could map more. This worked great for awhile but...

But it turns out if I did my vacuuming and mopping every night, I could keep my floor in better condition. I don't have time for that, but a robot from Eufy does and doesn't cost much compared to how much I would benefit from it.

Luddism on HN is a bit weird, but I get it, some people don't see the point of automating these tasks because their lives aren't complicated enough yet (e.g. they don't have kids, or have lots of free time and energy to spend on house work).

My wife bought the Dyson garbage anyway because she can't ignore her instagram feed.

Having a robot do everything is just another step in the convenience direction. It is great if you have expensive floors that you want to maintain on a daily or bi-daily basis.

Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.

I guess this is how people felt when they moved from wired phones to wireless phones?

> Dealing with plugging a cord into an outlet is no more burdensome than picking up the socks or shoes before the Roomba wakes up and tries to ingest them.

And dragging the cord around, and having to plug out and re-plug the cord in again because you want to do a different part of the room.

As someone who used to sweep the floor of the family home as a chore, as a child, that makes me smile.

> Or they could sell the broken design and people would just buy more as they broke. They don't care if Costco was eating the cost with their in-house warranty.

This strategy has limits, and I think iRobot hit those, and they didn't didn't lower themselves to switch to the second strategy of selling cheap unreliable garbage (at least not before 2019, which was the last time I bought a Roomba).

> The fundamental problem though is the same with all "household gadget" products. They look cool, and appear to solve a problem, but that is actually all a perception based on novelty. They actually don't work very well, they are not built very well, and they don't last very long. There's no point in improving them because the concept is fundamentally something people don't need in the first place.

I'd dispute this in this case: Roombas may not have solved the vacuuming problem for everyone, but they solved it for me (at least), and they were built pretty well (reliable, modular & reparable design, etc.).

> Just buy a good canister vacuum and you're set for a decade or more. It will cost more than the latest gadget from Shark or Dyson or iRobot but it won't frustrate you and it will just reliably do what it is supposed to do without uploading anything to an IP address.

1. I've got both, and the Roomba works a lot better than not vacuuming with the canister vacuum at all. It doesn't frustrate me, and it took far less time to Roomba-proof my home than vacuuming it every week for a year.

2. I agree with the IP address thing, but I think at only got added when they attempted to "get people to replace their machines with the improved ones." I have a couple of the older models that have no network connection (and had no plans to buy more due to the unnecessary network requirement).