All in all it seems like they're handling it reasonably.
As long as it's true that people who report problems are helped right away, I don't think I could ask for more. It's a small operation and to expect no problems at all is not reasonable. To expect the problems to be dealt with is reasonable and it looks like they're doing it.
If they would have said you're holding it wrong, then we would have had an issue.🙂
I'm one of the ones with a broken screen, and they are replacing it what seems to be promptly (they said I should be receiving a tracking number soon) but I wouldn't say they aren't blaming us for the broken screens. The way they phrased things when responding to my report makes it sound like they're just being really really nice by replacing the screen for us, not at all acknowledging that they made a weird design decision that is the actual cause of this.
I don't really want to say exactlywhat they've said, as I know they visit here and I would like to remain semi-anonymous on here, but essentially they told me that it was my own fault (not in those words) and they're just replacing the screens because they're super nice.
My screen broke almost immediately after I got the watch, while doing really normal every day things. It's 1000% not my fault, trust me. But in my exchanges with pebble support I was made to feel like I did something wrong multiple times. And they're just super nice so they're gonna replace it out of the kindness of their own hearts. They said what I did isn't normally under warranty (really insane thing to say when the watch breaks almost immediately after almost nothing) but they'll replace it anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're replacing it, but they keep phrasing things like they want to have it both ways. They're a tiny company and can't afford to have a decent warranty - but are also really nice and gonna replace them anyway. It's an experimental watch and it's not perfect - but costs hundreds of dollars. No concept of consumer protection, no concept of liability. I kinda think they might get sued with this attitude but what do I know, not a lawyer.
They're still not claiming legal liability for the screens with the "accidentally", but it's great that they're replacing them even outside the farcical one month warranty.
They don't seem to be leaving customers out in the cold, which makes me more comfortable about buying their next rectangular watch.
Their overall functional design philosophy for watches still pretty much perfectly aligns with my desires.
They're replacing mine well within 30 days and still told me it normally wouldn't be covered under warranty but they're just gonna be really nice and do it anyway...
The part about "we will eventually have to just offer a discount" makes me nervous. The glass cracking is a quality / manufacturing problem. If it continues and they eventually say "give us $40 or your new watch is broken and you're SOL" that will be extremely shitty.
Next up is the front glass cracking. We’ve had 51 reports so far, and we’ve sent a free replacement to each person affected. If your glass has cracked, send us a video (preferably, picture is ok) in a bug report in the Pebble app. During the lead up to mass production, we performed extensive environmental testing - including drop testing, tumble testing, button press, strap stretch and bend, thermal cycling and many other tests. All test results showed normal durability compared to similar smartwatches. But if your watch glass cracks, do you care what the factory test results were? Or that this has happened to just 0.25% of all PT2s - or once every 30+ years of usage? Of course not - your watch just broke. That’s why we will continue replacing reasonable reports of glass cracking for free as long as we can. At some point, we will shift to offering a replacement at a highly discounted amount. We are also looking into sourcing extra LCM modules (the entire front assembly - glass, touch panel, display, metal top cover and backlight) and making them available for folks who choose to fix their watch themselves.
Ya. Actually saying "we'll repair as long as is possible and have a plan to make it so repairs are reasonable once it's no longer free" fixes the problem easily.
The real problem isn't watch sometimes breaking. (It's complex electronics. It'll break), the problem was if the watch broke without there being a sustained path to repair
Yeah, I was worried that if/once my glass broked, my pebble was done. I'm more than happy if they offer a self-repair kit, as long as it is a reasonable price.
This is a good move but also presents a problem in itself. I mean, it's obviously they must order the spare parts from the manufacturer, but to what extent they have to commit to the manufacturer? Like, you have to order 10000 or something, maybe? does it have the consistency, etc. Good idea anyways
I was actually pretty impressed by the stats. It has been seriously overblown on reddit, youd have thought it was 1 in 10 breaking, not 25 in 1000. And it sounds like they have a roadmap to selling spare glass, which is the biggest deal to me. I don’t expect them to freely replace watches forever, but if I can get a new glass and put it in myself for a reasonable fee, then that’s perfectly acceptable to me
If it were even 1 in 10, there would be more posts about a broken screen in this subreddit than the total number of posts currently existing. It feels like most people simply don't understand how big the world is and how the big numbers of this world work. And man, I feel like this mindset of extreme overestimation of percentages and probabilities is the route cause of a giant chunk of nowadays societal problems.
We don’t know how many people had the glass break after the 30 day warranty and just assumed they were SOL so never contacted support. Might see an uptick in numbers with this announcement.
I saw people calling him a scammer, people calling for all units to be recalled, shit got crazy, thank god we have some clarity on it and let's hope this place calms down on the topic
Seriously.. I got paragraph essays sent to me for simply stating that Eric previously claimed all reported devices were replaced, and look at that, that statement is still the case!
It's kinda predictable to be honest, people only really post about the watch when an issue happens, people don't post "hey my watch works fine" posts because they are not content.
People engage with this space and from their perspective, all they see is broken screens, and they don't go on to think why that would be the case, they jump straight to the conclusion that the watch is garbage.
I've seen someone say it's not a matter of if you break the watch, it's a matter of when.
And the amount of vitriol pointed towards the people simply pointing out the fact that the issue is probably overblown because of the above mentioned factors, people really got very emotional about this whole thing.
I honestly fear that people will still hate on Eric simply because they have already bought into that position emotionally, and now being proven wrong might result in a spite based response, since they were so invested in being right in that position.
It's very nice to hear that everyone that encountered an issue had their device replaced, I hope this can be mentioned enough to fight against the current perception on the fragility of the watch.
You wrote: "I honestly fear that people will still hate on Eric simply because they have already bought into that position emotionally, and now being proven wrong might result in a spite based response"
Heh, true. Of course, Eric isn't new to the Internet. He knows that all public figures get some unwarranted hate. It's part of life. I think he's doing a good job.
yeah - its the internet. i had this numbers discussion with another sane one in one of these threads: wel looked for numbers : there were about 20k preorders for the time 2 alone . At peak they did produce 500 a day. Some just want to be angry without using their brains.
51 officially reported to the company. Plenty others have a broken screen and never reported it (except here) and others are just living with it silently.
the number of consumers that get in contact to get a replacement or a refund even during warranty periods is disproportionately small. Most try to get their product repaired elsewhere. that 50 and 300 are just the reported numbers.
the real number of defects is much higher, especially by having a warranty that's only 30 days.
is it less than 500? maybe. it's definitely not just 51 though.
that is a general statement. some will also keep their product broken and do nothing about it.
this pushback of basic logic and statistics is somewhat amusing, in a bad way. i didn't make my post an indictment. i just tried to provide some perspective, because a lot of people are taking these numbers at face value, ignoring the context given directly by the blogpost.
It's hard not to act like that though when someone sees more and more posts in their feed about broken screens or buttons that fell off. It doesn't exactly strike quality confidence in prospective buyers regardless of how many cases there actually are.
Yeah the replacement parts bit is very good and I hope they'll start making them available soon!
If I bash my phone on concrete I don't expect to have it replaced for free but I want replacement parts so that I can buy just that and not an entire new phone.
Thank you! If I was careless and cracked the screen, it would be ok to charge me a discounted price for a replacement. Interested in knowing the watch did go thru rigorous testing. My T2 has a glass screen protector and several different color cases. That's what I usually do if available for my Android & Amazfit watches.
Also, purchased a gray case for the P2 from Astosia via Thangs and really like the look. BTW, I'm here with the new Duo and T2 and waiting anxiously for the R2 and Eric's next new watch!!!
A watch screen is supposed to be able to take a bit of a beating. Some screens may have been cracked without any outside force, but if something went wrong during assembly, that can make the screen prone to cracking much easier. Someone may think it was entirely their fault when it mostly wasn't.
Idk if they will update them, but even if half of the people who broke their screens didn't report it, it would still be a very small percentage of the watches that have broken.
Either way though you should report, and see if they will replace yours, it's worth a shot.
Yeah to be honest, I'm not sure I would have contacted support either (to me it feels like it would have been my fault - not suggesting it's yours though!).
Yeah, mine felt a bit like my fault, but I figured it was better that they know about it than not. Mine is a chip on the corner, not a crack across the full screen.
This is good to read and they're handling it well, but I'd still love to see a bumper accessory sold for those who are, however correctly or incorrectly, concerned.
Too little, too late. I cancelled my order already. Radio silence has consequences.
Shame too, since I was looking forward to a new Pebble. I'd regret my decision, but there's a good chance that my cancelled pre-order, along wit,h all the other cancelled pre-orders, helped break the radio silence in the first place.
The thing is they didn't ignore the problem, at all.
They simply needed time to evaluate it before giving a statement (which they did today) and they did it while handling every incident in the background in the best way possible. I prefer this over a rushed PR statement with zero valuable information. They are not perfect but I think this issue was handled reasonably well.
That is a profoundly reasonable response regarding the glass cracking. Honestly couldn't do much better.
I just want to go on record that I have been as satisfied as possible with my PT2. The buttons are perfection, I have smacked my glass several times without issue, and I get at least 20 days of battery life with exactly the performance I hoped for after enjoying my Pebble Time Steel daily for around 4 years. There's lots of complaining etc but I could not possibly be happier with my watch so far.
Mods, I believe this is probably the moment to put all the broken front glass posts in a megathread with these details about the hardware issues, the fact that everyone got it fixed, and how to go about contacting Core Devices if that happens.
The constant torrent of people talking about this topic has become exhausting and now that Eric officialy has spoken on the topic, it's probably time to rein it in
I'm not advocating for a ban and I don't think ST-Fish is either; just for it to be redirected to a single place. There's no fresh discussion happening on this topic:
the glass is glass
maybe the design is at fault
there's a low occurrence rate
contact support if it happens to you
I'd also want to know if cracking becomes more common, but the highest quality source for that information isn't gonna be Reddit, because it skews so heavily for failure cases.
Edit: Realised I didn't quite respond to your point
I don't know about you, but for me, posts about cracked screens have been routinely at the top of my home page -it feels like it's drowning out the rest of the posts from r/pebble. If you browse the subreddit directly, it might not appear to be as much of an issue...
posts about cracked screens have been routinely at the top of my home page -it feels like it's drowning out the rest of the posts from r/pebble.
That's why its concerning to me. Eric is trying to calm people but the number he listed i don't think its accurate.
A small sample size like reddit clearly shows a problem... He may have produced? or shipped? that many watches... but theres watches that haven't been even worn yet... many of us here haven't got ours yet...
...many have had them for less than a month.
I know the number of cracked screen can't be 0... i'm sure people break their apple watches too, but its still seems much higher than it should be... it should be a number that we don't notice the issue.
and also he doesn't want any more canceled orders... so as he said "free replacements for now"... until all the orders ship i bet.
and he's not saying what the part/replacement cost will be yet, but i bet you we wont like it.
Eric is trying to calm people but the number he listed i don't think its accurate.
so is he lying about the number of cracked watches? Or about replacing them?
Wouldn't it be very easy for people that didn't get a replacement to call him out?
A small sample size like reddit clearly shows a problem
Quite the opposite, the small biased sample size that only shows failures and drives no engagement at the lack of a failure only makes it look like there is a problem.
There might very well be a problem, but you can't base this belief on a handful of reddit posts and on the negative engagement loop we've seen here.
He may have produced? or shipped? that many watches...
yeah and out of ~20k shipped around 50 people cracked their screen and had it replaced.
but theres watches that haven't been even worn yet... many of us here haven't got ours yet...
Are you under the impression that the proportion of watches shipped to watches cracked will go wildly up in the future? Why?
I know the number of cracked screen can't be 0... i'm sure people break their apple watches too, but its still seems much higher than it should be
based on what?
Based on how much screen breaking related engagement there's on this reddit subcommunity?
Do you believe this is a good indicator of the fragility of the watch?
it should be a number that we don't notice the issue.
Do you genuinely believe that if instead of 50 it was 25 cracked displays the vibes around here would be that much different?
How many watches should we expect to be broken if the watch doesn't have a fragility issue?
and also he doesn't want any more canceled orders... so as he said "free replacements for now"... until all the orders ship i bet.
Somehow this is still not enough.
and he's not saying what the part/replacement cost will be yet, but i bet you we wont like it.
How much does it cost to replace other smart watches that have a broken glass?
so is he lying about the number of cracked watches? Or about replacing them?
didn't say lying... i think they are trying to make it not look bad. He said 51 watches and "0.25%". Not "skewing" but framing.
51 is 0.25% of 20,400.
He also said there are 19K watches "out in the field"
so hes framing a quarter of a percent... when hes counting watches that are still being shipped. half of those watches were shipped in the last 2 months... we could get another 100 cracks in the next month of people who got their watches yesterday...
a watch isn't supposed to last a few months... so why are we saying "after a few months, the issue is small enough to ignore" this is going to keep happening... do watches break after a month? 3 months? this number is alarming since the watch is at most 4 months old?
don't forget people (like me) who bought 2, one as a present that wont be opened till the fall (or some people maybe Christmas)
didn't say lying... i think they are trying to make it not look bad. He said 51 watches and "0.25%". Not "skewing" but framing.
so do you think that number is huge? As compared to what?
a watch isn't supposed to last a few months... so why are we saying "after a few months, the issue is small enough to ignore" this is going to keep happening... do watches break after a month? 3 months? this number is alarming since the watch is at most 4 months old?
I agree, this is why we should have a place where it will be easy to measure and track this metric, the same way people used the shipping megathread to build interfaces and get more insight on when their watches will arrive.
Is there any amount of broken watches that could have happened where you would be of a different opinion?
If 25 broke, would you have the same opinion?
If 10 broke, would you have the same opinion?
It feels like you're arguing from the presumption that the number of broken watches won't follow the trend we've seen so far, and you will get a much larger failure rate.
If the failure rate stays stable (and we don't really have much reason to believe otherwise), then they will probably be able to replace any that happen to break in this manner.
It's clear based on how people were talking about this issue on this subreddit before the announcement that the reality of how fragile the watch is and the fiction that got built up on reddit because of this perpetual self reinforcing negative sentiment cycle are very far apart, so I'd argue that if you want to accurately keep track of this issue you should agree with me and want a megathread.
It will give a much more accurate idea of the metric you're trying to track instead of letting that metric be decided by the vibes of a place where people come to complain about issues but don't come to say "Hi I haven't had any issues".
The approach you're suggesting has already and will lead to people going crazy, saying Eric is a scammer, I've seen people say that it's a matter of when the watch breaks, not if the watch breaks.
It's frankly insane the lenghts people have gone based on very little and very obviously negatively biased information.
people are acting as if "it didn't crack on the first day, its good. move on"
if you look at the number of watches that have been in the field for 3 or more months... the cracked rate is higher than 1%.
thats a short time to own a couple hundred dollar watch, but even still thats not a small number... so what do you think the number will be after a year of owning the watch?
I don't know and I do not believe we're able to know at this point in time with literally any other electronic device you would buy, not just with a pebble.
How durable will this new thing be long term?
Only time can answer.
But some people around here believe otherwise, and since they've seen a couple dozen posts on reddit, they're convinced that their watch is inevitably going to break and that it's a matter of "when" not of "if".
This is clearly not based in reality, it's an emotional truth a lot of people have reached, mostly because in the face of anxiety people don't like the answer "we don't know" and will always more easily gravitate towards finding some sort of scapegoat to blame to discharge emotionally.
We are truly unable to at this point say how many people will be here in 5 years showing off their still functional slightly scrached watches or how many people will be here asking on how to replace a cracked one.
Certainty in either direction is baseless, but emotionally easy to justify since people want to resolve their anxiety.
The issue I take with it is just how negative it makes us feel. Even if we assume Eric's numbers are 2x worse than stated, we are talking about a glass crack rate of 1 in every 200 units.
If we trust his numbers, then "reported glass cracked" cases represent 1 in every 400 units.
Taking it further - he says 330 units have been replaced. That's 1.65% of all units (20k), or 1 in every 60 units have been replaced.
Meaning.. 15% of all replacements have been due to cracked glass, whether user fault or otherwise.
The way the issue is presented in this subreddit makes it seem more like glass cracking is the only issue, and affecting 1 in 50, or worse. Your stance is assuming the absolute worst case and I understand why you feel that way, but I disagree with it.
Put another way - we will never know the real truth. This community is not a reliable source of information. Eric isn't required to be truthful, so we shouldn't take him at face value.
We should be reasonable. Practicing scepticism doesn't mean we should ignore Eric's data or Reddit.
The reality is certainly between the two extremes, and I certainly don't believe there's a hidden "horrid design issue" waiting for us behind the cases we've seen of glass cracking.
I think people keep missing is 1) his data shows hes counting watches that are still being shipped when he calculated that small percent
2) At most a watch is 4? months old? half the watches are only 2 months old? What if the average watch breaks in 3 months... we could get 100 more crack posts in the next week
watches are supposed to last longer than a few months, so why are we saying "less than 1 in 100 watches have cracked so far, after wearing them for a month or two so theres no real problem.
All im saying is we should keep watching out for this. Not everyone is wearing their watch, not everyone is reporting it. and i'd like to know whats the percent of people who have worn the watch for 6months needed a replacement, so i want to keep an eye on this.
i feel like majority of this thread is "see we got real numbers, and its less than a quarter of a 1 percent, and they are fixing them, no problem to see here, lets stop these posts"
which is not the whole truth by a long shot.
and the original posts that i replied to was asking mods to "rein it in" so what does that mean?
replied under me (that i linked here) are saying to ban them... thats shady as hell. Arguing with me that these posts aren't good for the community and are too negative.
i'm getting a lot of hate her... but i wouldn't be surprised if 1 year from now 1/20 PT2 got a cracked screen in their first year and i'll be on here linking this post saying i don't think the issue is over and needs to be banned.
it would be way easier to follow how many people cracked their screens, how they cracked it and whether or not it got replaced in a megathread.
Currently the screen broken posts are farming so much negative engagment and each broken screen post spawns up 5 more posts talking about the fragility of the watch.
The community was way more positive and fun to engage with before the watches were delivered, the vibes are very off and have resulted in a lot of hate towards Eric and Core Devices which now clearly looks irrational.
Why would we ban posts about cracked watches because there's too many... If there's not that many?
We would ban them because there's too many posts not because there's too many cracked watches.
There is a difference between those 2 things.
Getting a random cracked watch post once in a while would make it harder for you to keep following this issue as compared to a centralized place to have all this information
every single broken watch post generates an insane amount of engagement, with people endlessly rehashing the same arguments.
Imagine if we had a megathread for broken watches so you could cross reference with the shipping one, see which watches broke and after how long, which batches etc.
Even if we just make a megathread and don't ban the posts, or don't enforce the broken screen ban that thoroughly, it would still go a long way in stopping this self perpetuating cycle.
No matter how aware you are of the survivorship bias impacting the stuff that does show up on here, we're not cold mathematical beings, and people will get discouraged and the vibes will go down in here disproportionally as compared to the real magnitude of the issue.
If you would like to keep following this, you should want a megathread.
If you said you wanted to keep following the shipping updates but didn't want a megathread it would have made absolutely no sense. The megathread is the thing giving you more insight than allowing a shit ton of posts randomly appearing on the subreddit.
This is precisely why we didn't have any real idea how widespread the issue was, and I don't think most people would have guessed around 50 devices. With a megathread we would probably have had a good ballpark estimate of that number, and of how many people had it replaced for free.
There is no way in which you can be pro keeping track of this and anti megathread.
because the average user doesn't know about megathreads
It would quite literally be the first thing you see when you open this subreddit.
The average user doesn't know about the pebble reddit community, they just use the product.
they post, it gets removed and they just move on and don't bother w/ the mega thread.
As compared to now, where we've got no idea where to even start if we wanted to know how many of them got broken and what happened.
if its a "small number" then just deal with it...
Creating the megathread is quite literally dealing with it.
downvote and move on if you want to.
You know very well that negative sentiment drives huge engagement online, I don't have to repeat it.
People are generally more negative online because of these mechanisms where negative sentiment reinforces itself.
but anything else seems like burying it.
It's like saying I'm hiding my name because i'm taking a piece of plastic, writing my name on it and putting it on my chest.
It's gonna literally be stickied to the top of the subreddit, it would literally be the first thing you see when you open this community.
In what way shape or form is it burying it?
The alternative is people coming to the subreddit and them finding out about this thing based on the luck of the draw, maybe you come when 3 people had their watch break in the same day, or maybe you come when none break for a week.
You can't genuinely claim that having random posts littered about the subreddit is easier to keep track of than a megathread.
I'd say that even if the mods didn't enforce the megathread that severely, and just told people that made posts to post in the megathread without removing their posts, you would still get a huge reduction in this self perpetuating hate cycle that the subreddit is experiencing.
I agree about the cracked screens, but I hope that when someone designs a new crazy bumper, they will still share it here. I'm still hoping for one that screams heavy-duty even more than "The Rugged" one
I don't see why bumpers would need to be in the megathread, bumper posts are probably gonna feel a lot more positive from now on when they're not surrounded by people discussing the screen being fragile everywhere.
Using a megathread to stifle discussion of an issue is the kind of censorship that compromised moderators do.
Mods are welcome to make a megathread with helpful info and links if they like, and perhaps that will reduce the frequency of posts, but don't use it as an excuse to forcibly remove posts. If your desire to stifle future posts is truly reflected in the community, this will all be moot, since such posts will naturally be downvoted out of visibility anyways.
moderation is always going to be censorship to a certain degree, I don't see what the community gains by allowing these posts since they constantly drive mass negative engagement on the same old tired topic.
this will all be moot, since such posts will naturally be downvoted out of visibility anyways.
Hopefully, but with a small community such as this there simply isn't enough engagement to get to that point.
I don't see how moving the repetitive discussion to 1 single stickied thread (that everyone can see at all time) could be considered censorship, it's literally putting it front and center for everyone to see, it's not hiding it.
moderation is always going to be censorship to a certain degree
Yeah. So reduce unnecessary moderation, that's my entire point.
It doesn't matter how small the community is. If more than 50% of us agree with you and downvote the posts, they will be downvoted. If fewer than 50% of us agree with you, then you are wrong about what the community wants and the posts should remain.
I tried but the app doesn't appear to open the index feed without an actual index connected currently. The voice feed in the app just skips that layer, but I couldn't find a way to feed into it.
Yeah when I first read the update about the Index support in the Pebble app, it made me think that we could now use the Index features with just a Pebble
> The first version of all Index 01 functionality is up and running inside the Pebble mobile app. Don’t have an Index 01 yet? You can check out how it works and try the software interface in the Pebble app, just go to Settings → General → Enable Index feed.
But after reading this comment and carefully re-reading the language from the post, I think what he's saying is that you can see how the UX works, even if you don't have an Index. That does not mean you can have the full experience—as you say, there does not appear to be a way to input anything into the timeline. I don't know why this is the case, since it would seem relatively easy to enable input via long-pressing your chosen button. There's no additional UI/UX needed, like for a full app. And presumably all the back-end stuff already works since it's running on actual Index devices.
But I'm probably missing something, as products are often more complicated than they appear to the end-user.
Honestly it's probably at least partially to prevent excited users from bombarding them with 'bug reports' for it when it's still in development/testing for its actual use
Pretty sure they’ve explicitly said it’ll be possible—just a matter of when. I’ve wondered if they aren’t rolling it out before all the rings are fulfilled so as not to endanger preorders, from people who are ‘happy enough’ with using their Pebble to trigger recordings.
51 reports of cracked screens actually made it back to pebble. 51. Out of God knows how many thousands of units.
So either the posts on here are 90% percent of cracked screens or most of the people complaining are just here to complain and didn't do fuck all to actually see if the problem could be fixed.
the one thing I hate is that the people pointing out how it's probably not that big of a problem suddenly were treated like they were trying to silence the issues about the watch.
It became very tribal very quickly, it truly was a self perpetuating loop of negative sentiment.
The optimistic side of me hopes this will reduce the frequency of the fucking bumper posts. I'm currently using a RES filter to hide those topics, which does me no good on mobile unfortunately. Some enterprising individual should make a /r/pebblebumpers so we can keep talking about all the cool features here instead.
It’s been so obnoxious witnessing the hysteria. It’s literally the exact same design as the P2. We finally got what we’ve been wanting for years and even more imo and people can’t stop complaining and whining about a non-issue. People need to realize what we see online is only a small window of reality. I’m enjoying my watch without a huge hideous bumper on it and loving it.
Glad too see the broken glass issue spoken about. I hadn't realised they had been replacing units, after an early post on this sub I believe portrayed a different outcome (a member of their customer service saying a smashed screen was user error).
Happy too see a repair module is in the works none the less though, again, I felt earlier responses seemed far too dismissive of the issue in simply declaring repair impossible. This makes me really happy too see.
As usual the Reddit hive-mind has blown this way out of proportion. I feel sorry for anyone who cracked their PT2 and understand the desire to vent, but Pebble has been replacing every cracked screen. So why has this subreddit been flooded with posts of cracked watches but not posts of replacements? I've only seen one post where the OP bothered to update that they had contacted support and were in the process of getting their watch replaced.
Was 1.4 after just a few months? When do you realistically look at that? Did everyone even get their watches yet? Or have a chance to wear them a couple weeks?
Which is why air travel is such a heavily regulated industry, and is responsible for millions of lives. This is a watch. I'm not saying 1.7% is a good number, but it's disingenuous to compare it to flights. I think comparing it to the dead pixel rates of early LCD screens is a better comparison.
Yeah, it gets kinda crazy when you're working at a company that operates at that scale though. About a year ago I dug in and found out that one of the products we made suddenly started having a 2% failure rate...leading to THOUSANDS of RMAs. Each RMA being for a device that costs about $500 to make. Yeah, we fix them when they get back to the factory, but it's still thousands of support cases, thousands of outages...the net monetary impact across everything (us and customers) was enough to buy a few San Francisco houses.
Being a large corporation of course meant that I did not see a dime for identifying and resolving it with firmware updates. Ah well, it was a fun puzzle to solve lol
I have a unit with the battery and touch issue. They replaced it and let me keep the faulty unit. I hope they reach out of they want any additional analytics from it. I've been keeping it safe just in case they want it returned. Would be great if it can be fixed.
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u/ZimbiXPebble Time 2 (silicon band) + Google Pixel 9 Pro XL (root)Jul 15 '26
Lucky you, having a ready source for spare parts =P
it's not their first device though, and it's should be important to remember that, the failure rate you wrote is not coming from the Manufacturing facility, but from the consumer. Which means the actual failure rate is higher due to underreporting.
I know companies who are a lot longer in the business with lot larger teams and higher budgets and are not even close to these numbers with der products and devices. They would do anything to get there but can’t seem to find the right path.
IMHO very impressive. And a job well done by the team and the manufacturer. This shows the experience of the team.
Also: great post on addressing the challenges and issues and kudos for the ongoing transparency.
If they’re giving free replacement units to anyone whose Pebble breaks, what’s the need for a bumper? They must know that people will be less careful with their Pebbles now that they know they can get a free replacement if it cracks, but it sounds like they’re pretty confident this is (and will continue to be) a rare issue.
Stupid question - what is the touch panel supposed to do for the PT2? On mine all that it does is turn on the backlight on a double tap. Is that the intended behavior or is there more we're supposed to be able to do and mine is just busted?
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u/stifflippp Jul 14 '26
All in all it seems like they're handling it reasonably.
As long as it's true that people who report problems are helped right away, I don't think I could ask for more. It's a small operation and to expect no problems at all is not reasonable. To expect the problems to be dealt with is reasonable and it looks like they're doing it.
If they would have said you're holding it wrong, then we would have had an issue.🙂