My two cents: I’m thinking there’s a misalignment about what the target market is. I think I’m (software developer, interested in mucking with things myself and willing to pay a premium for hardware to avoid adtech) pretty much the target market for the original product I ordered . It feels like the target market has shifted (or maybe it was always this way?) and there’s an intention that this is a mass market device?
It worked out so that I unboxed this at Christmas, so my first experience showing it off was “huh, it doesn’t seem to really work or do any of the stuff it says it can do”. It can turn on very slowly with fan whine, connect to Wi-Fi, and then tell you in a bunch of different ways that it can’t do anything you ask. The room full of “mass market consumers” is not going to be buying this based of my demo, that’s for sure.
I understand the team is under pressure and it blows to have to make hard choices. That said, how many shipment delay, address confirmation, “order now”, “no really, order now” emails did we get and how many mentioned anything about Dinkum or the “stripped-down” (from my perspective, crippled) software that would ultimately ship?
I’m really surprised this wasn’t the decision made, but I guess it’s also got me curious. How many sales of the Mark 2 went to people unfamiliar with the command line? Is that really the majority end user that should be optimized for?
The product that showed up did not feel like it was produced to be user-empowering, hackable, open source alternative to adtech. It feels like it got halfway there, someone said “hmm, but it’s gotta make money” and turned it into mass market shovelware.
Maybe this is a rant and overly harsh, but sure was a disappointing Christmas reveal.
Edit: Thinking about how to make this rant more constructive, I think it’s all down to communication. If I buy a microcontroller, I know it doesn’t do anything and the first thing I’m going to have to do is flash it. Dinkum was a complete surprise to me, and I only found out about it indirectly in response to my own bewilderment in Mycroft Skills Manager on Mark 2? - #4 by devilish_cobweb. If the version that shows up is stripped to the core and can’t even install skills, then that should be front and center in the on-boarding so I don’t assume it’s just broken.