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How to Make Millions of Hoverboards Almost Overnight
- redlightbulb 11y agoJust listened to the Planet Money episode about this: https://overcast.fm/+BP5_W92-o https://overcast.fm/+BP5_W92-o Anyone getting one?
- Lemmih 11y agoDon't have a hoverboard but I do have an electric unicycle (they're usually made at the same factories). It's fast and I use it instead of my bicycle when it isn't raining.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoConsidered, but I won't have place in my luggage to take it back :(. I did get the chance to ride on them though, they are great. Shenzhen is an interesting place. I learned as much about China as about the West here - in particular, I wasn't up to date with all the stupid USB-powered shit Westerners buy. Took a few hours of strolling around the electronics market and now I feel like I'm a walking gadget catalog.
- tiredwired 11y agoI assume they will be really cheap (new/used) after the holidays.
- tempestn 11y agoWhy are these wheeled things referred to as "hoverboards"?
- sand500 11y agoCall it memeufacturing. It starts when a (typically) Western company, eager to cash in on a product made popular by the social internet, contracts a Chinese factory to make it. From here, the idea spreads throughout the elaborate social networks of Chinese electronics manufacturing until the item in question is being produced by hundreds and hundreds of competitors, who subcontract and sell components to each other, even as they all make the same thing. It reaches its saturation point quickly. It moves from product to product without sentiment. And it is proof that our never-ending digital output, our tweets and Vines and Instagrams and Facebook posts, has the power to shape the lives of people on the other side of the world.