Pebble had a small but vocal audience. Their audience is price conscious, picky about features being exactly what they want, and relatively hard to please (desp

Pebble had a small but vocal audience. Their audience is price conscious, picky about features being exactly what they want, and relatively hard to please (despite the simplicity of their expectations). It’s not a good recipe for building a company around. Probably best for someone doing a hobby-scale or deliberately small business, but establishing manufacturing and logistics for a hardware project is notoriously expensive. Meanwhile, engineer compensation expectations have gone up a lot since the Pebble days. Just think about how many Pebble watches you’d have to sell to be able to support even one engineer salary. Multiple that across a team big enough to do everything needed to ship a Pebble watch that satisfies their audience and it’s not hard to see why it’s not happening.