The new Pebble has issues. That's kind of the point.
So I've been reading through the complaints. Coating scratching off, cracks on the B&W units, the Time 2 screen situation. All real, all valid.
But I think people are losing the plot a little.
This is four people. Not four hundred. Four. And they're not just making one watch — they're doing three hardware products, the mobile app, and the software stack all at once. In small batches. With suppliers who frankly don't care about your order when it's this small.
You don't get Gorilla Glass Victus at this volume. You don't get to run three production test cycles before shipping. You get what suppliers will do for you at your scale, and that's it. The B&W crack thing? That's exactly what happens when you don't have the budget for a materials engineer to catch a stress point before it goes out the door. It's not a conspiracy. It's just hard.
I did hardware once on a small team. We made embarrassing mistakes. Stuff we should have caught. When you can't afford to run the same test ten different ways, you kind of just have to ship and find out. It sucks but that's what it is.
The 30 day warranty feels short I know. But warranty logistics are genuinely a whole operation — intake, verification, return shipping, failure analysis. They don't have that yet. Maybe someday.
Anyway. If you bought one of these you're a beta tester. I don't mean that as an insult, I mean that's literally what early hardware adoption is. If that's not what you signed up for, Garmin makes a great watch.
But if you're into it — design a bumper case, post the STLs. Found a fix for something? Write it up. Got a cracked unit? Document exactly what happened and tell the team directly, not just here.
That's kind of what this community is supposed to be good at.