I'm sold enough on this form factor to take a flyer on a pre-order. I've been hunting for ways to minimize friction when quickly capturing random thoughts and this is a novel idea that seems to go further than anything else I've tried.
The lack of battery charging/replacement is a bummer, but slimness is far more critical for a ring than just about any other device so I understand the tradeoff. I've also seen stories of injuries from battery expansion in fitness rings, so if the risk of this is significantly reduced by eliminating charge cycles, I personally consider that a notable benefit.
Even though, IMO, there are enough legitimate benefits to warrant this product's trade-offs, I imagine its disposable nature will ultimately make it unsuccessful. Off the cuff, it's easy to look at this as "saying the quiet part out loud" vis-a-vis planned obsolescence, and I understand why many would find that extremely off-putting.
I don't understand why people who are probably OK with ordering Doordash once in a while are up in arms about a disposable device that weighs a couple of grams, lasts for years, and is recycled. You can easily spend more on a single Doordash meal for two people and I guarantee a few Doordash meals have more impact on the environment than this minuscule device ever could.
personally, i worry about what happens when it doesn't last for years. a software bug causes high power draw, or you set your ring down and something gets pushed against the recording button for a few hours, or you fall asleep laying on it. given it only has a 15-hour recording life, this happening just once could be the end of your $75 device
amazing! does it provide any other protections against other battery drain risks? glad you guys though of that haha, definitely will be ordering one :)
This thing costs $75. Over 4 years, that's $0.05 a day. Let's say you're 40 and plan to buy these until you die at 80. We'll pretend inflation doesn't exist: $750 for 40 years of use.
It feels like backward objection handling where people can't find a use case for something, but feel like they should, so invent a totally irrational objection to it.
I doubt it's about the environmental impact. I agree that the environmental impact probably isn't that bad. My biggest concern is that it's $75 USD (plus shipping, presumably), and if the company ever goes under it's now worthless because I can't get a new one.
That said, if I assume that the company will last long enough, I think $75 USD is worth it even if I only get to use it for 4 years. Although if I end up building workflows around the ring, and then I have to get rid of it, that would be very annoying.
On a monthly basis the cost is quite reasonable IMO. It will continue to work if the company goes out of business. Their software is open source. So you can count on using it as long as the battery lasts.
Doordash? What does that have to do with this discussion? It is a completely different market. You use the food right away (food is perishable), and you probably could've cooked yourself a healthy meal with much less money. If you live with multiple people, it is even easier to do so due to scaling and sharing what you like. I am very much not OK with spending 50 USD per person on takeaway food (getting it here costs just 3 EUR or so). It is the amount of money I spend at a (for me) fancy restaurant.
I'll give you another example. A smart TV. A smart TV is more expensive than this ring, but yeah. So a cheap smart TV needs a soundbar for decent audio, and it needs a STB for the OS (streaming) in order to make it a dumb TV. It comes with a computer in it. A computer which you cannot upgrade. They decide to quit support whenever they want to (after 2 years you're generally hosed in EU). Planned obsolescence. We don't like that in Europe. I know, in the USA the current leadership denies climate change even exists. But here in Europe, we follow the scientific method, not BS.
> I've been hunting for ways to minimize friction when quickly capturing random thoughts and this is a novel idea that seems to go further than anything else I've tried.
Since you’re the target audience, I’ll ask you: How do you envision you’ll work through all of the captured notes? Do it all at the end of the day? Go back and look for something after you remember making the note?
I’m wondering if this product will have the same problem that many discover after they buy a Moleskin journal and think it will solve specific problems in their life: Recording the thought or idea is the easy part, but it only defers the action. Additional diligence is required to review the notes and act on them.
For a very specific type of person who is both forgetful but also diligent enough to process the notes thoroughly and in a timely manner I could see this being helpful. For the people saying this will help with easily distracted people I’m not so sure. It could easily become a tool which gives a false sense of handling a task when really it just blackholes the thought into an ever growing collection of 3-second notes that are never revisited. Like the person who clicks the “mark as unread” button on every email with the intention of responding later, but then has 100 messages in their inbox by the end of the week.
The advertised use case of recording 20 short thoughts per day means over 100 notes to process every week. For a highly diligent person who clears their inbox (and now audio notes) every day that’s nothing. For all of the commenters thinking this is going to solve their distractability problems, I have my doubts.
This is the perfect device for me. What I do now is I have an Android quick settings button that opens an email to myself. I jot down a few notes per day and they end up in my inbox. I triage them later whenever I process my inbox. My ideal way for this ring to work is that it would do exactly the same, but without typing. I agree that if the notes are siloed in a separate app then I might ignore them, so I hope that I can get them as emails in my inbox by default.
I also want it to have the additional capability of setting time-based or geofence reminders, timers, alarms, and calendar events. It will be incredibly useful for me to be able to, while I'm driving to work, say "remind me to take out the garbage when I get home" or whatever. You'd expect Siri or Google Assistant to be able to do this and in theory they can but in practice they suck for this use case.
> How do you envision you’ll work through all of the captured notes? Do it all at the end of the day?
Not entirely sure yet. My current setup involves an Apple shortcut that sends a text blob to my email inbox with the subject "Note to self", where I have a filter set up to send emails with that subject line to a specific folder.
Once the notes are in my inbox, I go through them whenever I get around to clearing my other emails, and I parse each item into my action planner. For that, I'm currently using Mark Forster's "Resistance Zero"[0] system to moderate success, but I've been experimenting with other ways of tracking and actioning my to-dos.
Given the software is open source, I plan to try and hack something together that automatically routes my voice notes as plaintext to that same email filter.
I try to adopt the Unix philosophy when assembling my personal productivity workflow. To that end, I consider this device a composable "quick capture" tool, and nothing more.
> Recording the thought or idea is the easy part, but it only defers the action.
I find that this is very untrue for me.
The tiny bits of friction with other quick-capture systems I've tried add up to a substantial "loss factor" over time. If I use pen/paper, I need to ensure I have my notepad and pen on me at all times. If I use my phone, I also need to have it on me at all times, and then also manage to avoid getting distracted by social media. Either action requires fumbling around with a physical object which is not always convenient or possible.
If this device results in me capturing so many thoughts that I get bogged down and struggle to process them effectively, I would actually consider that a massive success, at least as concerns the specific use-case I aim to address. Any "failure" there is merely an indication that I need to give the "input processing" part of my system some TLC.
> For all of the commenters thinking this is going to solve their distractability problems, I have my doubts.
Fully agree. I have no illusions about this solving anything more than improving the reliability with which I capture thoughts and get them into my system. But anyone who expects this to solve more will likely be disappointed.
The lack of battery charging/replacement is a bummer, but slimness is far more critical for a ring than just about any other device so I understand the tradeoff. I've also seen stories of injuries from battery expansion in fitness rings, so if the risk of this is significantly reduced by eliminating charge cycles, I personally consider that a notable benefit.
Even though, IMO, there are enough legitimate benefits to warrant this product's trade-offs, I imagine its disposable nature will ultimately make it unsuccessful. Off the cuff, it's easy to look at this as "saying the quiet part out loud" vis-a-vis planned obsolescence, and I understand why many would find that extremely off-putting.