Basically the question is: who do you want to rely on/trust more, encryption or the justice system?

That's a false equivalence.

I have more trust in the correctness of encryption than the reliability of the justice system.

HOWEVER, that's not what's at issue with crypto. The issue of crypto is that it's irreversible. It absolutely does exactly what you tell it to do, and no more. But, at the same time, that means that when non-algorithm mistakes or exploits (ransom, cons, etc) happen you have 0 recourse to fix it.

There's a reason crypto is the preferred method of wealth transmission for scam artists, hackers, and ransomware.

After reading what others have said and feedback on PineTime and what a good hackable watch should have, it seems like Pebble should resurrect from the grave as a hackable watch. I mean the pebble time had 128kb ram (this only has 64k ram), an color epaper display, 150mAh battery (over a week battery life), heart rate sensors, etc. Heck its even being supported by the open source community AFTER it was discontinued.

Maybe Fitbit can be petitioned to make the Pebble's hardware fully open source too.

Fitbit only bought the software IP, not hardware: https://investor.fitbit.com/press/press-releases/press-relea...

Who got the hardware?

Not sure, I didn't see any public announcements about that from Pebble.

Pebble's over, sadly. I assume fitbit will want to do something with the assets, why else would they have bought it? (PS: I always wondered what was in it for them actually)

I really hope the PineTime will pick up where it left off! But it's only in dev kit stage now.

I had the 1st two generation Pebbles, and now I'm using a Versa Lite. I do find a lot of resemblance on Pebble. Granted it's not open at all and their 'store' is, to me, much less inviting. Yeah not open source at all. However, I also recall that Pebble was looking into Android with their 'Pebble Core'. I do miss their e-ink screen

It wasn't eink! But low-power transmissive LCD. Best of both worlds IMO, faster refresh rate and still super low power.

I was a backer of the original pebble too.. It's a shame things didn't work out. I think they just grew too quickly and got caught up in too much investment money wanting too quick returns.

That's sick! Brilliant and creative idea. Those shots look beautiful.

Google stopped indexing flash content recently too. They were indexing it this whole time cause of how much legacy content is out there. https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/29/the-slow-death-of-flash-co...

Color displays are great, but they should have had an option for a (color or black and white) e-paper display. More efficient for these purposes imo.

I would pay so much for a hackable watch like this with a 3 or 4 color epaper display, I'd almost pay as much as an apple watch if it was high quality hardware and had a great open API and toolchain.

Go on ebay and purchase a Pebble Time. Color epaper display, fully hackable even after being discontinued thanks to the dev community who continues to update it with "Rebble" the open source version of the OS it ran on.

ePaper is just their name for a transflexive LCD display. It's not eInk type technology

Thanks!

I'd pay more than for mass produced consumer gear, from any manufacturer.

Yeah, the original Apple watch had like half a GB, and a raspberry pi zero ($5 price) has the same. Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size?

It's a microcontroller rather than an application chip - so the amount of RAM will always be significantly less. A really beefy high end microcontroller might have 1MB of internal RAM - and for most applications that's more than enough.

Ohhhhh, I didn't realize that. Makes a lot more sense, I guess it is a better comparison to an Arduino than a raspberry pi.

> Couldn't they have fit that within both budget and size?

Oh they could have. The problem is: it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you and most of the documentation is under NDA.

> it's extremely hard to get access to powerful SoCs - the vendors simply won't work with you

That's a really good point. I remember having the Pebble watch (this was pre-Apple and Android watches) and I think it had 128 KB of RAM total, including OS, background tasks, apps, etc. That was a mass produced and commercialized item though.

I've written about the other challenges in another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25252022

Slapping on a more RAM on the PCB is not free energy-wise. The watch only has a 180mAh battery that needs to provide power for an entire week.

I mentioned in another comment about how I had the Pebble watch (before Apple and Android watches were a thing) and it had 128 kb ram total, but it lasted 11 days. That thing was a beast, but as someone else mentioned cost is a. big consideration too. It had 150 mAh on the newer models, before it was discontinued, so while I'm sure it definitely eats up energy I think it's definitely possible to fit more RAM in the power constraints.

Granted that was an e-paper display. (They had color and black and white options)

i now know exactly how to show off on college application resumés...think MIT uses Chrome? finally something to make up for my GPA.

A long time ago I wrote my résumé in PostScript. The text was in an abstract representation, to which an internal typesetting system applied paragraph and page filling and converted it into drawing commands, and could output to plain text for emailing, and HTML, script to mail itself, etc. I thought for sure Adobe would give me a job, but I don't think anyone ever saw it, because who would ever look inside a such a thing? It became thouroughly irrelevant when everything became PDF. I'm not sure I even sent it to Adobe.

So if you do such a thing, realize you might only be doing it for your own enjoyment.