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GoPro is in serious financial trouble. Action camera giant is at risk for potential bankruptcy (www.digitalcameraworld.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 201 points 5 months ago* (18 children)

What a crazy fuckup. You have a household name almost for action cameras and you keep releasing overpriced crappy products.

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  • [–] 90 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    And the exact same model just rebranded!

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  • [–] 48 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    Meanwhile my old GoPro Hero 4 is somehow the most reliable action camera I own, and my newer one constantly stops recording due to something. I bought an Insta360 as an alternative a couple years ago and the batteries are all already toast, and last maybe 30 seconds of recording.

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  • [–] 20 points 5 months ago*

    my newer one constantly stops recording due to something.

    For a while they kept putting the same old processor in that couldn't handle the load. GoPros shutting off due to overheating or recording too long was just normal.

    Dunno if it's still the case. I switched to DJI and you can't even compare the two. Quality, smart design, price, reliability; these are not GoPro things. I record for an hour plus sometimes and just flawless. Don't have to think about it.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I see a lot of action cams on the used marketplace selling for cheap. What’s a good one to buy? Or are they all toast?

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    Theyre all really good now, and all priced very similarly. All have strengths and weaknesses but you can't really go wrong with any of them.

    Unfortunately they all require a proprietary app and associated account so I'll never buy another one.

    GoPro rested on their laurels and DJI and Insta360 are eating their lunch now.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Insta360 really wants to take the higher end of gopro. As in, beating them at quality. There's a bazillion lower end models with varying quality, some rather decent.

    I have the insta360 acepro 2, and recording quality is really good, i think better than gopro. But it's a brick of a camera to hold, rather heavier. I didn't have issues with batteries myself, i have an original one and 2 off market ones, so far all working Ok.

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  • [–] 32 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Agreed. I have a Hero 10 Black and basically every time I go to use it I wind up wanting to hurl it into the sun by the time I'm done. My wife bought it for me as a birthday present a couple of years ago because I asked for one specifically (I didn't know any better, apparently) so it would probably be rude to do so, though.

    It overheats, it randomly shuts off, it routinely experiences a firmware crash that renders all of its buttons inoperable and requires pulling the battery to cure. Oh, and it also has a battery life best measured in seconds so you need to keep it plugged in to external power all the time which requires an aftermarket accessory. Brilliant.

    With any luck mine will get taken out in some spectacular and marketable fashion, preferably while recording at top quality so I can post it and use the video revenue to buy an Insta Ace or something.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    They've always been kinda crappy. I don't think that changed so much as competition got better. And then as competition got better, they started doing things like stupidly priced dongles for external audio input. This has been a slow burn in the works for a long time.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    At the beginning they weren't "kinda crappy" because there really wasn't anything else you could compare them to. Nobody else made a camera that you could strap to your chest, or your helmet, or your motorcycle while you did something action-ey. They had fully waterproof cases too, so you could take them underwater.

    As a camera, they weren't amazing. But, people weren't using them to take wedding pictures. They were using them in situations where a normal camera would be too heavy, or wouldn't stay attached, or wouldn't survive.

    There's a reason they became a household name. They enabled people to do things that had never been done before, and they changed the way a lot of sports are shot.

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  • [–] 19 points 5 months ago

    Not almost, "GoPro" is absolutely a household name, they were the only realistic choice for action cameras for an incredibly long time.

    It's also a verb, I've heard people talk about "GoPro-ing" something many times before.

    Absolutely nuts how far they've fallen.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    A lot of the comments look to me like part of the reason for the failure. At least the old ones continue to work almost forever. They product was so good that people aren't replacing them. This leads to them releasing overpriced crappy products to make up for it.

    I wish we lived in a world where making the best product, that is reliable and durable, for as cheap as possible was standard and made sense. We've essentially made it so it doesn't work.

    The correct option seems to be, to me, for them to not have scaled like they have. They should have been a niche durable action camera, and their costs would have stayed low. Every product that sells though is told they have to scale as much as possible forever, until it kills the product.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago

    I suppose their shareholders had other ideas, they just failed to have the right people piloting that ship. Other companies took over their space and now it's too late. They should probably attempt what you said, scale back and just release a solid action camera again.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I wonder if there are other " genericized trademark" companies that have failed that spectacularly. You can still buy Frigidaire refrigerators. Vaccuuming is known as "hoovering" in the UK, and Hoover is still around.

    It would be pretty interesting if "a GoPro" exists as a word for an action camera and the company / brand no longer exists.

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