I’ve been thinking about this somewhat. The past six months I left my Pebble charger cable twice. Once I left it away from home so I had to deal with not charging my Pebble for about 10 days while the new one comes. Once I forgot to bring it with me on a trip so I had to borrow one to recharge the Pebble. By the way my Pebble Time Steel hasn’t shipped…probably because they have some problems not only with the watch band, but also the particular type of watch I ordered (gold).

At first, I never was a fan of smartwatches that hand battery life measured in hours. Days days days. That led me to buy a Pebble, since the transflective LCD technology allowed it to run for 5-7 days at a time. Living with the Pebble these past 2 years, I learned that, in reality, as most Apple Watch defenders would point out, it doesn’t matter on a daily driver sense. You go home, you can charge it overnight and get on with your life. Yes it’s one extra cable, so yes, if you travel or what not, or just live life in general, yeah, it’s one extra cable that you can forget/lose/break. None of that is a deal breaker in the sense that you can always pack a backup or have a spare cable somewhere. But it’s still not substitute to having the battery life.

Here’s the main problem. In the first world, smartphones are ubiquitous. Smartphone charging is not an issue. All the international airports I’ve visited had easy ways to let you charge your phone. Some even had cables right there so you didn’t need to go to the newsstand or Best Buy vending machine to pick up a cable if you needed one. Maybe Apple Watch cables will also be like that, but so far I don’t think that has been the case. And I don’t need to mention all the other Android Wear and Pebble watch cables.

And it’s okay to carry around a dead watch. It’s way less disruptive than carrying a dead phone. So it’s not a huge risk rationally. It’s just an irritation. Much more so than smartphones, however, watches breed physical habits and muscle memories. Wearing one for a few years then go a normal day without it and you’ll know what I mean. So to me it’s much more about the irritation of wearing a dead watch. Having a dead phone seemed just like a straight-up crisis. It’s not even in the same league.

The takeaway is if I had a watch that had a battery life of 2-3 days, the two instances I left a cable home or lost it or whatever, I would had to go without a smartwatch for days. Because my Pebble have like a 7 day battery life, I was able to use it during the stretch of days when I wasn’t able to charge it nightly. (I turned the watch off when I sleep instead.) Forgetting it on my IM@S 10th trip was funny because I knew one other guy who was going also had a Pebble, so I borrowed it from him for one night and it was all I needed to last 11+ days in Japan.

Maybe a sensible way to qualify “a couple days” of battery life to “a week” of battery life is in a construction sense. Having smooth metallic finishes or “clicky” crowns or fine leather or solid buttons are good, I think, and these workmanship qualities are desirable. In that sense I think a battery life long enough to not having to worry about not charging your watch is in the same category. A holy grail would be like, once a month or something. Or maybe some out-of-box thinking is required here.

The long answer to the battery life question applies not just to smart devices we carry but in general. At some level the CPUs and GPUs we carry in our smartphones will cap out, and technology today work hard at driving the power consumption of these moore’s law candidates. We might stick to the same # of transistors between generations of phones, but the power consumption drops. We are also making way on battery technology so we can carry more juice at the same size and weight limits. This just means battery life too has a cap somewhere, and that cap might not even be too far from where we are today. The real takeaway is that we need to learn how to rationally “calibrate” these numbers. What does 1 day or 12 hours mean in this context? It’s not even a linear relationship between x number of hours of battery life to desirability, or if a device’s battery life exceeds your power requirements by x hours, what value does it add, etc. It’s about measuring edge cases, analysis of risk, and figuring out what is a good value.

Just my 2c. Nothing really that special either, but just trying to put my ideas into words. FWIW I was not a backer but I am also not a believer of Facebook, despite having an active account there.

I think it’s great that Carmack and all those other guys now have the backing of a pretty spiffy company looking to change the way we integrate fancy technology in or daily lives. If Occulus Rift’s vision is to popularize VR beyond video games, okay, that’s fine.

But the problem is we are not even at step one, popularize VR in video games. Right now Bitcoins are more popular than Occulus Rift in terms of adaptation. There is no consumer product, just a lot of dev kits out there. If Occulus Rift is just a company that makes VR kits, maybe we have arrived, but this is not what its backers are really in for. Something like VR require not just support in the technical sense, but also in the platform sense. It needs not just developers but a developer community and channel, it needs backing of a player in the video games industry. Or players.

The problem is always about faith. Kickstarter, too, is a platform that runs on faith. All the talk about giving back to backers and investment versus preorder is besides the point. It doesn’t matter you are making a charitable donation or buying stocks, it requires faith that these acts will result in the things you want to happen–money spent to do the right kind of good works, or you get a positive ROI of whatever. And faith comes in that in both cases you rely on a third party or some external circumstances to carry these effects out. Sony’s HMV-T3 is already a thing you can buy, with the headtracking sensor addon announced at CES this year; OR is not treading new grounds in terms of what it promises to deliver.

The FB buyout violated faith of backers. These guys are buying dev kits or whatever, sure, but the vision of the VR (even in just video games) lives on even after all the crap is delivered. That’s what Kickstarter is actually about: supporting art and crap like that. And I think on this point the FB buyout goes pretty much against this exact point. Or maybe not so much “against” the spirit of independently funded venture to do something new or hard to commercialize; it’s more like we switch “independently funded” to “corporate funded.”

I’m not saying FB or OR wouldn’t carry out their vision of a VR whatever. I’m saying it’s like okay, so FB bought you guys, maybe the least you can do is to assure that your Kickstarter backers feel okay about this? These guys are the same gaming community that will help pave the way to a VR future. I would say even refunding the 2.5 million bucks would be pocket change for OR at this point, and it will go a very long way to help Kickstarter and OR’s fans. It’s a gesture of thanks. Thanks for having faith in OR, whatever.

I’m thinking if it was some other company that bought OR, like Microsoft or Nintendo, this would be like a positive move. Because those companies are actually directly operating in this space and it’s easy to see how it can further OR’s vision. FB? Not so much. Even if on the back end, FB is turning out to be an okay acquirer of startups.

In that way I’m glad nobody bought out Pebble yet. I wonder how they can stand against this. I suppose that’s something to think about, as a Pebble backer. Or it’s something I have already thought about and it seems like the problem they’re tackling is wholly different enough that 2 billion dollars from FB isn’t really going to change much.