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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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Gaming
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Sure, Analogue also caters to scalpers, to a point.
Somewhat /s, I guess?
I love my Analogue Pocket, which I've had for a little over a year, and Dock, which I've gotten maybe a week ago but has already surpassed my (fairly mild) expectations. I've also had a Super Nt for over a year and have a pre-order in for the Duo, so I tend to appreciate what Analogue comes out with, but their recent strategy with limited edition Pockets feels a bit ill-intentioned.
They had seemingly finally caught up to production issues and were able to deliver everyone's orders towards the end of August and suddenly made both regular editions of the Pocket unavailable to then "drop" limited editions a few weeks later.
Those are once again hard to get, unsurprisingly slightly more expensive than the "regular" variant and generate a significant amount of demand for very limited quantities.
I might be reading too much into it, but it feels like they're still trying to cultivate a constant feeling of FOMO and/or limited supply around the Pocket, all the while being finally able to catch up with demand (I fully understand production was not at scale compared to how much demand there was for it back in 2021/2022).
That's a good assessment.
For anyone unaware, you can get a Slate kit for the GBA SP for about $100 less (provided you have an SP lying around), and it can play GBA, GBC, and original Gameboy carts. If all you're looking for is the form factor and general retro gaming, there's other options out there.
Yeah, I see them as the Teenage Engineering for retro hw. They both have an Apple flavor to them: create a unique, highly polished designed, and use scarcity to sell the product.
As a small batch hw company, that's definitely the safer route to go, vs over-producing your niche product and then not being able to sell them all.
How does Apple use scarcity to sell products?
They let you get in line with a very clear delivery date when they can't meet demand, compared to basically everyone else who just has stock drops on and off.
I'm thinking apple from 15 years ago when they were first establishing this marketing strategy. The first few iphones were hard to get your hands on at launch, which is why people started lining up.
These days Apple has their manufacturing pipeline down and can accurately estimate, and mass produce to meet demand. Analogue and TE will probably never have enough demand to justify mass production of any of their products. So it behooves them to err on the side of scarcity.
Apple doesn't, teenage engineering does, and both teenage and analogue both belong to a distinctly apple flavored school of design