You can be more expensive if you’re better, or you can be worse if you’re cheaper, but they’re both the downsides while living purely off brand recognition.

They also blew up in a time where there wasn’t any real competition. Sony had action cameras but they were bulkier and expensive, and didn’t have the features of GoPro.

These days other brands give better quality video in better quality hardware and more functionality, for cheaper.

Gave the brand a second chance some years ago. Couldn't export my videos from the app, it always hanged. So I couldn't share footage. Apparently a common long standing problem on forums.

Woved to never buy anything from them again.

Yes, I've done the Garmin VIRB Edit thing, which is the very approach recommended by Jeff (NorCalCycling) in his tutorial videos on the subject. It feels like something out of 2005. It is incredibly labour-intensive and imprecise unless you're fortunate enough to be in relatively short criteriums where you've got the battery runtime to just record the whole race. Most real-world events and rides require one to turn the camera on and off at certain moments, which then requires _hours_ of stitching together clips and correlating them to GPS fixes from the head unit (in the FIT file), and quite imprecisely at that.

There has to be a more 2026 solution to this. All you need to do is correlate the footage to the FIT data points by timestamp, in the temporal domain.

If Garmin came out with one, it would absolutely annihilate this space. To the best of my knowledge, there is no competition that offers anything turn-key, though perhaps the best of my knowledge has not aged well and by now there is something. It's maddening.

Apple somehow reigns supreme still. Anyone else?

Action cameras sound like a tough business, since most of them are built to last ages, and they need to keep the vast majority of content creators happy trying to increase image quality in a small form factor.

Anyway, I bought the Insta360 Go Ultra I had my mind on from the start, which I'm still reasonably happy with.

As soon as we hit deeper waters the capture button pressed itself down due the pressure and it wouldn’t come back up. That, unfortunately happened in a way that I couldn’t start a capture. Lost the entire thing, despite the camera being perfectly fine after we came back to surface.

Hated them ever since.

I’ve had a few GoPros and a few GoPro 360s. I also had Roombas so you can blame me as the brand killer.

The "problem" is that I don't use it that often. Most people do not need action footage regularly. It was more like a impulse/hobby buy rather than a need.

I thought they were meant to be really robust and hardy but it decided not to work when I needed it and now I don't really trust them tbh. It's sort of opposite of what the brand was leading me to believe.

Turns out it overheated 15 minutes into the drive, and corrupted all the footage from my whole ski trip.

I'm also still salty that they cancelled my favorite fast video editing software (can't remember the name).

This was 8 years ago.

Then they started this subscription thing and I was like, finally, they're going the SaaS way, they will make so much money, and they will be able to improve that camera that basically never seems to improve much version after version. I bought a bunch of put options, and I lost all my money, every time I put back some in the put options.

Now I have the insta360 go ultra and... I think go pro is going to die. It's just so good.

The first surprise was just shoddy electrical engineering: unlike any camera from a big-name manufacturer, they drain the batteries in storage, to the point where they're dead after 2-3 weeks. But that aside, image quality is just poor for the price. It's oversharpened and oversaturated to cover up deficiencies, and that may work for some YouTube videos, but it's a $400 device that's miles behind any $500 mirrorless.

So I get it that if really want to go snorkeling or mountain biking with a camera, this might be a good choice, but that's a tiny market, and for everything else, why would you buy it? If you want cell phone quality video, you can use your cell phone. If you want professional quality, you can spend the same amount of money on a mirrorless from Canon, Panasonic, Sony, or whatever.

Heck in youtube videos you'll occasionally hear "for some reason my gopro is really hot and smells like burning plastic".

Happens to every big brand, really.

typical story. first move out production, loose core competency, let competitors copy it with own brands in own jurisdictions, and shut down business.

https://youtu.be/frrhSJF__Mc

Insta360 is the company that has essentially taken over this space.

I will say the Insta 360 Go 3S is an amazing camera physically it's so small and convenient. They could improve the algo when you pan over a pavement that conglomerate pattern looks sickening when you pan.

It's possible they are just poorly run, and they spend more in R&D than they recoup in revenue, but I strongly suspect they were set up to only be profitable if they sold millions of cameras per year as an attempt to maximize profits at that volume, without consideration of other scenarios.

Gopro has this cool reliable aura around them. How could they he struggling? So bizarre

GoPro will be fine. They just won't be the go-to for every YouTuber any longer.