How Next Thing Co and Popcorn Computer Screwed Customers

When I was a teen. I finally saved enough for pocket chip, I was so excited to be able to have a terminal on the go and be able to program while at school. I ended up asking my mom to order it and she said she didnt trust it. She was right

When you suddenly realize... "Hey I ordered one of those... It never did show up"

I was an early kickstarter backer (and my brother as well) - we both received our PocketCHIPs and i had purchased an additional chip board. This was back in 2016/2017 when i had just started college to get my degree in computer science. I played with it a bit then put it in a drawer for 5 years. Last year i dug it out and started playing with it again. 3D printed a keyboard and buttons for it. And a stylus. Used the gpio to make a i2c seven segment clock. I play pico 8 on it. Its a lot of fun. Ive since bought 2 more, one still in the box just for nostalgia. One of mine has the new debian 11/mainline kernel image with pockethome-bismuth installed. Its a lot of fun to tinker with but not for the faint of heart. Im glad theres still people keeping it alive and im grateful for the video!

I still have my CHIP. It's so depressing how quickly and suddenly it just.... all ended. It was genuinely a really good and cool product. It feels like Next Thing straight up gave up on it.

when i clicked this I thought it was a big channel. Great Video man had me hooked for something i dont care about!

Never liked the idea of SoC board made by a small company. I don't want to spend countless hours learning how to use the thing and build projects just for the supplier to go out of business and all my efforts turn worthless.

I ordered about twenty of these for my computer science courses and they arrived on time and worked great. I was shocked later to discover so many people got stiffed by them.

As a network admin I used my pocket chip to wander the campus running wavemon in terminal, checking for wifi issues. I could also do basic adminning tasks like SSH into servers for updates and debugging.

I've still got my original CHIP from the original Kickstarter! Never really had much of a use for it, admittedly, so it collected a lot of dust over time. I remember back then that the power management IC felt underspecced and had a propensity to trip from overcurrent protection whenever you'd do anything remotely taxing on the CPU, even stuff like updating the system software, so there was one command you basically had to run to disable the protection in order to actually use the thing. I remember looking into trying to build some networked IOT-adjacent stuff with it at one point before NTC went under, and was considering getting some CHIP Pros because they would have been cheaper than getting Pi Zero Ws for what I was looking to do, but I never pulled the trigger on them. Guess that's for the best.

Cool seeing a video about the Pocket C.H.I.P.. I managed to pick one up at a thrift store for $5 years ago.

I have a CHIP that I got from the kickstarter. I think I paid like $9 plus shipping. I hardly ever used it though, it is a very underwhelming device. The Pocket Chip looked pretty cool.

Thank you for the video! About 10 years ago? Shortly after they started to come out I got a call form the guy who owns one of the local computer shops. He had someone with some "strange hardware" that I might want. This lady had bought a bunch of these and got them. I got two pocket chip units and a stack of chip modules. I ended up paying not all that much for them as she just didn't know what to do with them, and didn't want to deal with them. Anyway, I kept one and sold the rest on eBay. I've enjoyed the one I kept for many years, but at this point the keyboard is next to useless. The Pocket Chip is one of the tools I carried in my toolbox. It's nice to have a pocket sized linux computer that I can plug into networks that I'm working on. A while ago I ordered a Clockwork Pi uConsole. It's got a similar form factor and much better specs. The company also has a much better track record. It should be here in the next three months :( As for the Pocket Chip, when the Next Thing servers went offline updates where impossible. Thankfully, someone has fixed this now. The software is still outdated, but at least it's something.

I didn't get a Pocket CHIP, but I had a CHIP board which I used to run the backend logic for an Android application that I developed, which routinely needed to scrape data from a few websites and then update the status on a local SQLite DB and send out notifications for clients. I wrote the whole thing in C, on the CHIP, and it was always fast enough and didn't really give me any headaches. The fact that I was able to do what essentially was dedicated infrastructure for little over 15$ with shipping on a single board for a real project felt kind of magical, and I've been trying to come up with something new to do with the CHIP, as I've since retired that service. I have fond memories of those days.

My wife got me one of these as a gift when they were first released. She gave me a printout of the receipt as the gift and said something like "If it ever shows up then happy birthday." We got lucky and it finally arrived. I didn't realize that lots of people never received theirs. I do agree with you, after the novelty wears off, there isn't much you can do with it. It does look cool though.

I was lucky at the time when the Pocket Chip came out because I lived in Oakland, CA at the time. I was a day-one pre-order so I messaged them asking if I could come to visit to pick up my order and to my surprise they agreed. They were very cool showing me around their offices and introducing me to everyone. It's such a shame of what became of Next Thing Co. So much potential and good will with the hacking community just wasted.

I actually managed to get a pocket chip, 4xchips, and the hdmi adapter before it first sold out or during the first restock wave can't remeber exactly

I only had a couple of CHIPs. Used one as a home DNS server for a while, and the other for playing wave recordings over the bedroom speakers. After both of them died, I went looking to buy some more and learned that Next Thing hadn't been sending anyone their orders. I pretty much forgot about it after that. Thanks for the vid, subbed!

I remember when these were first announced, and I thought they were totally awesome. I made a mental note to follow up on them to see if they went anywhere (I rarely impulse-buy, especially on Kickstarter). This is pretty much the first time I've heard anything about them since then. Honestly, it makes me feel a little it sad. The thing still looks super cool, even all these years later.

In 2017 I used my Pocket C.H.I.P. as a job application (tech journalist). Added a custom boot screen and loaded the menu with shortcuts to highlights from podcast I had made, a presentation video and my application - very fun project. Thanks for covering this little part of Kickstarter tech history.

Sorry to hear your experience was so negative. I did not have the same experience when I bought my PocketCHIP years ago. I remember getting it quick. Thought the keyswitches were too painful for prolonged typing so ended up selling it to a co-worker. Had no idea there were issues with the company.