designing hardware you hand down

consumer electronics has an expected lifespan, and it's embarrassing. two years, maybe three, then the battery swells or the port loosens or the app that unlocks it goes away. the industry calls this a business model. we call it a design failure.

an instrument is different from a gadget in one respect: someone will depend on it. the person carrying a night vision device up a hill at 2am is not a "user journey" — they're cold, it's dark, and the equipment either works or it doesn't. designing for that person changes every decision upstream.

so: cnc aluminum where plastic would flex. batteries that can be replaced, not mourned. no feature that dies when a server does — every product we ship works at full capability with zero signal and zero subscription. seals rated for the weather the product will actually meet, not the weather in the renders.

the pinhole pro lenses we shipped in 2016 still work. they will work in 2066, because there is nothing in them that can stop working. that's the bar. the electronics are harder, but the bar doesn't move: build the thing your customer's kid will argue about inheriting.