I had one a awhile back. The videos looked great but battery life was a joke. I remember behind baffled by how un-user friendly it was. For a $400 dollar item it’s felt oddly outdated when it was new. I just preferred using my phone.
Between DJI Action 6 and Insta360 X5 on the high end, and the cheap knockoffs on the low end, GoPro is in a big pinch. Unless they pull a totally new rabbit out of the hat.
Everyone is talking about how bad gopros are? My 11 has been fine. Only overheated once on a hot day. My only other complaint is that occasionally the stabilisation doesn’t work.
Their cloud storage is completely shit though, didn’t use it even when I had it for free.
That sounds pretty bad, since you can get a better camera cheaper
Again? This is a recurring event with gopro.
Nice to see that at least in the hardware market, competition still works. It is normal for companies who don’t offer competitive value for the money to just fail. This is how market economies are meant to work.
Didn’t GoPro start requiring online activation of their cameras a while back? Like customers couldn’t use it out of the box until they installed the smartphone app and activated it?
Edit: Looks like GoPro did try doing it by using dark patterns first and then getting more aggressive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gopro/comments/16n6xyr/so_you_need_the_gopro_quik_app_to_activate_the/
And the second highest comment is “wHY arE YoU bUyINg nEW TeCH wItH aN OlD pHOnEeeee?” (Because OP’s complaint is about how they don’t have a phone capable of running the app rather than just a “why the fuck does this need an app?”)
Though there’s a non-zero chance those replies are made by someone with a vested interest. It’s annoying how both those and people who have just drunk the koolaid are pretty much impossible to tell apart.
Hah, and here I was thinking of getting a GoPro as a dash cam/rear cam. Sucks to suck GoPro lost another customer.
A lot of my GoPros already have an overheating problem and battery issues(ballooning). Having them in direct sunlight on the dash or leaving them in the car on a summer day would make that worse. While the picture quality is nice I think they’d make terrible dash cams for day to day constant use.
Most(not all) dedicated dash cams use capacitors and not batteries due to the extreme cold/heat they’re subjected to. The capacitor should provide enough power to gracefully shutdown if you have the cam wired to an auxiliary power wire(turns off with ignition).
Insta360 does the same. I downloaded the app, registered the camera, and deleted the app. On my kid’s tablet; my phone is too old for the app. If GoPro only requires such a rudimentary registration, it’s a matter of 5 extra minutes. Now, if they require the app for transferring videos, that’s a whole different problem…
GoPro hasn’t really done anything for the past 5 years at least. Totally on them.
What should they be doing? They are an action camera company, they make action cameras. Do you think they needed to branch out to do energy drinks and lunchables or whatever?
If they have a solid product and do not want to make “energy drinks and lunchables”, the best financial move would be to optimize it. Find ways to make it smaller, lighter, and most importantly, reduce costs.
But if I were in charge, I’d seriously think about trying to eat DJI’s drone lunch now that there are FAA rules around foreign drone companies. GoPro is headquartered in San Mateo. Drone design is well known enough that there aren’t any hard problems in the way of introducing a decent DJI mini replacement. There may be patents or other non-technical stuff in the way though. But if they could get in on that, it could be immensely lucrative, especially if they can get government contracts.
Mini drone that follows/records the user and wide angle panoramas of the surrounding area at the same time.
Get to it, gopro. Be the change you wish to see.
They’re still feeling the burn from when they tried entering the drone space. The GoPro Karma almost bankrupted them on its own, and marked the end of their perception as a quality brand. It was a disaster they never recovered financially or reputationally.
The concept was great. The gimbal and camera could actually be removed from the drone to use independently. People were excited for their entry into the space, and they built a TON of the drones.
But they were also missing features. They didn’t have an API for third-party integration and flight automation like DJI. They had no collision avoidance features, which had started to become standard in the market by the time the entered. Their battery life was pretty bad.
Oh - and upon release the drones constantly lost connection to GPS and would suddenly shut off mid-flight and fall out of the sky. The FAA actually advised all users to ground them.
They eventually recalled all of the Karma drones over safety concerns, took a huge stock hit, and went through a round of layoffs.
Frankly, that second idea seems really consistent with whatever residual brand value they have.
Unfortunately, they got burned by doing it poorly around 2017 and seem to have been scared off of playing in that space ever.
The first is probably already done but maybe not enough to keep the niche afloat. If the GoPro’s need replacement, then they won’t have a reputation for durability. If they keep going, then why replace your old one when it already does 4k 60fps? Problem is either they need replacement and erode brand strength, or are durable and can’t compete with already owned product. That path probably most likely ends with selling themselves to some other company that will probably slap the name on random Chinese cameras.
They could try and make a camera that doesn’t overheat and shut down.
They doubled down hard on editing via the phone app with cloud storage via subscription. I have zero desire to edit video on my phone. Their desktop apps are frankly horrendous. They have cameras that capture footage at higher than 4K but their phone app only allowed export at 4K at least on an iPhone. This seemed to be a limit on the h265 libraries on the iPhone so it might be different on Android.
If you wanted to export their 5.6K 360 footage on a desktop from a GoPro Max you couldn’t do that in any sane way. You had to export it in their cine* whatever format and an hour of footage was over 400GB. This also used your graphics card to accelerate it. You could export the h265 files in 4K if memory serves which was obviously smaller and faster but you dropped the resolution as a trade off.
YouTube in a desktop browser supports 360 footage in 5K+ resolutions. I believe the mobile app is still 4K only.
Their camera tech is stagnating. I had plenty of gopros and it’s just almost the same product every year now, they don’t even bother updating the sensor or innovating and look at how DJI and Insta360 is cleaning them out because of it.
make action cameras that people want to buy?
instead of pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs which bring no benefit to the consumer?
pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs
Works for smartphone manufactuters though
the smartphone space has way more competition and their market is literally everyone on the planet. there are 6 billion smart phone buyers.
the vast vast majority of whom, do not need the power in most phones. there is no demand for improving phones, they have peaked. Phones are a commodity at this point, like your average desktop/laptop.
make action cameras that people want to buy?
instead of pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs which bring no benefit to the consumer?
They might try making cameras that don’t overheat and shut down after 10 minutes…
Precisely. They used to make better products than they do now.
The problems with their products got worse generation on generation. Their older products were more reliable.
And let’s not forget- don’t listen to customers.
Do customers want a ‘Hero 47’ camera with a new one every year? Nope.
Do customers want to be pushed into a paid cloud video storage and editing system that can’t handle the camera’s full resolution? Nope.
Do customers want a reliable camera that has good battery life, doesn’t overheat or crash, and generally works as advertised? YES THEY DO!So what should we do? Let’s release a new camera every year, with the same overheating and firmware bugs, and push people into a phone based video platform.
Now we don’t understand why Insta is doing so well…
Same as it ever was. Line must go up.
1- make good product, make money
2 - make product worse/charge for standard features
3 - cripple existing products, force people to buy new version
They needed to maintain value and performance. Their value sunk as cheaper competitors closed the gap. And their performance sunk because they were gatekeeping function behind required apps. This is 100% on them. What should they have done? They should have made the product actually better for the user, or lowered prices to expand their sales volume. I would buy one if they cut prices dramatically.
My old Hero 7 is going strong. Yes, there might be cheaper options now, but they were strong options at some point at least.
The paradox of a good company and product.
Make a good product with good ownership terms by the customer, and why would there be repeat business?
How did they fuck it up that bad. All thry need to do is keep selling an ok camera
I disagree there, the market of people who record their outdoors activities was always limited and quickly got boring. Eventually, competitors caught up and many of them focused on products in better form factors for non-extreme sports that were better for a wider range of people. There is a reason why the likes of DJI and Insta360 are the goto products for those that don’t utilize larger cameras.
Yeah I got my hero 7 many years ago and have sat on it. Does the job. If I were to upgrade I’d go the i360 route.
They stopped selling an OK camera and started selling cameras that overheat in the shade with dark patterns to try and force you into using their mobile app for video processing.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filing comes after GoPro has already shared that it is considering a potential sale, news that followed a a $93.5 million net loss for 2025 and $432.3 million in 2024.
Psst. Your management is atrocious.
I’m on my second gopro (a hero 10). It will overheat in the shade outside in summer. The battery also crapped out quite early, though they did find another one to send me (I bought it new from them directly, but after newer models released). I don’t see myself buying another of their cameras.
They all overheat.
Damn, is everything cheap ewaste? Does anyone think about their global impact beyond money?
Yes but not companies like GoPro. Or really any public company.
They made a fantastic product and slowly, painfully, failed to innovate away from it.
360 cams are eating our lunch: makes a margina 360 cam
gimbal cameras are eating our lunch: software gimbal
gimbal cameras are STILL eating our lunch: huge hardware gimbal.
They should have gone after the dashcam market, made one that could handle day/night really well for a good price.
they did not learn from kodiak camera.
Clearance GoPros orrrr
Practically a penny stock now at less than a dollar
