Mr Goodenough—"Mr. Cha Buduo"—is a figure from Chinese satire now famous for haunting the supply chain in southeast Asia. Alas, the factory making the Playdate Stereo Dock put him in charge and the results were not in fact good enough.
What happened? Well, our first regret was assuming that our factory at that time — a factory that made lots of Bluetooth speakers — could easily design the electronics for us, saving us lots of time and money. That went pretty well at first. But they, in turn, outsourced the Bluetooth software and chipset to another company in another country.
As a result, the Stereo Dock would crash often — rapidly adjusting the volume would do it. The Bluetooth pairing/unpairing experience was rough. And when we played music, it just didn't sound very good. The back-and-forth between three companies trying to fix bugs became a huge challenge. And worst of all: the cost of the Stereo Dock kept getting higher and higher.
Good on them for not pushing it out anyway—they even bought the Bluetooth chipset source code in hopes of writing the problems out down to the bare metal. Even without a speaker dock, the Playdate is a fantastic 1-bit portable game console and if you order one now you'll get it for Christmas.
