Is this the end of the once-mighty GoPro?

I’ve owned a lot of Gopro cameras, having done video capture for a variety of motorsports, and they just got too expensive for what you get.

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.

Many years ago had my first Gopro camera that seriously overheated, sent it for repairs, they said there was nothing wrong with it. It literally turned too hot to handle after taking a few clips and wouldn't work. I think there was some serious hardware issue that caused it to then drain the whole battery.

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.

I had a GoPro Hero 7 and 8. In the -10c snow they battery wouldn't even last for 5 minutes. It's a bad product and just like with cars and solar the Chinese are ruthlessly out-engineering the west.

It’s the classic situation. China can outcompete all this stuff. It doesn’t really matter. Roomba, GoPro, they’re all going to be crushed by Chinese manufacturers. You just can’t get the margins to work anywhere else and if you do the R&D you’re a sucker.

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

Extremely similar to iRobot (Roomba). They both practically genericized themselves by inventing and dominating the product category, then just couldn't keep up with the competition. GoPro does feel more self inflicted though. Their drone was a failure, and they burnt a lot of money trying to do some kind of pivot to being a media company.

As a cyclist (and former racer), I still want to know how to capture videos with telemetry overlays (speed, power, HR, etc) from my head unit in a straightforward way. NorCal Cycling's videos - https://www.youtube.com/@NorCalCycling - are an excellent demonstration of this at work.

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.

I'm just surprised that an American brand making electronics lasted this long. Even Japanese companies are giving up. No one can compete with China.

Apple somehow reigns supreme still. Anyone else?

When I was looking to buy an action camera last year, I was deciding between Insta360 and DJI, with many YouTubers suggesting outright against GoPro since they haven't kept up with image quality.

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.

I bought my first GoPro for a scuba diving trip in Mexico once. Was super excited, it was my first scuba diving experience too.

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.

Contrary to the popular opinion in the rest of the comments, I do like my GoPro (Hero 11). Good and robust hardware, a lot of thought into usability for professionals, many accessories, and hackable with official firmware from the company.

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.

we barely ever use our GoPro 8 BLACK. I decided to take it with me skiing and turned it on for a crazy ride down. When I got back I wanted to show my GF the footage and it just had frozen video, only playing sound.

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.

They missed the chance to make PC camera just before Covid or during it or now as another revenue stream. They have a hacky way to get it to work but they should have made one specifically for the PC and meeting settings.. Cisco and others make a killing in that space

I stopped buying go pros when I drove from the top of Mt Blue Sky to the base. Had the camera mounted on my dashboard, planned to make a cool time lapse down the mountain road.

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.

I loved the product early on, but they became the Adobe Creative Cloud of cameras. Play dumb subscription games win dumb prizes.

I remember using these on movie sets as crash cams - a cheap camera that could be mounted on something fast-moving so you could get cool action shots without risking the $100k primary camera. But the main selling point for this use-case is that they were cheap, and that’s a fight the Chinese companies will always win.

I've owned a bunch of gopros and I feel like they've always had the same kind of bugs. Random crashes, things not working anymore. It's really bad, so bad that I had plenty of videos that were missing sound, or just corruption in general.

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.

I slept on GoPro for a long time because, but then wanted to document some outdoor activities. I went with two Hero 5 units and as a photographer, I was shocked by how overhyped these devices seemed to be.

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.

These days you can buy mini cameras for a few bucks on AliExpress, so no wonder.

Gopro has been garbage for years now.

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.

didn't they moved actual hardware production elsewhere outside of US?

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

My guess is that action cameras are 20 % need (professionals, documentary crews etc) and 80 % fashion (people buying them and them using them for a few shots twice a year on the holiday), and the fashion component peak is over.

IMO the image quality on GoPro is still the best. I don't understand why people say it's horrible. For flat video it outperforms Insta360 and definitely DJI.

My only gripe with GoPros is lack of external mic like dji ecosystem.

Yes.

There’s a really good video out there about how GoPro fumbled their position:

https://youtu.be/frrhSJF__Mc

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

the end of GoPro happened with the first DJI Action

> While GoPro action cameras are built to withstand shock, the brand itself is looking distinctly shaky right now. Latest reports[1] are that founder Nicholas Woodman is propping the company up by extending it a loan of his own money to the tune of $20 million, at an annual interest rate of 6.5%, while a buyer is desperately sought. It’s believed GoPro may not survive the year without a new owner or fresh injection of cash, with Woodman’s intervention acting as a stopgap rather than bail-out per se.

Only reason I'd choose them over Insta360 for example is that weird manual phone app permissions to activate the camera Insta does. I don't know if go pro doesn't do that, haven't bought a modern go pro in a bit.

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.

Red Bull really ran the marketing playbook that GoPro should have done: become known for athletes doing extreme things. Instead they stayed too technical and product-based and didn't build a brand beyond "we make action cameras."

It's a testament to how broken modern business practices are that GoPro can sell 1.2 Million cameras per year and still go out of business.

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.

I had no ifea they were struggling. Tldr; their competitor Insta360 is battling them, and they have YoY revenue drop.

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

no one is mentioning DJI? they are also crushing go pro with DJI Osmo lineup, action or nano.

What does one buy if they want a 1080p60 action cam with stabilisation that doesn't overheat, has good battery life and acceptable low light performance (think rainy day in the woods)?

Ah damn I just bought their new Mission One a few weeks ago (upgrading from a Hero 10). Already quite angry though since it seems the batteries are basically the same shape for both, except the connector is in a different location, so the 3 existing batteries I have for the Hero 10 are not compatible, which is a shitty move from GoPro. Well I guess either way I won’t be buying gopros anymore in the future.

They could spur a lot of innovation by open sourcing their firmware or introducing plugins. They don't really have a channel to take asks like "ring buffer style recording" but I would do it myself.

This has been on the cards for about a decade. I guess Insta360's YouTube advertising barrage worked.

Betteridge enters the chat. GoPro's market is changing: strong competitors now make solid, low cost alternatives. GoPro is moving deep into professional markets where margins are high, and leveraging their position as a US company whose products can be utilized by sensitive customers.

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

I don't see a use case for these cameras. Phone takes amazing pictures and videos and is always on hand and if I need something more polished, I just get DSLR. Sure DSLR is more expensive, but if I want to do something well, I'd rather go all in.

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