Kickstarter Isn’t A Store, But These People Still Want Their iPods

Earlier this year, Kickstarter made some changes to the way they deal with campaigns to find new types of hardware. Most importantly, the product has to actually exist. But what happens when the Kickstarted project is obsolete before it even ships?

That’s what happened to the Syre, one of the many smartwatch-ish projects launched on Kickstarter. It wasn’t the first product that was a wrist strap that holds an iPod Nano like a watch, but it did feature a neat innovation: a super-small Bluetooth dongle so you can run around with wireless headphones.

Higher-priced backer packages included items like an iPod Nano and Bluetooth headphones for people who didn’t already own them. Great idea! Some backers even chose the “retail package” for resellers (now banned on Kickstarter) that cost them a $900 pledge.

The Syre already exist in prototype form, or at least people in its Kickstarter video were exercising with things that looked a lot like the product. The creator posted photos of himself visiting the production line in China. He posted photos of what were allegedly the iPods that backers would receive. But the watch bands…didn’t ship. Nothing shipped.

The product’s backers are now understandably irate.

More than a year later, backers are mad and they’d at least like the iPods they paid for, if they can’t have their money back. The problem? Since the project launched, Apple came out with a new iPod Nano that made the Syre unnecessary. It now includes Bluetooth.

PREVIOUSLY:

If A Project Funded By Online Backers Never Takes Off, Should Everyone Get A Refund?

via Consumerist http://consumerist.com/2013/12/11/kickstarter-isnt-a-store-but-these-people-still-want-their-ipods/