Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring (formerly DoorBot), recounts discovering a critical hardware limitation on Christmas Eve Eve 2013 after shipping thousands of malfunctioning units to customers.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.4s
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“So it turned out, and we learned this on Christmas Eve Eve, that you can't rewrite the software on this chip. It just doesn't, like, the chip only takes it once at the factory, and then it never allows it to be rewritten again.”
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