Last fall when I was making the plunge into full time vaporizing the three names that were recommended to me most were the Grasshopper, the Milaana, and the Dynavap.
I made the wise choice to invest some time reading through the threads on each device here and made my decisions based on what I knew to be true about me and balanced that against user experiences on each thread. So I have a couple of vapcaps and a Milaana that are my daily drivers. Never pulled the trigger on the GH.
Watching these threads has also been a real education for me as a small business owner in the 21st century. On one hand you have Dynavap, and in a bit lesser way Milaana, that have seemingly done everything right: great product, great customer service, and they listen to their customer base and respond to them. They create places for them to engage with their customer base, and base new versions and new products based on customer input.
On the other hand you have GH and Hopper Labs taking the duck and run approach which has never worked out well in any age, but is near suicidal in the information age. It would appear that when it works the GH is one of the very best products around. HL would have been so much wiser to stop production, figure out a real fix, and then re-release a product they had confidence in.
The Ghost MV1 seems to just now be recovering some ground after walking down a similar path with a product released before it was truly ready. Roll-outs matter. There's a reason some the well-respected brands have months of beta testers field testing their units before release. Making one great vape is hard enough, making sure a run of 500-1,000 units is reliable is a different universe.
I believe that in the very near future both the Dynavap and GH may be case studies in colleges around the country. One will be how to do it and the other will likely be a cautionary tale.
Whilst you make good points, and probably made the better product decision for yourself.
Personally I focus on the hardware, and not the business. The business is just the structure that offers the product.
The Dynavap is turned metal. The Milaana is an unregulated direct drive electric device powered by an off-shelf 18650, large components, wooden enclosure and their awesome turbulator heater.
The GH is all custom with brand new production tech, but keyly it's a regulated device using PWM to communicate with itself. It has over 100 parts, which has grown from 67 to 80 to now 100+.
There's simply a lot that can go wrong with it, it's insanely hard to mass produce the things. Especially when compared with much more basic designs.
HLs customer response has been decent enough, beyond decent for me personally, they're just not being clear with the fine details of what they're doing. Which is fair, because apparently it's proprietary, and these kind of procedures are complex and prone to time blow-outs. The current events are In fact what you've recommended them, to halt in-house production to try and get the 100+ parts working together better. They're happy with their product, I'm happy with it too. It just needs better QC and QA, which they've slowly been adding, and things have slowly gotten much better. More time is needed, but it's worth the wait for the state of the art product. Business tactics are solely an economic limitation, and all things considered they've done well to keep at it. Their so called blunders have been an atrempt to maintain that too, what people are titling as lies are merely overly optimistic estimates. Beyond that, what they deliver is pretty cool and a good time to own.
Apparently shipping starts the end of this week, which seems like less of an estimate and about due time at this point.
In terms of company comparison that's actually relative, there was one other crowd funded vape that made similar leeway with their campaign. I thought they'd died, but their latest update seems like they're where HL were in 2014..
Though it was from Dec 17 and the final word was expect an epic update Jan 17, which didn't happen. Quite similar.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/loto-lux-1st-smart-vaporizer-powered-by-induction#/updates/all
Humble beginnings are a big limitation, and maybe RBT and Dynavap did well to focus on simplicity considering.
The MV1 did not have humble beginnings, and their blunders are kind of slack because of that. Not to mention it's design is far from ideal. The GH is quite ideal as an ultra portable powerhouse. So far it's in a league of its own, still, after a few years of that being the most desirable vape product.
No one has really managed anything that similar.
..emphasis on start.
and I guess I learned to get along with that.
it'll be nice to have such a portable pen. Other than that, I'm well set for getting high as balls. I'd imagine anyone could be, so all the complaints about an unreliable mid-priced vape are kind of petty. I get the frustration over expectations vs. reality, but I get irrate over other real things and find it easy to deal with a little vape pen. But I still want the vape pen because it ticks boxes. Perhaps your check list isn't what this device was aimed at, because for me every portable vape is shitty in some major way. At least with the hopper it's always been rectified at minimal cost, the design and dynamic is what I choose over everything else. When that's the case, it's pretty easy to seem like a zealot, because there is literally nothing else to get excited about and won't be for a longer while than what HL have mustered.
![:\](/i/s/hmm.gif "Hmm :\")