True love never dies (it just files for insolvency)

Fitbit bought Pebble in 2016, mostly for the parts, and quietly switched the whole thing off. It’s been nine years and I’m, if anything, deeper in mourning. The Pebble was a smartwatch that didn’t want to be a phone. E-paper you could read in direct sun, real buttons, a week of battery while everyone else tapped out before lunch. It did a few things without once asking me for a cable.

It knew what it was, which is rarer than it sounds. Most-funded thing on Kickstarter in 2012, when a watch that showed your texts felt like witchcraft. Mine was a Pebble Time. It buzzed when something mattered, ran whatever dumb watchface I picked, and otherwise left me alone. Nothing I’ve worn since has managed it once.

Then December 2016 happened, and I’m not over it. Pebble filed for insolvency, sold most of itself to Fitbit, and the servers went quiet by 2018. A volunteer crew called Rebble kept a version wheezing along, and reader, I was a diehard. The original went in a drawer, then I bought a refurbished one anyway.

What I wear now is a round Samsung, because round is mostly what’s left, and that’s the other quiet crime: the square watch is dead. Everyone chased the analog look and abandoned the one shape that fits a screen and a line of text. My Samsung needs a charger by dinner and would love to be my phone; somewhere in the pinging and glowing, the watch I actually wanted went missing.

And then it came back, and here’s the humiliating part: I learned that halfway through writing this. Deep in the rant, eulogizing everything I’d lost, I went to check one date and the internet informed me that the one that got away is very much alive.

Guess who found out it was taking pre-orders and spent $200 in the same breath. It’s me. Before I read who made it, before I finished the sentence I was in. The eulogy was still open in the next tab, half-written.

The Time 2, obviously, the direct descendant of the one I’ve spent this post grieving. Google owns Fitbit now and open-sourced Pebble’s software last year; Eric Migicovsky, who built the original, started a new company and shipped the Pebble 2 Duo and the Time 2. The thing I buried has a sequel.

None of the last nine years was necessary. Someone bought a small good thing, switched it off, and left a lot of us on refurbs and community firmware just to keep the shape on our wrists. But the man who built the first one is building this one, the software’s open now so nobody gets to quietly kill it again, and I get to see what a Pebble looks like in 2026. Sore about the years, excited for the box on my doorstep. Both, as a treat.