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, angrier. The Pebble was a smartwatch that didn’t want to be a phone, which in hindsight was the most radical thing about it. E-paper screen you could read in direct sun. Real buttons. A battery that went a week between charges. A full week, seven days, while everyone else’s watch tapped out before lunch. It did a few things and it did them without once asking me for a cable.

It knew what it was, which is rarer than it sounds. It was the most-funded thing on Kickstarter when it launched in 2012, back when a watch that showed your texts felt like witchcraft. Mine was a Pebble Time, the color one. It showed the time. It buzzed when something mattered. It ran whatever dumb watchface I picked and then, mercifully, it left me alone. That was the entire pitch, and it was plenty. 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 it needed to breathe went quiet by 2018. A volunteer crew called Rebble kept a version of it wheezing along for the diehards, and reader, I was a diehard. The original went in a drawer eventually, the way these things do. Then I bought a refurbished one anyway, because apparently the drawer wasn’t going to be the end of it. That’s the kind of gone I was about this watch.

What I wear now is a round Samsung watch, because round is mostly what’s left, and that’s the other quiet crime here: the square watch is dead. Everyone chased the look of a real analog watch and abandoned the little rectangle, the one shape that actually fits a screen and a line of text. My Samsung needs a charger by dinner and would love to be my phone. It pings. It glows. It tracks. It nags. Somewhere in all of that the thing I wanted went missing, which was a watch that was mine, shaped the way I wanted, that otherwise left me alone.

And then it came back, and here’s the genuinely humiliating part: I found that out halfway through writing this. I was deep in the rant, eulogizing everything I’d lost, and I went to check one date and the internet informed me that the watch I was mourning is not only alive but taking pre-orders. Google owns Fitbit now, and last year it open-sourced Pebble’s software; Eric Migicovsky, the man who built the original, started a new company and shipped new ones, the Pebble 2 Duo and the Pebble Time 2. The thing I buried has a sequel. I made a noise I’m not proud of.

Reader, I pre-ordered it. The Time 2, obviously, the direct descendant of the one I’ve spent this whole post grieving. And I’m still furious, to be clear. None of the last nine years was necessary. Someone bought a small good thing and switched it off, and a lot of us wore refurbs and community firmware for years 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 find out what a Pebble looks like in 2026. Still furious about the years. Genuinely excited for the box on my doorstep. Both, as a treat.