This is not intended to sound like an excuse. However times have changed.
You may not intend this to sound like an excuse, but that is exactly what it is. To be frank with you, whether you are a paid or unpaid employee of the Mobius company, the simple fact is that you are their primary and sole representative here on the forum, providing product updates and support, video samples, technical data and
promotions and sales links to their latest products. Your reply comes across exactly how I might expect a loyal representative of a business to defend their company.
I'm aware that Mobius are facing hardware supply issues and recurring Covid restrictions and lockdowns in China. The pace of development also feels slower at other companies too.
These rationalizations you put forth in reply to my post have literally nothing whatsoever to do with
what I actually said.
What I actually
said was specifically related to the frequency of camera
firmware development we all enjoyed and benefited from during the development of the Mobius 1.
remember the days when we saw regular and ongoing firmware updates with bug fixes, improvements and new features for the M1? Times have changed at Mobius, haven't they?
Instead of speaking to my comment about firmware development you are moving the goalposts and changing to subject. Supply chain issues and Covid lockdowns having nothing to do with firmware development and I certainly never mentioned anything about hardware, manufacturing or other products. I was speaking specifically about the paucity of firmware updates since the "old days", which is something that can be created by engineers and distributed remotely despite the pandemic.
Bringing on all sorts of extraneous factors like the #32 key chain camera, the ongoing (and apparently flawed) development of the MM4K capacitor version or a couple of updates to the MM4K completely ignores my point about the fact that (as you point out), the firmware for the Maxi 2.7K camera has been abandoned with V2.40, despite the reality that the camera has serious problems such as freezing up on a regular basis and having the propensity to brick itself completely during the firmware update process if you have a capacitor installed. My God, they haven't even been willing to publicly address these issues, much less provide any fixes, yet they continue to market this flawed camera.
I'm aware that Mobius are facing hardware supply issues and recurring Covid restrictions and lockdowns in China. The pace of development also feels slower at other companies too.
I think I've seen 2 or 3 FW updates for the MM4K in 2022, plus 2 or 3 updates of mSetup, the release of the #32 camera, and ongoing development of the MM4K capacitor version. For any RC or action video users out there, I believe the latest MM4K FW (coming soon) supports exporting the onboard gyro data for post-processing in Gyroflow, which is something I've not experimented with yet.
None of us can fail to be impressed with the way Mobius went about developing and refining the original Mobius 1, especially the almost obsessive devotion put into building firmware updates that squeezed every last drop of performance and reliability out of the hardware. The fact that the M1 is still as viable as it is and that it is still on the market after nearly ten years is a testament to that. This product is what put the company on the map and created the enormous fan base it has.
But things went downhill from there, long before Covid or supply chain issues. The long awaited and overdue Mobius 2 finally arrived in the Fall of 2016 and was such a disaster out of the starting gate that it had to be withdrawn from the market. When it was finally sold again there began a long slog of sparse and deficient firmware updates and an increasing number of M2 buyer complaints, especially about image quality going into 2017 that it eventually led to the product being discontinued.
Finally, after another very long waiting period we at long last we got the much anticipated Mobius Maxi which at first seemed to be the worthy Mobius 1replacement we were all waiting for, but it too proved to be highly problematic, especially with many of us having the camera freeze up unexpectedly and repeatedly.
Initially and for a long time after, we were all hoping for a feature set that matched the original Mobius as far as exposure controls were concerned and we finally got them. But the camera continues to be problematic and no fixes have ever been offered. In the meantime the camera is in need of some imaging quality tweaks and many of us expected that Mobius would continue its tradition of refining the camera, fixing bugs and maybe adding a feature or two if warranted, but no. They've abandoned development of the Maxi, moved on to the next project, the MM4K, which so far is also behind the 8 ball and not surprisingly, not selling well from the looks of things. I would have bought one long ago but without a viable super-cap it's a no go for me and the wait has been far to long at this point.
