The Playdate Stereo Dock is (was?) a beautifully-designed desktop dock, Bluetooth speaker, and pen holder, the ultimate all-in-one accessory for your Playdate. And being so much simpler than the Playdate, we thought it would be easy. But somehow, along the way, making the Stereo Dock was almost more challenging than making the Playdate itself.

What happened? Well, our first regret was assuming that our factory at that time — a factory that made lots of Bluetooth speakers — could easily design the electronics for us, saving us lots of time and money. That went pretty well at first. But they, in turn, outsourced the Bluetooth software and chipset to another company in another country.

As a result, the Stereo Dock would crash often — rapidly adjusting the volume would do it. The Bluetooth pairing/unpairing experience was rough. And when we played music, it just didn’t sound very good. The back-and-forth between three companies trying to fix bugs became a huge challenge. And worst of all: the cost of the Stereo Dock kept getting higher and higher.

But oh, we tried! Everybody tried. We took over the audio part and hand-tuned the speaker EQ curves, eventually significantly improving the sound. We also managed to negotiate a buyout of the Bluetooth chipset source code, hoping we could take over development ourselves and improve the user experience, only to be greeted with some gnarly code (think #IFDEFs for every Bluetooth speaker ever made) and an obscure toolchain.

We kept pushing forward. We got a number of beautiful finished prototypes, in beautiful final packaging, that look incredible on our desks. But they weren’t very good to use. And if we’re going to ship a product, it has to be, at least, good.

Eventually we hit that painful line: we’re spending more to make this product than we are likely to ever make back from it.

And so, we hit pause.

We all deeply hope there’s a time when we can reboot this project, and bring the Playdate Stereo Dock to the finish line! But for now, we need to focus on Playdate itself, as our new factory comes online and production once again resumes, and getting more Playdate systems into the world.

If we pick this project back up again, you’ll be the first to know — we promise.

More than anything else, thank you for your interest in the Playdate Stereo Dock!