GoPro Karma

» see gopro.com/karma as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the consumer drone segment in '16 had one default brand and that brand was DJI. i had been watching the flight-control and image-stabilization side of small UAVs out of professional interest by then, and the phantom 4 was already the reference machine. gopro shipping its own drone was the surprise of the year, the same kind of move kodak might have made in '99. on paper karma had a folding form factor a year before everyone else and a detachable gimbal you could mount as a handheld for ground shots. on the test bench the flight controller was fine. in the air it sometimes stopped flying.

karma was announced september 19 '16 and went on sale october 23. base price $799, $999 with the new HERO5 black bundled. the carry case folded down to the size of a backpack lunchbox, which was novel. for two weeks the press response was warm. then the crashes started. on november 8 gopro issued a full recall on every karma it had sold up to that point, about 2,500 units, citing "loss of power during operation". the actual cause was the battery sliding out of its connector mid-flight, which cut the motors and dropped the drone. CEO nick woodman confirmed the root cause publicly in january '17.

shipments resumed february 1 '17 with a redesigned battery latch. karma was no longer the only foldable consumer drone on the market. DJI had shipped the mavic pro on september 27 '16 and was eating gopro's segment in real time. gopro reported drone sales were not enough to make the segment profitable. on january 7 '18 the company announced discontinuation and said it was leaving the drone market. roughly 200 engineering staff were laid off in the same week.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

karma was a three-axis-gimbaled foldable quadcopter built around a removable HERO5 camera unit. the smart move was modularity. you could pop the gimbal off the drone, snap it onto the handheld stabilizer in the box, and shoot ground footage with the same camera and the same gimbal as the air footage. nobody else in the consumer segment was offering that. DJI's response to that idea was the osmo line, sold separately. gopro had it in the box.

~ the recall ~

the november '16 recall was the first full recall in the consumer drone segment of any size. gopro told customers to stop flying immediately, offered full refunds without requiring proof of purchase, and shipped a prepaid return label. the actual fault was small. the battery was held in place by a single plastic latch that could pop loose under vibration, and once it popped, the connector lost contact, and the motors went dead. the redesigned latch shipped in february '17 with the same battery and the same connector, just held in by a sturdier clamp. it worked. but two weeks of recall coverage in october-november '16 was enough to convince consumers that the karma was the unreliable option.

~ how it actually ended ~

january 7 '18, ahead of CES, gopro announced it was discontinuing karma and exiting the drone segment for good. the company said it would honor warranties through the remainder of the warranty period. the press release said the segment had become "extremely competitive" without naming DJI. nick woodman said gopro would focus on cameras. the karma was on amazon for clearance through summer '18. by '20 the units in the field stopped getting firmware updates, and an unrelated date-rollover bug in the world magnetic model january 1 2020 broke the compass calibration on remaining karmas overnight. gopro has not made another drone.

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