It’s time to come clean. I am partially responsible for the death of Brydge. No, nowhere near as much as mismanagement and Apple themselves, but I am partially responsible. I never did pull the trigger on one of their fancy keyboards.
No, not for Apple products. Making the iPad closer to a computer than even Apple’s first-party solution may have been their bread, their butter, and their downfall; but they did things for other manufacturers. The important one for this conversation being Microsoft.
The biggest problem with the Microsoft Surface Pro is that it runs Windows. The biggest advantage that it has over its competitors is…that it runs windows. In the current hegemony, where tablet OS’s give you all the ease of use in the world at the expense of any user wanting to do something a little more advanced than doomscrolling having to jump through hoops to achieve it. I’m on my second surface pro now. I love the form factor. It’s not especially powerful but doesn’t need to be, and it doesn’t complain if I want to install something outside of the Microsoft store or, god forbid, access the filesystem.
Unfortunately, the concept kinda falls apart when you want to make your super cool tablet into something more. The integrated stand may allow you to have your computer at any angle you want, but you need to have much more space behind it than on a regular laptop for the more vertical angles. It’s a shame, the keyboard cover is an excellent keyboard, even if the trackpad finds a way to disappoint and the Alcantara finish eventually splits revealing the plastic backing underneath.
Enter the Brydge 12.3. Designed to make your Surface Pro the laptop in the form factor that Microsoft ignored when they went to make their own. Here is a removable keyboard to at least make you consider replacing that x240 with something just as portable and rather easier on the eyes. Admittedly at $150 it was a bit dear, but not when you remember the Surface type cover is $90. And that one is for when you want a tablet that can occasionally be used as a laptop rather than the other way around.
It was fantastic.
It was excellent.
It was never going to be enough to sustain a company.
There’s a reason everyone chases the Apple accessory market. They just make the one thing (more or less) and you can aim for their products knowing that they’ll sell well and customers are much more likely to spend some more cash on accessories. The gamble works well for most companies, but not for Brydge. As more of the situation is revealed, I expect that we’ll feel more and more sorry for the people stuck in order limbo and random employees rather than by anyone doing management or anyone at Apple. People sitting on leftover stock may be justified in giving it a bit of a price bump as that gravy train is not coming back. And then there’s me, whose surface is aging and is waiting for apple to be dragged kicking and screaming into allowing things like web browsers that don’t run through WebKit or the ability to edit the hosts file without having to just run all of your connections through a VPN.
So that’ll be a third surface in a year or so then…
