I don't disagree with assertion about Apple and similar companies but they end up selling you a physical hardware product.
Bufferbox offered a service and didn't sell you a product therefore I don't think they were "hardware" company. The hardware was means to an end.
I don't think it lessens what they did. It was a good service.
Walmart has a large IT infrastructure, with sys admins and in-house developers. They also manage a lot of buildings, and warehouses. I wouldn't consider them an IT company, a property management company, or a logistics company.
This is a tough call but Walmart's IT services is a core technology they own but its not customer facing at all. Bufferbox on the other hand had this customer facing hardware. In fact that hardware was a core component of their user experience. They could royally muck it up. They didn't. Kudos to them.
Maybe not their IT service, but their logistics and building operations certainly are.
I agree with your points regarding BufferBox, but I wouldn't say they are a hardware company producing a hardware product that you can sell to a customer. They were in an entirely different space, with very different set of challenges.
The YC post concerned companies that sell hardware to end users. Further, the initial post in this chain was someone asking if YC has had other hardware companies beyond Pebble. I don't think BufferBox is in that category.
I think there is a large difference. It requires a different skillset to manufacture 1000 of something that consumers will buy vs manufacturing customer touch points that are owned, and serviced by the company.
Your manufacturing pipeline, volumes, service issues are all very different. So as great as BufferBox was I don't think they were a hardware company and certainly not for the purposes of this thread. I am not discounting their abilities or what they made but based on my experience they are apples and oranges.
Most of the problems kickstarter companies run into are unique supply chain, and manufacturing issues that BufferBox wouldn't have had to deal with.
Additionally, a big part of what BufferBox offered would have been in their app, and website. A locker that you can remotely lock and unlock is not difficult from an electronics point of view and had been around before.
So would you consider SpaceX to be a service company and not hardware? They build rockets to deliver stuff for customers. I think defining whether a company is a HW company is too narrow. If you need to build HW to build a business of serving customers, or need to build HW to sell to customers, you need to build hardware in either case.
Bufferbox offered a service and didn't sell you a product therefore I don't think they were "hardware" company. The hardware was means to an end.
I don't think it lessens what they did. It was a good service.
Walmart has a large IT infrastructure, with sys admins and in-house developers. They also manage a lot of buildings, and warehouses. I wouldn't consider them an IT company, a property management company, or a logistics company.