TRIMUI is Shooting Themselves in the Foot with Their Pro U Pricing

Suddenly, TRIMUI is emailing retailers and partners to jack up the price of the newly-revealed Brick Hammer Pro U. After revealing the device just two weeks ago (and shocking everyone with its sudden upgrade to the Snapdragon G2 Gen 1 chipset), the pre-order price on several third-party retailers started to be revealed as around $159.99 USD, or $135.99 with a discount code. Now, TRIMUI is asking for more. Way more.

Suddenly, the price has jumped to $249.99 USD, as mandated by TRIMUI, “under penalty of sanctions” (as per the founder of GoGameGeek, one of those third-party retailers mentioned) due to what is claimed to be the rising cost of metals and core components (read: memory). Supposedly the early pricing was based on the prototype stage, but it seems very difficult to believe that TRIMUI wouldn’t have hammered (ha) out pricing before revealing the device to the world and putting it up on their own site. They are offering a ‘special’ price of $212.49 USD to certain retailers that have been affected, but even that isn’t opening my ears to TRIMUI’s plight very well.

Take for example the Retroid Pocket Classic, which had a G1 Gen 2 (not to be confused with the Pro U’s G2 Gen 1). Despite the difference, these chips are comparable in some aspects. Even if you consider the G2 to be twice as expensive as the G1, it makes no sense that the device itself should finish more than double the $99 MSRP of the most comparable option, which itself had a higher-quality OLED panel, among other things.

I’d point the blame chiefly toward the abysmal state of the chip market in general, due to data centers led by Nvidia dictator Jensen Huang and the second coming of Hitler, Sam Altman of OpenAI. The past two years have proven that there’s a war on consumer electronics underway, and these evil cretins aren’t going to be happy until you have no ability of your own to purchase compute power. These retro handhelds are only a byproduct of this war.

GoGameGeek’s response to a buyer who pre-ordered

Retailers are doing their best to make this right, it seems, with bundled packages and apologies via these emails. But if you ask me, that’s not going to be enough to make the device itself have even a fraction of the launch that was originally promised.

How is TRIMUI going to respond, given that they supposedly can’t offer the device for any cheaper? We were all expecting a reasonable $150 for this device, but a 60% markup is just choking, considering the alternatives currently available on the market.

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