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Too Little Too Late For the GoPro Drone?

For a brief period of time GoPro held the spotlight with its foldable drone equipped with camera stabilization and 4K video resolution, courtesy of the mounted Hero 5. The drone was unlike anything from the major drone manufacturers; for about a week.

Soon after the GoPro announcement, DJI demonstrated their even more compact, foldable, 4K enabled, video stabilized drone, which retails for $749. The GoPro Karma drone, which is bigger, heavier, and less compact, is expected to sell for a similar price, but without the necessary Hero 5 camera. The whole bundle including camera will be around $1099.

The surge in GoPro’s share price and the hype that GoPro’s CEO Nick Woodman created surrounding the drone was based off of its revolutionary design features. The revolutionary design features are the foldable quad arms, extremely small frame and great video quality. The DJI Mavic Pro has the same exact features, but in a much smaller package, which was supposed to be the main selling point for the GoPro drone. 

A point of differentiation for the GoPro drone is that the Hero 5 camera will detach and mount to a hand held stabilizer. Surely a unique feature, but is it worth the extra $350 that one would pay for the whole bundle? More importantly, is that extra feature enough for the consumer to switch from the already trusted DJI drone brand, giving up a more compact and better-designed drone, so that they can detach a camera and hold it on a stick. I do not think it’s enough.


The original release date for the GoPro Karma was nearly a year ago today. The failure of the company to execute on new products has again come back to haunt them. If the drone had met its release date with the same features, it truly would have been far ahead of anything on the market. Instead, GoPro has let the competition catch up and take the lead. The DJI Mavic Pro is going to be viewed as the better of the two options and it is unlikely that the GoPro Karma will provide the full boost to earnings that the market has anticipated.

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