GoPro Max 2 Bundle Repeats 3D TV's Fatal Mistake

GoPro is selling the Max 2, a 360-degree action camera, for $369 as part of a bundle that includes $100 worth of accessories—but this is structurally the same move GoPro made with the original Max in 2023, when it dropped the price from $500 to $299 in a bundled package designed to move units. That discount failed to change the fundamental problem.

The Max 1 never exceeded 5 percent of GoPro's revenue before the company shifted focus back to its conventional cameras. This pattern has a longer history in consumer electronics.

In the early 2010s, 3D television manufacturers faced an identical crisis. Prices fell, bundles appeared, retailers ran aggressive promotions—and Samsung and LG promised that 3D would transform home entertainment, that the technology was inevitable, that adoption was merely a matter of removing the friction of cost. By 2017, 3D televisions had vanished from the market entirely, even though the technology was sound.

Both 360-degree cameras and 3D televisions solved a problem that audiences did not experience as a problem. 3D televisions required viewers to wear glasses to watch content that existed in limited supply and for which glasses were an annoyance. A 360-degree camera captures everything. Sounds comprehensive until you edit it down—and a creator shooting immersive footage typically converts it to flat video in post-production. The workflow cost—learning new software, managing unwieldy file sizes, managing the conversion—exceeds the creative value the final flat product delivers. Novelty fades.

They needed a reason to accept the friction, and discounting the hardware did not address it.

What changed between 3D television's death and now is not the underlying mechanism but the creator's relationship to workflow friction. The original Max 1 buyers discovered this themselves. They did not need GoPro to drop the price further. They needed a reason to accept the friction, and discounting the hardware did not address it. The Max 2 bundle will follow the same ceiling because bundles discount objects, not the work of using them.

Watch whether GoPro releases software that converts 360 footage to flat video automatically. That would be the variable that changes the game, because it would finally remove the thing that actually matters.