GoPro Hero5 is the iPhone 7 of the action camera world

Both are made in China, both are marketed by extremely white people, and both are overpriced status symbols unworthy of the price people pay for them.

I, of course, am saying this as an Indian. Both these items are far more affordable in first-world countries. In India, not only are GoPros sold at an inflated price, if you do happen to buy one and then break it, you’re fucked. No support, no warranty.

So then why again is my social media feed filled with people drooling over their keyboards about the new GoPro Hero5 and the Karma drone? It’s the exact same reason why random versions of sick looking superbikes get thousands of likes on Facebook.

False Hope.

The people who are all excited and shit about the Hero5 can be divided into the following categories.

1. Kids (75%): These are your average teenagers, hasn’t showered in a week, hasn’t studied in a month, hasn’t contributed to society in a decade. They are in essence just sheep in people’s clothing, ready to click that like button on anything that looks different, and/or already has too many likes on it, hoping to own these things someday, despite the fact that they can’t even afford a fucking haircut at that point in time.
2. Married fathers (24%): These poor sons of bitches feel good about looking at stuff online, imagining how their life would be with them, and then snapping back to reality when one of their kids vomits in their dinner plate. Their hope is that someday they’ll have enough time and money for themselves, and when they do, they’re gonna buy every goddamn shiny toy there is.
3. Professional videographers (1%): These are the people who actually have the skill, time, and money to use the GoPro the way it’s meant to be used. Most of them would rather use a DSLR as their primary camera, using the GoPro to get some of the action shots, and the drone to take it all one step further. They don’t hope, they do.

In case you haven’t read my review of the SJ5000X Elite, take a look at the first few paragraphs. GoPro and their marketing videos want you to believe that you can actually shoot this kind of footage, and maybe you can. However, their videos tell only one side of the story, which is actually less than 5% of the complete picture.

They want you to believe you can take crazy good shots of you riding your motorcycle, they don’t talk about the giant mosquito corpses you continuously have to peel off the lens to keep the footage clean. They want you to believe you can shoot yourself while backflipping through pristine white snow, they don’t talk about your lens fogging up every time you’re in the slightest bit of cold. They want you to believe YOU can make such incredible videos, even though they have an ARMY of people acting, shooting, and editing everything they produce.

Some of their claims in the video are simply dishonest, not unlike the ones repeatedly done by the Apple people. In their launch video, there’s a section of a guy riding a cycle downhill. It’s impossible that the footage could be so stable, even with GoPro’s new digital stabilization. There’s another section with motorcycles where they seem to imply that the camera is gyro stabilized, like the ones at the back of MotoGP bikes. It’s not.

Why am I telling you this? Because there are many of you out there dreaming of buying this thing, even though you aren’t a super-rich asshole for whom money has no value. Save yourself the trouble, spend that money on experiences. Go someplace, use the 2 super-ultra-mega-hyper resolution, 64 axis stabilized, unlimited storage, unlimited battery life cameras that are your eyes.

In the amount of money that’ll get me one of these new GoPros, I could probably travel for 3 months, maybe more.

Buying shiny stuff will not fill that void in your life, it’ll not make you feel better than that guy on Instagram with 15k followers. On the contrary, you’ll end up investing so much money, and the final videos that’ll come out of it will be so disgustingly crappy, you’ll want to kill yourself by slashing your throat with that 128 GB microSD memory card.

Don’t let a few smiling white girl cleavages pull you into a stupid delusion, don’t waste your life desperately trying to show the world how epic your life is, don’t believe anything just because it’s popular. Buying anything is the easy part, living with it is not.