Last year we told you about the Solarin, a privacy-oriented Android smartphone with a hefty $14,000 price tag (or more than $16,000 with taxes), wondering whether a market for it even exists. If we’re judging by the recent troubles of its maker, Sirin Labs, it appears there doesn’t, as the company has reportedly laid off a third of its staff, and is looking to pivot in a new direction going forward.
The Solarin wasn’t purely a victim of its own price, mind you – at the time of its release, it was equipped with the already obsolete Snapdragon 810, ran Android 5.1 Lollipop late into the Marshmallow era, and had a few other hardware problems unfitting of such a high-priced device.
