I was at a birthday party at a neighbor’s house recently when I spotted what looked like a countdown clock of the Manhattan-bound Q train sitting on a table at the bottom of the host’s staircase. I wondered out loud to the fellow guests standing beside me whether it was accurate. They replied that, indeed, it was. Did they know what it was? They told me it was called Tidbyt, and that they both owned one. Intrigued by this neighborhood hive mind — and to keep up with the Joneses — I called one in to test.
The Tidbyt is what the company calls a “retro-style display” that can tell you when the next train (or bus) is coming — but also so much more, like the time and weather, naturally, but also the Knicks’ score, or how many days until Christmas, or the price of gas at Costco. Encased in a handsome, Tivoli-esque walnut frame, it’s essentially a souped-up LED Lite-Brite that you can customize with over 700 apps, most of which are user-generated on its open platform. The closest counterpart I can think of is a digital picture frame, but instead of photos from your camera roll, it shows you a mix of both the useful and inane, in charming, lo-fi, pixelated resolution.
[Editor’s note: The Tidbyt is out-of-stock, but pre-orders for the Tidbyt Gen 2 are currently open for shipment in August. You can also buy a refurbished Tidbyt Gen 1 from $159.]
First, the supremely useful. We’re always late taking our older son to school, so having the train and bus departures right there on the foyer table cuts down on the chaos. Instead of scrambling for our phones to check when the next bus is coming while also yelling at Augie to put on his shoes, we can simply glance at the Tidbyt. It also gives Augie some buy-in, as he can clearly see that unless we jam, we’re not gonna make it. (The departures are accurate within a minute of what’s on the official MTA app.)
I wanted the Tidbyt for the transit info alone, but after playing around with it, I’ve discovered that the real delight is in the stuff that’s purely for fun. You can have Nyan Cat flying across the screen in perpetuity, if that’s what you desire. If you’d like to have the “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” banana dancing in your periphery at all times, as Augie so insists, you can throw that on the Tidbyt, too. (Whenever that deranged banana flashes on the screen, Augie howls with glee as he calls us over to come look.) We also have the Yankees, Mets, and Dodgers scores go up on game day, holiday countdowns, Peanuts pictures, James Webb Space Telescope images, and the weather. It’s strangely satisfying to behold text and images rendered in low-res pixel art. The graphics are bright, nostalgic, and pretty in a way that makes me stop and stare at the Tidbyt for a few seconds as I walk by. Is any of this necessary? No. Is it hella fun? Yes. As my husband puts it, “It’s completely pointless, but I love this thing.”
The price is admittedly pretty steep. It’s $200 for a nice-looking box that tells you stuff. For comparison, that’s double the price of Google’s smart-home display, which can do more advanced things like turn the lights on in your living room or play Peppa Pig on Netflix with a voice command. But the point is that it’s not supposed to do much. Though it might look like a radio or an alarm clock, it is neither. It does not have a speaker or mic, which is reassuring because it can’t “spy” on you the way Alexa or the Google Hub does. (Tidbyt Gen 2, which comes out in August, will have a few more features, including a touch-button control and a speaker for alarms and notifications.) Calling it analog would be inaccurate, since it’s powered by Wi-Fi, but you can think of it as an anti-smart device. It only shows you what you put on it. In fact, it was designed to keep us from checking our phones for every little thing. (If you want a full review, our friends at the Verge wrote about it when it first came out a couple of years ago.)
We had some neighbors over for dinner the other night, and in a full-circle moment, one of them asked me about the Tidbyt. She had seen it at one of the other aforementioned neighbors’ homes, but Googling “Subway countdown clock” did not yield her any relevant results. I told her what it was. She said she would definitely be buying it.
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