Sent to me by a friend and colleague in the face level sports industry. At around $14,000 though, all I can say is "why?".
$14k for one of those Seabob thingys? Come on. It's cool at first glance but when you break it down:
1. You can't see jack when you're on top of the water. Why spend that kind of money when you could get a couple awesome wave runners for that price and see just fine?
2. Diving deep so fast like they do in the promo video would blow my eardrums without being able to pressurize on the way down. It looked real, so they must have hired free-divers who don't have that problem. And if someone tries it with scuba equipment, they just paid $14k to commit suicide, because surfacing too quickly will overexpand and explode your lungs if you fill them with air at depth. And yes, I did just learn that. Consider it a community service bulletin. ;-)
3. I can only imagine the damage to sensitive reefs that the Spyros Latsis' of the world will do on these things after a few drinks on their mega-yachts.
MKTG
From a marketing standpoint though, they're brilliant – they even got a trance song written just for their product, and it's pretty good (although it sounds very familiar for some reason…but with different lyrics). Rather than a catchy jingle, how about an actual work of musical art? Subconscious branding with the hook Seaaaaabob!…that'll be going through your head all day.
(update – totally is a ripoff of an actual trance song tho)
Somebody with a zillion bucks made a toy for his or her cronies, and is marketing to them (and people who want to act like they are them), and probably making a killing with the markup (Paul Allen, maybe?). Kudos to them for that!
What do you buy the very rich man who has everything? A toy like this. What do you buy the man with lots of toys who always needs to have the latest and greatest toy that his other wannabe reallyrich friends don't have? A toy like this.
Personally, my preference would be buy a sick wave runner that I can SCUBA from, and get the best of both worlds…but that's just me.