Regarding Yihi and LV. We have no info whatsoever about Yihi, just what we can infer from facts. They had no new designs since G class; released only a couple of new devices with diminished features; the SL has been marred by numerous returns and some uncorrected firmware bugs.
A direct voltage pod followed - and then nothing.
LV, see their website has become a placeholder; the company, after the release of the Orion and the Drone has split in two; and hasn't progressed since with new models, at a time when there are multiple release each week.
Lost Vape made outstanding devices with Evolv technology inside, and it is sad to lose such possibility now.
They made the Therion, by many considered the best vape device of all times.
Yihi, LV and Dicodes are my daily drivers... I may have to change something in the future.
The primary difference between Dicodes and most other companies that make e-cigs, is that their e-cig division is more of a hobby which began when one of the primary owners switched to vaping, went like, "this is terrible, we can do much better!" and then, they did.
Dicodes is actually a relatively large German company whose primary market is making chips for embedded medical devices:
dicodes GmbH in Bottrop – Elektronikhersteller und Entwickler Their entire e-cig division is more of a hobby; the overall impression I get is that as long as they're not losing money and it stays in the black, then they don't care, and will continue making high-end devices at the pace they're going, with the target demographic they've chosen to address (high end, with people who do not need 200W to vape).
The company doesn't live or die based upon how many Extremes or Dani Boxes they sell. If they did, they'd be out of business long ago, because when I look at the serial numbers of a Dicodes I purchased years ago, vs. the one I got last week... they are all small-batch runs and can't possibly be selling more than thousands per unit. I would be very surprised if their entire annual output exceeds 10K units across all models.
Obviously you can't sustain an entire company, R&D costs, customer service, paying salaries, etc, at that level. But their price points and margins are obviously high enough to just keep that division going at the pace it's at.
I owned a SX Mini from Yihi years ago, it was... okay, but ended up back on my shelf. I also drank the Lost Vape koolaid and have 3 or 4 iterations of the Therion, as well as whatever the model was that came after the Therion which I never even took out of the box. I guess I collected them without any real intent of using it as a daily driver (see also: half the stuff in my collection). With Lost Vape, having no real idea about the company behind the devices or their plans, from a subjective point of view, it seems like their plan was to release The Most Awesome Mod that Ever Existed (in their eyes), and then immediately follow that up with v2 6 months later, v3 5 months after that, and so on. No model ever really lasted that long, and no model ever approached the build quality of Dicodes. Their MARKETING was very high end, their products, not so much. Dicodes on the obverse has very little marketing which is pretty anemic, and they release new products on very slow timeline with extremely limited production runs and pre-announce products which then take years to make it to market (their charging station took something like 2 years from announced as forthcoming, to production. Their plans for having a charger obviously extend even beyond that 2 year lag-time because every DaniBox and #6 had that charging port on the bottom, which couldn't be attached to anything for
YEARS. Their dual-battery Dani Boxes have been forthcoming since 2016 and still aren't on the market, their lightweight titanium models are more collectors items then production runs -- they appear and disappear in very small batches, etc, etc, etc).
tl;dr: I don't think Dicodes is going anywhere. They'e very similar to ProVape/ProVari in the sense that they have their own priorities, have chosen to dominate a very niche high-end target demographic, who like their products, and can sustain the level of stability/growth needed to keep Dicodes e-cigs chugging along. Unlike ProVape in the olden days, their entire company does not revolve around their e-cig division.
