I worked at a VC funded hardware start up for the first eight years of my career. You'll never read about it here though; we made digital pathology scanners. When I left we had sold the company for ~300M and were bringing in about ~30M / year in revenue.
I guess my point is that there is more going on in the VC space then you'll read about on HN.
This goes well with the great-grand parent's comment on consumer hardware not being as attractive to investors. I think a lot of it lies in the complexity of the product. A smart watch or rugged video camera seems trivial to replicate and commoditise from an investment and technology standpoint compared to digital pathology scanners.
I'll look at the article at some point, Jawbone had multiple best selling products -- bluetooth speakers being one -- no idea how that covered investment. Hell, A16Z gave all of Skype one of the speakers 6 years ago as a thank you. They did some nice hardware.
What I do know, per your point, investment in and around hardware startups is not publicized. I wonder how some of the networking hardware startups that started the carriers of those I know (and benefited me) would be taken now.
Cisco / Nokia / etc. hardware acquisitions apparently aren't HN sexy.
I guess my point is that there is more going on in the VC space then you'll read about on HN.