The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses may be one of the most brilliant products in history that almost nobody is going to buy.
Let's break that into two pieces, starting with the "nobody is going to buy" part. These glasses are a really cool gadget, but there isn't a strong market for "gadgets" anymore. Gadgets are by definition niche pieces of tech that are really good at one specific thing and that's it. My iPhone is really good at a lot of things and I'm never more than two feet from it, so why would I want to lug around a bag full of one-trick-ponies too? Smartphones are an invasive species that have crowded out the gadget market from getting any sunlight.
I happen to think the Meta Smart Glasses are really cool. The video quality is almost shockingly great, they look fantastic, and if the embedded AI can really interact with what you're seeing as seamlessly as the demos show, then Meta might once and for all prove voice assistants can be something more than pocket-sized weathermen. I love traveling and going to concerts and hiking and having cool live experiences, and the idea of getting to document those things without holding a 6-inch hunk of Gorilla Glass in front of my face is pretty appetizing. I might go as far as to say I want a pair.
But it's something I would have to think too much about. In my view, if it's not something you put in your pocket or on your body every day, then there's not much space for it in the market anymore. A tech gadget has to be as ubiquitous in your life as your iPhone for the masses to really want to buy it, and I'm not convinced enough people want a camera designed by potentially the most intrusive company in history on their face 24/7 for this product to ever reach a widespread audience outside of content creators.
The first part of my statement was "one of the most brilliant products in history" though, and I stand by that, not because it's particularly earth-shattering technology, but because I think it's going to save Meta tens of billions of dollars over the next few years.
Meta's Reality Labs division is spending cash faster than Mariah Carey at a mirror store. It lost $3.7 billion in Q3 2023 alone, and those losses have only trended upward over the last three years. The metaverse seemed to be Zuckerberg's sole obsession since the start of the pandemic, and that's saying something because it had some tough competition. Everything about the Reality Labs division reeked of a delusional passion project that had no legs, though neither did the avatars, so at least Meta was consistent.
Meta (and Apple too, for that matter) knows the end-state product they're gunning for: a fully functional augmented reality headset built into a pair of sunglasses. The Meta Quest 3 proved the company can make a passable mixed reality device, but shrinking that technology into something that doesn't look orthodontic is going to take another decade of product development and tens of billions of dollars in R&D.
All of this to perfect a product that it's not clear people even want to buy.
And it's going to be really hard for Zuckerberg to continue convincing his board to let him drop $10 billion a year on dope avatars when neighbors like OpenAI have ridden the AI wave to a valuation reportedly over $100 billion. Most major tech companies over the last year had to place a bet on one of three horses: cryptocurrency, virtual and augmented reality, or AI. At this point it's look pretty freaking clear that anyone who didn't choose AI bet wrong.
So what did Meta do when they arose from their metaverse hellscape to see they missed the AI wave? Simple: they launched a product that gave them exposure to both the metaverse and AI to test the waters. The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses aren't the final-form augmented reality product Meta wants to make, but they're 70% of the way there. It's a close enough approximation of the end product that Meta can launch it and answer the question, "Does anybody anywhere care about high-tech sunglasses?" before they spend another $50 billion learning it the hard way. And by taking that outline of a product and filling it in with an all-knowing AI assistant for any urgent arch identifying needs, Meta will be able to much more accurately gauge which platform their consumers care most about so they can decide which horse to stick with for the rest of the decade.
I don't expect to run into anyone wearing these glasses all year. They aren't going to be a smashing success. But I respect Meta putting something out into the world that meets 70% of their augmented reality vision and 70% of their AI vision to help them decide which technology is worth bringing up to 100%. It won't be a popular product, but it's a really smart one. And anything that helps eliminate new Mark Zuckerberg avatars from my Twitter feed has my full support.
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