This so called “sweet spot” comes at the cost of billions of dollars in operating losses and layoffs at Reality Labs year after year. The worst part is that Meta is merely licensing the Ray-Ban form factor and this also comes at a hefty price tag. Specially if other companies such as Google enter a bidding war to snatch that exclusivity away from them.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/07/31/metas-reality-labs-posts...https://www.androidauthority.com/google-steal-ray-ban-meta-m...
wrsh07|1 year ago
Yes, it has cost them billions of dollars (ongoing) to develop their AR/VR tech. You can definitely criticize that, but this spending is defensive. If Facebook (Meta) doesn't own at least some market share in a future device, that is an existential threat to them. How much did ATT cost Facebook? [1] Answer: north of $10 billion in 2022. But note: it's actually a reduction in Facebook's revenue by that amount, so in the fullness of time, the total damage is much worse.
> Ray-Ban
Facebook has multiple form factors. They have VR quest (3). They have AR glasses. I don't expect Ray-Ban to capture Facebook/Google's margin here, and Facebook would be able to build first party AR glasses if they wanted. You use Ray-Ban to sell v1 and then you make v2 good enough that it sells itself.
All of this seems tangential to my complaint that I would love an incredibly high res and reasonably hackable VR screen.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2022/04/23/appl...
ingenieros|1 year ago