After losing tens of billions of dollars making clunky VR headsets that nobody wanted, Meta has finally built a winning product.
Driving the news: Meta is looking to potentially double the production of their AI smart glasses by the end of the year, as the once-niche wearable device starts to gain traction with consumers.
High demand and supply constraints of their newest models have forced the company to postpone rolling them out in international markets, including Canada.
Why it's happening: To put it simply, Meta has made the glasses look cooler (or at least less lame). New Ray-Ban and Oakley models are lighter, more practical, and look far more like a regular pair of glasses than the early iterations.
The value-add of their features is still a bit of a mystery. The new US$799 model Meta lets you record video, text, make video calls, or interact with Meta’s AI assistant (all things that our phones can do).
Why it matters: CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been adamant that some iteration of these AI glasses will replace smartphones as the next mass market consumer device. We may not be close to that vision becoming a reality — and we might never be — but Meta has finally proven that this is actually a product people will go out and buy.
Zoom out: Meta’s rivals are starting to hop on the bandwagon. Google has partnered with Gucci-owner Kering to build a pair of luxury AI glasses, while Apple is scaling back its wildly unsuccessful Vision Pro headset efforts to focus on its own smart glasses project.—LA