Meta wants you to strap computers to your face for three hundred dollars. This marks the company's fourth attempt to convince humans that walking around looking like a Google Glass refugee builds shareholder value.
The lightweight smart glasses serve as a step toward screens in the lenses. That's the official line. The actual function appears to be teaching your neighbors which house to avoid during block parties.
Zuckerberg keeps pushing wearables despite every previous wearable product performing like a tech demo at a funeral. Ray-Ban Stories sold dozens of units. The Quest headsets collect dust in closets across America. Now comes another face computer, because the problem with the metaverse wasn't the concept—it was insufficient hardware strapped to your skull.
Meta executives see this as progress toward advanced devices. They would. These are the same people who spent forty billion dollars building a cartoon office space where your avatar has no legs. Their vision of the future involves you paying them monthly to look like an extra from Minority Report while you check your email at Starbucks.
The real innovation here is pricing. Three hundred dollars sits just low enough that dipshit retail traders will convince themselves this is affordable disruption. They'll buy the glasses. They'll wear them once. Then they'll log into Reddit and explain how Meta is undervalued because the P/E ratio doesn't account for wearable adoption curves they learned about from a YouTube video.
Screens in the lenses come later, assuming anyone wants them. Betting on that assumption has cost Meta enough money to fund a small nation's GDP. But Zuckerberg remains committed to a future where everyone walks around half-blind, bumping into lampposts while their glasses display notifications nobody f*cking asked for.
Photo by Julio Lopez on Unsplash
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