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Comment by sheer_horror | Hacker News Reader

These glasses are going to be a huge hit thanks to their style. The main userbase of snapchat are product-hungy 12-25 year olds without much conviction; they'll jump at the chance to get a product that looks cool and represents their favourite timesink. I am very impressed with this move because it gives Snapchat a supplement to ad-based revenue. I hope this makes them a lot of money.

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I do think it will be a lot more successful than most here think.

First off, Snapchat (Snap?) isn't Google - their brands are completely different at least among the target audience. Glasses of some sort are inevitably going to be a fashion accessory with extra functionality, and Google is just too uncool. They are the company that wants to knows everything - every interaction refreshes that impression, from Street View vans to Search.

Second, it's sold as a camera on your face, instead of a computer on your face that can do things like recording a video. Even if it's the same hardware, this does make a difference. Everyone understands pseudo-mechanical functions like "press a button to take a 10 second video". Unless the wearer is mashing a button by their face, you can assume it's off. Computers and phones? One might as well assume it's recording video if the operator has the camera pointed at you. The average HNer has a good mental model of how a computer works, but the average person sees it as a magic-infused black box.

The price point looks reasonable, I assume the goal here is strong sales for the holidays. Would expect some celebrities or whoever to be spotted wearing these in the next few months.

> it's sold as a camera on your face

Exactly why comparisons to google glass miss the point. Totally different products and userbases

Correct. The Glass is a way to interact with the web, this one just goes: "fucj you internet, my input is the only one that counts."

I'm truly curious, why would you hope it makes them a lot of money? couldn't care less about the fact if a company makes money with a new product. It's not a company that has a shot at world peace or curing all diseases, so why care?

It is important that tech growth continues for a long time. I am very concerned that ad-based revenue will not sustain forever. We need more physical goods and more faith in technology, as every other industry is stagnant. No generation will ever have it as good as those who thrived in the last half of the 20th century and it upsets me greatly.

The above three comments to me summerise what has qualified as American Innovation for the last 15-20 years.

When you are surrounded by the superficial, building things for the superficial what else can you produce other than the superficial. It is sad as hell to watch. It isn't ironic to me that Trump is going to be leading this bunch of innovators soon.

An alternative way of thinking about this is that we're fortunate that our needs are so well provided for that we can focus on entertainment and life enrichment.

A camera at eye level is extremely useful for many reasons, snapchat is just one, excellent use case. In my own life, I have a use for that specific tool, and am glad it exists - Google Glass was never widely released. And the price is great - at $129 this seems amazingly affordable.

I expect it to be a hit.

> life enrichment

Is this really what this product does?

"Enrichment" isn't as strong of a word as you're thinking. If it makes life better or more enjoyable for someone, it's life enriching for them.

I would argue for a logical and in there. Cocaine makes life more enjoyable for almost everyone, but it's hardly life enriching.

That's a good point, but "better" is a subjective word. If an individual is capable of enjoying life while using cocaine, without regrets that outweigh their experience, then cocaine has enriched their life. Drugs are always a mixed bag, and the bad generally outweighs the good, in my opinion. Others may feel differently though, so I don't want to deprive them of their definition of life enrichment. Enrichment is not enlightenment: If anyone claims these glasses will make a person's life more enlightened, I would then be skeptical. Enriched though, I can accept. Let's first imagine some of the less valuable things people may be doing with their time, specifically in the targeted age range.

>An alternative way of thinking about this is that we're fortunate that our needs are so well provided for that we can focus on entertainment and life enrichment.

It's a nice way of thinking of it and hopefully it's true one day, but unless "our" means the typical HN reader, I don't think we're there yet. Consider that in the US in 2015, 43.1 million people were living in poverty (13.5% poverty rate) [1], and income inequality continues to rise [2].

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-25...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GINIALLRH

Considering the snark was directed at the comments on this post, I'm certain "our" means us HN readers/commenters.

Don't assume all HN users are narcissists and politically uninterested. I for one have very personal needs that are directly connected to what is going on politically and socially in the world.

I'm not - I'm just saying that, generally speaking, most of our 'needs' (the important stuff like food, water, shelter) have been met. Everything else, mostly all that's discussed on this site, is unimportant & frivolous 'wants'.

I'm not saying this as a criticism, just explaining the comment thread.

The other part of my comment I didn't write because I thought it would basically be evident without spelling it out: problems like poverty and income inequality aren't solved by tech innovators.

The actual problems that do exist in the U.S and the rest of the developing world are social problems. No amount of big disruptive thinking (by tech folk) is going to solve them.

If you look at SV's attempt to solve medical problems, you start to see where regulation and oversight are necessary for the difficult problems. Then you see why large governments, large companies, and exceptionally smart people with the backing of those organizations are the ones who need to solve the problem.

On top of all that, there's so often no actual intent to solve those problems. Poverty in the US is a big problem because the people who are capable of solving it just don't care enough to. In the case of government, voters are too self interested in the short term to push for it - how many times do you see complaints about hard earned tax dollars being used for poor people?

Even when the tech people do try to solve a social problem because the public has decided to care about it, attempts are misled and ineffective. If you look at the problem of diversity, companies are tryin to solve their problems at demand side. Big companies compete for female engineers to boost their numbers and smaller companies can't match their offers. This looks good on Apple's diversity report, but the problem is disguised, not fixed. Actual solutions, like encouraging women to become interested in STEM when they're young are few and far between.

So yes, I'd like tech innovators to focus on solving non-problems with life enriching innovations (slack, twitch, twitter, facebook, steam, VR, AR, bluetooth audio, etc) then waste time on misguided attempts that are way out of range for them.

I don't understand. None of the above commenters mentioned anything about innovation; they just said the Spectacles looks like it'll be a successful product. Appreciating successful capitalism is half of what this forum is about.

A few of the more significant American innovations in the last 15-20 years:

  -CRISPR, gene editing
  -iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.
  -re-usable space rockets (Spacex and Blue Origin)
  -IBM's Watson and Deep Blue, Google's AlphaGo
  -LIGO's detection of gravitational waves
  -MIT's improvements in lithium ion technology
  -NASA's exploratory discoveries on Mars, Mercury, Pluto, Saturn, etc.
  -Google
  -Wikipedia
  -Facebook
  -Tesla
  -Uber

It's hardly been a drought.

AlphaGo was a brit thing :P

Actually AlphaGo is British. DeepMind was well ahead on that road when Google bought it. All the rest is American AFAIK even if other countries have similar technologies and successes for space exploration and detection of gravitational waves. If you go back more than 20 years, space exploration was USA vs USSR with an early Soviet advantage.

Also, Elon Musk came from South Africa and did not become a US citizen until 2002.. I don't know that that makes anything that Tesla or SpaceX have invented to be not completely American, but if he is considered the driving force, then .. there could be a doubt

Hey, immigration is great! Steve Jobs was also the son of an immigrant..

How does Uber always make these lists? It's a taxi app. You can hold it up as a well-done business, but you can't call it a technological breakthrough.

If you think you can't use technology to innovate on the business model, you don't understand innovation.

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