Dead serious. "Cool" is all this product needs to be successful. People buy sunglasses. People like Snapchat. At $129 this is a no-brainer. Don't underestimate the power of social signaling.
You mean the social signaling that is going to brand these users as "glassholes" as well?
>At $129 this is a no-brainer.
Please step out of your tech bubble. Most snapchat users are teenagers or college-age persons who absolutely do not have $129 to drop on a pair of novelty sunglasses.
(for "subsidy" to be a reasonable description of the flow of funds, the phone company would probably have to be losing money on the most expensive phones; of course they aren't. They provide the phone up front with a minimal payment, but they have structured the monthly fees to more than cover their costs for doing this.)
Furthermore, early termination fees are constant for all contracts. The person who got the $150 phone has the same termination fee as the person who got the $600 phone. Thus again, someone is subsidizing someone else.
And the fees aren't necessarily the same for cheaper phones:
Remember Memoto? — The lifelogging camera that clips on your shirt; it looks like they're called Narrative now [0].
If Snapchat owns the camera hardware they have total control over analytics. They could become the platform for sharing daily moments. At some point, that's what Facebook was, except there was always an app layer in-between.
Facebook probably can still use Instagram's brand, so that is an edge over Google. If they can do it soon enough while resisting branding the hardware as "Facebook" is another matter. That also means they probably have to already be close to releasing a finished product.
The larger question to me is who will have the stamina to thrive in the post-smartphone era? Snapchat may be able to break to ice and get a lot of people to wear something weird and clunky. By generation two or three, what happens if Apple, Magic Leap, or someone else is able to produce a more refined & seamless wearable? To "win" Snapchat will have to produce an incredibly robust AR headset that no one thinks twice about wearing all day long.
Other commenters are correct, the article reads like a shameless press release.