Why Snapchat Spectacles failed
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
If you look at it from this point of view, everything else is just side effect.
- It failed because it's not fashionable? => No. See bluetooth headset. Also see Crocs. If it's useful, people will use it.
- It failed because it waited 5 months to sell it? => No. See Apple.
- It failed because the excitement died off by the time it shipped? => No. See all kinds of films that succeeded WITHOUT any initial hype (such as the Matrix)
- It failed because it couldn't get any influencers to endorse the product? => No, see Snapchat. Yeah their original app itself.
- It failed because the content couldn't be ported over to other platform without cropping? => No. In fact, if Spectacles would have succeeded, Techcrunch would probably be blabbering about how the key to success is how brilliant its marketing strategy was, so that all the videos uploaded to youtube and instagram had the "signature snapchat crop", which got everyone else curious.
The only arguments I agree with in this article are related to its utility--how it's considered rude to be video taping someone else, and how it was limited to sunglasses format.
The rest is bullshit because they're one of those "MBA case studies" type after-the-fact interpretation, which in most cases are bullshit.
Just go build something useful and you will never have to worry about being "fashionable" or all the gimmicks. In fact as a tech company you should never see yourself as a fashion company. It's a myth created by ignorant media pundits who's never built a product in their life.
1. Was snapchat users advertised about this product frequently? If not then its failure in execution right there.
2. What was the conversion rate if they did?
3. Where there any user studies for people who did not convert? What was the distribution of their reasoning? Price, battery life, availability?
4. Was the video/photos uploaded through these glasses carried the advertise for the device itself?
5. What was the influence ratio (friends buying product after one friend bought it)?
The thing is that this idea like most ideas was good but execution probably wasn't. The whole trick behind blockbuster product is to understand failure in execution, fix them and reiterate. Never stop after the failure.
1. Kind of/yes. They had campaigns at certain times. 2. Low 3. idk 4. Yes, they did. It would say "taken with spectacles" and the format kind of advertized/demonstrated the product 5. No one I know besides me bought one.
The problem is no one cares about snapchat that much. The average user isn't taking it so seriously that they want to spend money on hardware like this, let alone charge it, set it up, take it around with them etc. If snapchat charged $0.10 to continue using it half their userbase might just uninstall.
Yep. Today we live in times where apparently this is secondary, however, so they gotta make up a ton of crap.
A friend has a pair. They work... fine. The app support is... fine, and kind of novel actually given that rotation on the screen works with snaps shot with spectacles only.
But... there's not much value there. At all.
And why would there be, anyway?
P(Success) is highly correlated with (Marginal Value / Marginal Cost)
The original Snapchat app succeeded because the marginal cost is low (everyone already has a smartphone) and it provides a good marginal value to a subset of population (over other social networks).
Spectacles carry higher monetary and more importantly convenience and social costs to use and add little extra value beyond existing solutions.
The same framework could be applied to Uber, AirBnb, ... as well as many startup failures. Note that P(Success) or probability of success implies that there are factors other than those included in the model.
I’d love to have refinements or counterexamples to the model if anyone is interested.
Marginal Value, MV(iPhone) ~= MV(crap, and most non-crap, android phones) (granted, this is probably not true for the original iPhone). But except for that one time it is certainly not true. The quality is clearly different, however.
Even more clear is the Tesla case: MV(Roadster) <<< MV(alternatives). It wasn't the best electric car, it wasn't the best car, it wasn't ... however again there was a clear difference in quality.
I would argue most real estate developments are equally examples of this (mostly because laws prevent them on competing on anything other than quality in most inner cities). Trump's whole empire seems an example of it too.
It seems to be entirely possible to achieve success by simply copying a badly executed idea, and doing it better.
iPhone: signifier of good taste, ease of use (relative to Android), being well-off (in developing countries)
Xiaomi: middle class or upper-middle class status (in China), good value for money
I agree that current iPhones and Xiaomi phones do not provide much better features relative to their competition (no-name Android phones in the case of Xiaomi). Their values lie elsewhere.
Tesla Roadster: cutting-edge, environmental sensibility
In fact, by sales volume, Roadster itself was not a success. Tesla only sold 2,450 of them in 30 countries [1]. Model S provides much better value for cost and correspondingly achieved much stronger success.
Luxury products in general tend to be associated with social exposure. Maybe luxury mobs or floor cleaning liquid exist but either they do provide some special features for a niche or their sales volumes are relatively tiny.
It’s almost like marginal value isn’t the only thing that matters.
Apple phones are way way overpriced but they're so much better than the competition. It's not true people buy Apple phones only for fashion reasons. The absolute value of an iPhone is vastly superior to the marginal value of any other phone, and the marginal value depends on how much you use your phone.
I don't use my phone very much so I can tolerate an Android phone; but if my personal or professional life depended on it, I would buy an iPhone.
Having used both Android and iOS I think it's quite clear that both platforms are just as buggy as one another with the recent iOS11 outpacing Android in terms of bugginess by quite a large margin.
When you buy an iPhone you are paying for the build quality and for the marketing, you are not getting an objectively 'better' phone.
That’s worth a lot of money to most users. I think more people are willing to pay premium to get the great operating system compared to hardware which might be secondary.
If you don't use Apple as your main computer you basically have zero integration. Don't even get me started on interoperability (you can't even use the iPhone headphones on a mac??)
That the UX is superior is also highly subjective. There are many things that are either impossible to do or a massive pain to do on an iPhone; I would not consider that good UX (for example try looking at a picture you just took on your camera and apply some filters before posting it to instagram. The only way I have found to do that is to open instagram and open the picture in that app. The notification system is a massive joke. There are dozens of other such examples).
What is worth a lot of money to users is convenience and habituality. Having to change your habits, workflow and frame of mind can be quite taxing for some people.
Even outside the luxury market there are numerous other factors, not least of which include: distribution, vitality, marketing etc.
Edit: Also there are at least three Nobel prizes showing how marginal value isn’t what matters in making choices (Nash, Kahneman, Thaler)
What do you mean by 'vitality'?
Luxury products provide social signal value rather than pure performance.
I agree that imperfect rationality is a major factor in human decision making and perhaps should be included into the model somehow.
I'm not sure how Nash's game theory is related to this. Care to elaborate?
PS. I didn't downvote you and feel that too much downvoting, sometimes unwarranted, occurs on HN lately.
Sorry, virality. Damn autocomplete.
Luxury products provide social signal value rather than pure performance.
Social signaling is often (usually? Outside subsistence cases - there are some good studies showing how this switches over) more important than performance.
Sometimes performance and social signaling are correlated, but they don't have to be.
I'm not sure how Nash's game theory is related to this. Care to elaborate?
A product marketplace is pretty much the perfect example of a non-competitive game. Indeed, the New Yorker used is as one:
The setting could be nuclear negotiations, such as the ones currently taking place between Iran and the great powers. It could be a product market, in which a number of firms compete for business.[1]
This is a relatively mature field, and there are some fairly comprehensive ways of expressing the likelihood of success of a product.
Unfortunately your formula doesn't capture anything like enough of the complexities of a market place.
But hey - it is simple, and you typed it quickly, and it seems like it could be right so nothing else matters, right?
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-triumph-and-...
Social signaling is part of the ‘value’ in my model.
The utility of existing competition and their costs are included in the term ‘marginal’.
I am aware that my simple model, occurring in a couple minutes, is incomplete that’s why I asked for refinements. Including factors like distribution & marketing seems very useful. However, capturing imperfect rationality does not seem possible for a simple model.
Do you have references to the ‘fairly comprehensive ways of expressing the likelihood of success of a product’?
Everything the article says - be it about influencers not picking up and promoting the Spectacles to difficulties with porting content without cropping - is extremely useful to anyone else looking to launch a Spectacles type device.
The parent is saying that usefulness is the main, if not only, cause of success, and that other factors are in fact irrelevant (namely, fashionableness, launch strategy, celebrity endorsements, etc.)
You can agree or disagree with that thesis, but here you're misrepresenting it.
When OP says something failed because it isn’t useful, they are deliberately ignoring the subject and object of the equation.
When the article says that influencers didn’t glom on to Spectacles, they are making a statement about influencers not finding it useful but if you read the parent comment, this observation is useless because it obfuscates the true problem - that Spectacles is “useless”.
Earth has limited resources. I wish people wouldn't feel the need to buy / produce hypster "Spectacles type devices".
The post you replied to tried to explain why it's actually not useful. The journalist uses a style of seductive writing (some call it "narrative fallacy"[1]) which connects plausible-sounding causes to its supposedly logical effects. That style of explanation can actually make readers dumber about what happened because it leaves out counterexamples.
That "narrative fallacy" is common in writings from Harvard Business Review, histories, biographies, newspapers & pundits trying to explain why the Dow Jones Index went up/down, why startups/products failed/succeeded, etc. All of those suffer the omission of counterexamples.
Thank you for writing this
That audience is tiny and has budgets to hire marketers with much better analysis than this article.
I don't use Snapchat, but take a look at all the anti-Snapchat posts in his Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/joshconstine
It feels more like someone shorting stocks than providing thoughtful analysis.
Please don't wear crocs in public.
I won’t define that. It’s like Potter Stewart - I know it when I see it.
The Matrix's promotion campaign included a Super Bowl ad.
I feel really weird for being the first to bring this up, it seems pretty obvious to me the main reason these glasses weren't going to catch on.
What they actually wanted was something more like the cop drones in the new Blade Runner that hover about and take video in near silence. There are quite a few kickstarters that claim they can do this, but the drones are loud. This generates attention on the drone, not the corporate-shill. Err, sorry, snap-fluencer, my bad. Also, the battery life is terrible and I can see airspace getting crowded at homecoming in the multi-use-room.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sqdr/hexo-your-autonomo...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/airdog/airdog-worlds-fi...
First, wow I had no idea these existed
Second, where can I get them
Third, (months later) lost interest
Snapchat should have just had a buy now button in the app. Instead they tried to do some guerrilla marketing thing. If you have a captive audience of tens of millions of people, you don't need to create buzz around your product. Either you made something people want or you didn't. Me personally, they hurt my face. So I wore them about twice.
The guerrilla marketing was to keep Robert Scobles [1] from setting the Spectacles' zeitgeist. In that, it worked.
I agree that after they had lines they should have started marketing in app. A smooth transition would involve selectively marketing to those deemed to be general influencers, and then working down to the broader population. As a social network, it does seem odd to give away that home-field advantage.
[1] http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/5826657846e27af2008...
Prescient, given how toxic his personal brand now is.
i cant imagine the increase in content snapchat would have if it were recording what every subscriber was looking at.
Spoiler: the video was misleading (California is suing them for false advertising) and the company is dead.
It is a real product, founded by a bunch of robotics people from Harvey Mudd.
Also it doesn't look like it has the capability to follow me in even most sedate urban environments. I mean, I'm not asking for stairs, but that thing looks like it'd have a hard time with a sidewalk crack.
Both those problems could probably be solved by making it bigger.
I could be wrong, but I bet there's a reasonably large market for 'inside only' selfie drones. If you look at who is posting on youtube, most of it is filmed indoors.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/airdog/introducing-the-...
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/07/airdog-adii-2nd-gen-spor...
They can call it the "paparazzi" and Snapchat users will eat it up, it would be air and land based that makes them look like stars.
In all seriousness, the biggest use of Snapchat Spectacles or Google Glass is exploring but that view does lose the star aspect of what people desire on Snapchat. GoPro has that covered but also just a view of what the person is seeing isn't always the best view.
It could work with the drone/bot aspect to make it a full production. Still though, Snapchat is obsessed with angles that make you look the best so it might be something that would need to be edited/managed like a photo/video.
I think we're in a spontaneity uncanny valley for that kind of use case, though, and we have to wait for the hardware (mostly low energy processing and battery) tech to catch up before we climb out of the valley. A lot of the popular content has some element of surprise/spontaneity to hook eyeballs in. I suspect a device form factor like Spectacles, or really, the "recording others" use case, won't take off for the masses until it is as light as normal sunglasses, as stylish, continuously records HD video and high-grade audio 16-20 hours before needing a recharge, and is coupled with management software that makes it easy to pick out what you want to publish (if you exclaim, "Woah! Did you see that!?", or more prosaically, "Worldsta-a-a-r!", that's picked up for a potential clip to publish, so you don't have to scrub through hours of video). Maybe coupled with an AR interface that gives you on-the-spot access to the publishing interface.
Until then, the "recording others" use case will likely continue to be dominated by right-place-right-time smartphone recordings, and pro/pro-am publishers/bloggers with scripted/guided content like what we see on YouTube today.
It strikes me as very strange that on all phones the good camera is on the back and the crappy one on the front. Many people mostly take selfies with their phones and so it would make much more sense to do the opposite.
I say it's obvious because neither Glass nor Spectacles were wearable by people who need corrective lenses AS corrective eyewear.
None of the leadership had any idea what it meant to have a large piece of hardware on your face all day every day. Nor, importantly, how to convince someone to put a large piece of hardware in their face every day all day.
It's like they didn't even BOTHER to call the guys at warby Parker, or zenni, or even the anti-christ Luxotica
Glasses are SO much more personal than a computer or a phone, or even a shirt or other clothing. They are your face. Your literal identity.
It's so tone deaf of both teams (and everyone in the AR/VR community that thinks some manner of out-in-public eyewear is "close) to not deal with that need for customization at minimum.
Sorry had to rant about that. M sure all those people are actually pretty sharp, and I'm just being grumpy.
This reminds me of Canon vs Nikon. Fanboys on the Internet wank on about megapixels and whatnot but the real differentiator is the eyepoint of the viewfinder, which is probably literally as simple as, the eyepoint guy at Nikon wears glasses themselves and their counterpart at Canon doesn't.
The specifications bear me out: Nikon has a 0.71x magnification VF with a 17mm eyepoint, while Canon has a 0.76x magnification VF wish 20mm eyepoint.
Kids are easily distracted, so if you point a phone at them it'll completely throw them off whatever cute activity it was they were just doing - probably because they now want to play with your phone. No such problem with Spectacles - and not only that, it means you can keep two hands free (not a small issue when one arm might already have a child in it).
The problem is that Spectacles are so tied into Snapchat that it makes sharing the output very difficult. Grandma and Grandpa are not going to use Snapchat, and I'm not sure Snapchat wants them to. You can, eventually, import into Snapchat then export single videos back out again, but they lose the cool display method for circular videos and look awful. I think they could shift some of these glasses with a little rebranding and a spin-off app just for importing videos into whatever destination you want. They'll never do that, though. Maybe if they finally declare it dead they'll open up the sync API, but I'm not holding my breath.
(this is a repost of an old comment I wrote a few days ago in case anyone is suffering from deja-vu)
There's no maybe about it: Snapchat definitely doesn't want them. Evan Spiegel has been very upfront that he doesn't want the riff-raff. Snapchat has always been deliberately shitty on Android and Spiegel went out of his way to make clear how they definitely weren't going to make a Windows Phone application, back when WP was a potential player. If you're not a cool, hip teen with an iPhone, you can piss off.
He reminds me a lot of that Abercrombie CEO who said that they didn't want fatties and uglies in their stores, which was a winning strategy until it suddenly wasn't.
This is partially why, as much as I hate Facebook, I'm not particularly upset at Snapchat slowly getting steamrolled by them. Businesses that stick up their middle finger at potential customers out of snobbery deserve to fail.
To be fair, my impression is that this aspect of their marketing wasn't the problem; the Great Recession was the problem, because suddenly no one had 2 – 4x the money to pay for a piece of clothing that only differed from the competition in that it told other teens you have 2 – 4x the money.
Great Recession + fast fashion seems to be the real culprit.
The market for elitism has never disappeared in that domain. Maybe any domain.
Windows Phone turned up late to the party - third or fourth horse (remember Blackberry?) in an already competitive two horse race. A lot of the apps that made it to Windows Phone were paid for by MS.
It's also worth bearing in mind the advice of "its better to make something 100 people love than 1000 people like".
Marketing is a dark art, and signalling is real. Trying to appeal to everyone, especially when you are a scrappy startup, sounds like a great way to appeal to absolutely no-one.
It's like the Porsche 911. Great car, but definitely not cool. 3/4 of the people driving them are of retirement age. Definitely not cool by any stretch of the imagination.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2016/04/13/apple-mar...
For example, do your parents have iPhones? Anything your parents are into instantly loses cool.
After the London riots there were lots of breathless articles about the menace of BBM and how the yoof were using it to plan their mischief.
I have seen similar outcomes when carriers have introduced unlimited calling plans "because teens only text", only for said teens to switch to calling en mass.
There also isn't any other social network that is close to being big. There's just the current incumbents. For teens i can think of Musically, but that's a focused app. On the other hand I am actually surprised Snapchat didn't try to go and buy Musically.
I really like the idea of Narrative Clip. Google seems to be going for something a bit different with the price being high and battery life being low.
True that! Thanks for the idea, I am tempted to pull my Looxcie out of retirement and see if it is discreet enough to avoid notice.
I've often thought about a device that would catalogue my life, what I did, be intelligent enough to group events together etc, have a searchable index of time, places, people. But the ethical implications of this are just too great, and effects on society would shift in strange ways. There was an episode of Black Mirror a few years ago that explored this, in some ways it is "be careful what you wish for"
In the near term there's no worry about ethics. My friends and family found the Narrative Clip interesting to varying degrees but almost none of them were interested in it for themselves.
It is unfortunate that spectacles don't work well outside of snapchat.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12569182
and compare those to the "it was obviously going to fail" responses here.
The contrast struck me as an interesting example of hindsight bias.
In some ways they were really cool, but the article was bang-on about pretty much everything. It's really a case study about how to fuck up a product roll-out.
Portability complications were a huge downer. The shaded lenses made them difficult to use indoors, and what wasn't mentioned was that the mic was hypersensitive to distortion from the slightest breeze, which made them useless outside as well.
But, as the article states:
>To drive demand, Snap needed to demonstrate all the creative things you could do with Spectacles, and the cool people who wore them.
Why the fuck didn't they do this?
And you can't really stick a micromuff on your glasses.
Bluetooth issues galore. Completely stopped using them. As standalone sunglasses, they are inferior to a good $10 pair from amazon - heavier, worse lens quality, and limited viewable area.
Spectacles are a case where appealing to a niche may not be the most profitable endeavor. (and now that Snap is a public company, they have to actually care about profit at some point)
Unfortunately, it's just not realistic right now, I think. The Spectacles battery life lasts less than 30 minutes of recording, and they don't even have a screen.
So no, you're not the only one :)
Also, unrelated to my previous obsession with AR, I have prosopagnosia, so having glasses that could tell me who I'm looking at would make a major improvement to my life.
Was that a while ago? Or is that still what you're doing?
I wonder how many other people feel the same way. My belief is that if you don't recognize me, you should have to ask me for information about myself. I'd rather not any random stranger be able to just know.
[0]. https://www.ted.com/talks/pranav_mistry_the_thrilling_potent...
[1]. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/new-o...
The first time I saw them I thought to myself, well that's a cool idea but that was it.
It truly felt like marketing or some attempt to trick people into believing Snap could make cool things... like a response to Facebook/Oculus.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3i5asc3qI4
EDIT: actually looking at the snapchat spectacle webpage, it looks neat and I can see myself buying them. Just not at that price (130GBP) because I will probably not be using them a lot. But if there is a promotion around Christmas why not.
It is only a matter of time before cameras in sunglasses becomes a common thing with people using them in place of action cameras, dashcams and regular cameras. The UX needs to be 'wink' to take a picture so these things can operate hands free with voice control - 'cheese' etc.
Somehow these wonder sunglasses of the near future weigh no more than normal sunglasses, charge magically in their special case and stream 4K HDR+ 3D stereo over bluetooth 24/7 storing all content on a nano-SD card. But we are not there yet and Snap took a punt at pitching a fun variant of the ideal product with low-res functionality seeing if people would go for it. They didn't. People didn't go crazy for them like they did with 'spinners', an equally 'useless' product. But cameras in sunglasses are happening. People have got over lenses in public. There is one in every car bumper.
1: hard as hell to pair.
2: circular video does not work since a lot of people want to port out the videos away from snapchat.
3: i wear glasses, the lens on these frames are not circular. couldn't find anyone in the bay area who did custom lenses (at the time).
4: towards the end of the year (2016), a lot of people wanted them but were frustrated that even if they got to the vending machine there was zero guarantee they would even get one. at most they had ~70ish in quantity per day. way too low. drove short term hype up though.
5: no marketing at all for this thing.
No one wants garbage that only works with one website, and no one wants to pay for an uncontrollable device with a mind of its own.
If you have a free service on the internet, millions or perhaps even billions may clamour to use it. If you’re giving stuff out for free, people will happily try it out, if they have the option to throw it in the trash without consequence.
Make people pay for something? It better do what they want, when they want it, or you might have some pissed off people on your hands.
Getting people to spend their free time is relatively easy.
Getting people to spend their hard earned cash is very (very) difficult.
You'd think this would be obvious already :)
I can even order those glasses with a prescription. They will help me see, and nobody else will be the wiser about being recorded. I'm not saying that I go out of my way to discreetly record people - I don't. But that shows to me these commodity glasses are a superior product to cartoonish looking Snapchat Spectacles.
For me, that is why Snapchat and all other similar recording spectacles will fail.
You can also find a bunch here: https://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=1080p+spy+glasses, but at ebay I'd rather spend $100 instead of $12 for these types of things.
I'd buy a pair if they were more like traditional action cam style glasses. The technical limitations right now make them far too expensive for what they are.
The trouble is, that's not Snapchat's target demographic. The device concept is fine; it's the seller that's wrong.
I haven't heard many extreme sports athletes complaining that GoPros are inconvenient. The helmet mounts seem fine for most people.
The thing is expensively useless. And the design is very cheesy.
Surprisingly, at the time, I saw many articles praising it as "the most brilliant idea", feeling like total flattery. I suspect those were from their marketing team. Guess the market isn't so easy to fool.
Also, before this article, I have never seen a single video shot by Spectacles. And now I understand why: they look terrible. It's not at all like seeing the world from the glasses-wearer's point of view. It's more like looking into a goddamn peephole.
This is the same issue Pokemon Go had---they made a really cool product that would go through a period of super high demand followed by an extreme dropoff, but they didn't roll out their product in time---their release window didn't match the window for the traction they actually generated. Pokemon Go was massive when it released for a couple weeks, and they touted a IoT thing to go with the game that made it even more immersive, but that didn't come out until people really stopped caring.
The moral of the story is to know that if you're going to have a huge release, be ready THEN to sell things. Hype is useless if you aren't capitalizing on it.
I'd prefer something with less conspicuous branding however, and something I could export in a decent format. I predict this will be a somewhat mainstream gadget within 5 years (Well, for people who can afford it). Apple will make iGlasses, or some shit like that, with Siri and camera.
Then there's the whole thing about living in the moment, perhaps that's better :)
Google Glass failed for all the technological and social reasons it did, why would a BS subpar imitation from a, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant service, fare better?
Maybe it only allows you to see things in the real world based on QR codes embedded in real world objects like objects in a museum and other places where businesses, organizations or governments embeds AR qr codes. The heavy computing lifting is done not in the glasses but in the displays. Possibly making the glasses cheap and barely bulkier then current sunglasses.
Also this way distribution of such glasses could be like 3D glasses ... pay ticket for museum tour and get Their AR glasses for the tour.
A good introduction to AR glasses in the market and other businesses could do the same.
1. They specifically focused on the fashion-conscious aspect initially (e.g. the Karl Lagerfeld shoot), and purposefully tried to keep the specs away from the nerdy tech press. In the early stages this was actual really successful, and at the very least they got "fashion buzz" when Spectacles came out. 2. They highlighted that Spectacles have a big light go on when recording, which helped blunt some of the "creepiness factor". In fact, I think they did a largely good job of positioning Spectacles as "fun way to take video with friends" as opposed to Glass's "cyborg assistant" approach.
I'm sure that if snapchat spectacles had been priced lower, every middle schooler would have gotten them. Driving the market/trend by mass adoption.
I don't think it's worth the cost for me, but for those who just enjoy using technology and playing with the newest thing, I can see why you'd want one. Plus, I'm sure they make nice gifts.
I don't really buy that they're seen as rich people jewelry. It's less than an iPhone and priced like a budget or fashion brand watch.
Of course, this could be my bias showing! To me, the Apple Watch is cheap enough that you'd consider getting one as a gift for someone special, so not show-off expensive but just expensive enough. Indeed I've seen them given as such.
Making it look easy...is very very hard.
It's to easy to be seduced by (it looks) easy. But Snap won't be the last, will they :)
Mauro Usability Science
That's us! We're the mistake :-D
We'll get our revenge though. We control everything you mfers see, hear, buy, and think. If you look down on us, get ready for your phone to be the new heroin. If you like us, you can be free and dance with us and sample the earthly delights of the real world. We will be Neo, you can elect to be Morpheus or Trinity. Or we can be the machines in zero-one. Maybe that fits better.
Enjoy your new paradise losers.
/s
Here’s to hoping they get highly discounted and dumped on eBay/amazon.
If these glasses had waterproof headphones I know tons of people who would snap them sup.
Same as google glass. The tech wasn't the issue
So, IMO it's not hugely successful just not out an outright failure.
That said, they have shipped a lot of hardware over time, and made some reasonable profit from mice / keyboards.