Would META spend $25 billion/year indefinitely without earning a profit? I don't know but other scenarios seem plausible too.
Or perhaps it's a huge selfish gamble thinking, let's get our product perfected before everyone realizes how big this is. This sounds like a small startup more worried about having their unknown product's secrets stolen rather than how to market it so enough know it exists.
The business angle also doesn't make sense to me. Maybe during severe lockdowns it might have had a chance, but now we should be betting on the tech and performance/price improving in service of games first and foremost.
I hope SteamVR wins, otherwise I don't care whether Apple or Meta's device wins. And where is MS in this, too late as usual?
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/carmack-wants-a-250-v...
> As a "counterpoint" to the push for the Quest Pro in the Meta offices, Carmack says he "personally still [tries] to drum up interest internally in this vision of a super cheap, super lightweight headset." His rallying cry, he says, is a target of "$250 and 250 grams" for a headset that cuts out as many extraneous features as possible while still being usable (the Quest Pro weighs 722 grams, while the Quest 2 is 503 grams). That could help bring "super light comforts" to "more people at low-end price points."
Without experiencing Project Cambria/Quest Pro, I can still imagine the hard-to-believe-it's-not-real feeling of presence with the incremental improvements + real-time facial expressions. That does seem important to be able to demonstrate. I haven't as yet heard reviews that express this though.
That is, IMO, the key question behind this entire discussion. Zuck certainly thinks so. I'm sure a lot of people at Meta and outside think so as well. And their detractors obviously don't.
There isn't going to be any consensus on whether Meta is spending too much money or not because ultimately it is a referendum on the concept of VR/AR/Metaverse itself.
Of course shareholders really want to count actual monetary returns as progress, and it's the job of the CEO to decide whether prioritizing short term gains is actually in the best interests of the company or not.
What? Virtual Boy was released almost 30 years ago, that's a consumer product that sold in the same ballpark as the Oculus Rift.
Some of us quite like it.
Is that an amount to create an initial iPhone? While it was awesome, if it stayed like that, it wouldn't change the industry. It would seem fair to add up all the R&D costs that went into getting iPhone to where it is today, which will be much higher.
Dtto Tesla. For Apollo, we know the total.
Huge citation needed. You can't just lie and will it to be true. :D
I’m all in on EV, but Tesla blew it by failing to focus on the Bolt and Leaf market. And their SWEs are now apparently spending their time solving twitters HR problems.
Maybe a better way to state it is that Tesla has been alive and independent longer than ~1895/1900 American car companies.