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Comment by hindsightbias | Hacker News Reader

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hindsightbias·

200K x $3500 = $700M already

It’ll do fine.

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Plus, much of the tech they developed for it has gone into other products - spatial audio being the prime example.

I don't think it's time for an obituary that counts the spinoffs and devkit revenue. FB and Apple got the timeline wrong, but the AR story isn't over. Looking down at phones still fundamentally sucks and eventually AR will be good enough.

Point of comparison: Steve Jobs started talking about the iPhone when someone asked him about the next big thing at the Macintosh premier in 1984. 10 years later, he was fired from Apple and working on bespoke workstations. 20 years later, Palm/Blackberry owned the smartphone market. 30 years later, Apple owned the smartphone market. These stories take time.

I’m still waiting for my Knowledge Navigator: https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0?si=8q1W3ue40Kw_HRN0

To add to this, something akin to the iPad was first envisioned by Alan Kay in 1972 [1], then in the early 2000s, Microsoft was pushing the tablet PC hard to fulfill Gates’ dream of a paperless office. In 2010 Apple dropped the iPad, which seemed to finally get the formula mostly right, and 13 years later many are still waiting for the software to realize the potential of the hardware.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

Someone here estimated the 5k patents alone at about a billion. Then there's unit production cost and set up costs. They'll need way more than 200k to break even.

I doubt the revenue after cost of goods is much more than $1000 each with how expensive the displays and chips are.

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