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Comment by zooq_ai | Hacker News Reader

Before the bandwagon jumps on "Metaverse is dead", Meta is pursuing multiple headsets, devices strategy and trying to find the right Features / Price mix.

Quest 2 is the most successful headset and it seem to have the perfect balance. Quest 3 although great, probably is slightly expensive for the mass market. But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years and Meta's strategy will pay dividends.

It's Ray-ban smart glasses is already a huge hit. Like a startup, you just have to keep iterating and I'm glad zuck is on it

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If anything, what I’ve heard from friends at or adjacent to Meta is that they’re paring back metaverse ambitions and capabilities on their future devices because of the success of the Ray-Bans glasses and the relatively middling sales of the Quest 3.

The Ray-Bans are also a weird anomaly since they’re leaning on the Ray-Bans designer pricing to justify a lot of the cost. If you’re already buying a pair of luxury sunglasses that cost close to $200, what’s another $100 to get the smart version?

I'm constantly losing, scratching, or breaking sunglasses. I buy them at $30 tops, not $300.

Sounds like there is an obvious feature for having FindMy / location beacons in your smart sunglasses.

Not FindMy, FixMy.

Some of us can’t live without glasses and can’t afford to be this careless.

In my experience I tend to lose my sunglasses less when they’re expensive :)

And I keep my sunglasses in my car's glove compartment to use when I'm driving, with the only times I wear them being then and when I'm doing physical activity (running, sports, etc).

New, less physically risky use cases for sunglasses will not appear in my life just because I get a more expensive pair of them.

Don’t understand the appeal being a spy cam for Facebook, but to each their own. The subsidized quest is on borrowed time if it keeps losing crazy billions a quarter as it currently does.

> But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years and Meta's strategy will pay dividends.

You mean lose billions within an unclear race that may ultimately lead to commodity prices like TVs?

>But there will be a chatGPT moment for Metaverse in the next 5 years

Honestly I doubt it.

ChatGPT is a free service that is genuinely helpful. For the Metaverse you need to buy the headset and the hardware to run it for what? Wasting time in a virtual store instead of just using a UI? Using it on a worst version of VRchat?

> It's Ray-ban smart glasses is already a huge hit.

Sure, "huge hit". Anecdote but the only time Ive ever seen anyone wear one was when I interviewed at meta and one of the folks interviewing me was wearing them.

Also, completely anecdotal, but the only people I’ve ever seen wearing them are Facebook employees.

I'm getting Google Glass flashbacks.

Here's Nat Friedman saying he's a DAU of them: https://x.com/natfriedman/status/1796986709751759304

> DAU

"Daily active user" apparently.

DAU is really a common terminology used in mobile web apps and games(aka modern day tobacco and gambling).

Well now we know at least one person uses them.

He's the CEO of EssilorLuxottica saying that they've sold more units of the latest version in a few months than the previous version did in 2 years.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/n...

These things ARE selling, the product is just early.

The CEO of a company selling them says he likes them, and they are selling more quickly than a product which flopped. I am not particularly swayed by this information!

Hope you're sitting down, because the next iPhone is going to be the Best iPhone Ever.

I would absolutely die of laughter if Tim Cook came on stage and said "we worked really hard and we think you will agree, this iPhone is definitely in our top 3 iPhone models ever released. It is really quite good. Seriously, its nearly as good as last year's model, which was great!"

Anecdotal but of the few people that showed me their smart ray bans, 0 actually wear them, let alone use the smart functionality.

After 10 years of building headsets and 5 years of selling them at scale Facebook has fewer than 10 million MAU on Quest. That's $30-50 BILLION spent for maybe 8-9M MAU.

The Ray-bans aren't AR or VR, they're sunglasses with a built in webcam. What a joke.

What a total failure and the fanboys pretending it's not.

Which other products out there cost tens of billions and gave fewer than ten million monthly users?

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