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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

> Once you get the form factor fixed and comfortable everything will change

Will it? Even if you offer people AR glasses and smartphones at the same price, I'd expect most people to pick the phone. Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.

The VR/AR modality struggles when OEMs rely on unique native experiences as a selling point. There's no "killer app" for VR a even decade after the original Oculus DTK. Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to go work on building cruise missiles, to give you an idea of how awful VR's prospects are.

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> Nobody wants to tap their glasses on a Square reader to buy coffee, or ask their specs to take a picture.

Nobody used their cell phone to take pictures, that's what a camera is for! And music came from a Walkman. But then the iPhone came out, and the rest is history. A pair of glasses that takes pictures could very well be the future. We won't know until after it's happened though.

No, actually people were taking photos the very second phones had cameras added, which was well before smartphones. I have photographic proof

Because the camera you have in your pocket right now was always better than the one you left at home.

People abandoned laptops as a primary computing platform for phones with small screens because the "masses" prefer convenience above anything else. Those phones eventually increased their screen size, but never got to laptop size of course.

People don't want to have to put on a headset to doomscroll.

I was going to say - you can't retcon feature phones to claim that camera phones and MP3 player functionality didn't exist. It did, and it was super popular!

VR/AR is not a "faster horses" problem. It's a "buy my 40-foot-tall horse with 9 legs" one. The market has several high-quality headsets to choose from, and none of them are selling like hotcakes. The people have spoken, even at $1,300 I expect Meta's glasses to be a flop.

You'd use it in conjunction with a phone, just like a smart watch. It wouldn't replace your phone.

Smart watches aren't particularly popular, even at the sub-smartphone price point.

Not sure where you live but everyone is wearing them in LA. And they are super popular in China, especially among children who use them in place of a phone.

I don't live in LA. People without a smartwatch outnumber smartwatch owners 50:1 here in the sticks, as far as I can tell.

> Palmer Luckey sold Oculus to go work on building cruise missiles, to give you an idea of how awful VR's prospects are.

I too once abandoned a bowl of cereal for a steak dinner, but that says nothing about the quality of the cereal.

Luckey owned a cereal bar. He sold it to Zuck, who spent $46 billion and a business rebrand trying to make breakfast compete with dinner.

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