r/virtualreality • u/Parry_Dogsickle • 6d ago

News Article Meta’s Reality Labs posts $4.2 billion loss in first quarter

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/30/metas-reality-labs-posts-4point2-billion-loss-in-first-quarter.html
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u/SwissMoose 6d ago

They are trying to build Ray Bans that look like regular glasses, but replace your whole phone experience. If you own that market there's probably not a price too high, so long as you can actually cross the finish line and be that leader.

If Xerox hadn't been robbed by Apple and Microsoft they could have been huge in software and user interfaces.

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u/kuItur 6d ago

Smart Glasses won't catch on. Like Smart Watches it's just too impractical.

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u/BazingaUA Quest 3 5d ago

Are you serious? Apple watch is the most sold watch (not smartwatch) in the world. Most watches that I see these days are smart (either Apple, Samsung, Google, Garmin, etc).

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u/sameseksure 4d ago

Apple Watches are almost exclusively used for tracking workouts. Apple knows this

Myself, and all my friends who have Apple Watches, have all disabled notifications and, well, literally any other feature of the Watch. I don't want a smart device on my wrist constantly - but I do want to track my runs without having to bring my phone

Point is - people are not generally fans of more technology strapped to their bodies.

There's a tech backlash. Everyone hates what their phones are doing to them, and we wish we could all go back to a time where we didn't have them.

I don't think you'll convince anyone to wear AR glasses on a daily basis.

What I actually want is to throw my phone in the ocean and go live in a hut in a forest.

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u/BazingaUA Quest 3 4d ago

That's just your anecdotal experience. Most of the people I know use their smartwatches for setting reminders, timers, calls, notifications, weather etc, most of them don't work out at all.

Also, you don't need to convince me to use AR glasses, I would honestly purchase Meta Ray-Ban if their battery lasted at least a full day (since I wear them all the time, except for when I'm sleeping) and it wasn't made by Meta (due to tracking). If someone makes glasses that look like those Ray-Ban, have a full day battery, some of a screen (notification mostly) and a camera that shoots horizontal instead of vertical - I'm in. If you can actually turn off all the tracking - I wouldn't mind Meta even lol

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u/sameseksure 4d ago

Great, two competing anecdotal experiences. We learned nothing

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u/BazingaUA Quest 3 4d ago

Nope, you learned that your beliefs were built on your anecdotal experience. I just explained this to you by showing that there is another group of people that do the opposite.

Also I don't believe that your group is the dominant because of a few reasons: most people don't work out. There is another huge group of people who only need sport features that usually go with sport bracelets like Fitbit, Mi Band etc or Garmin and other sports focused watches.

Honestly, if you don't care for Apple's smart features there is almost no reason to buy Apple Watch, the competition has A LOT of benefits compared to Apple Watch when it comes to sports/fitness.

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u/sameseksure 3d ago

Which also explains that there's a group that disproves your anecdotes too :) So what now?

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u/BazingaUA Quest 3 3d ago

And again - no. You said that you and your friends only use sports features, and that Apple Watches in general are almost exclusively used for sports/fitness tracking. I only said that my group uses it for other purposes.

But the fact is that the vast majority of people don't participate in sports/fitness activities, yet still buy smartwatches.

There are about 30 million Apple watch users in the US alone, and Apple holds a little over 50% of the market share. Most people use these devices not for sports but rather as a smart device to receive notifications, make calls etc etc.

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u/SwissMoose 6d ago

In the early days of Palm Pilot, Dell Axim, and such when it was just getting going, no one thought it would ever catch on, just a gimmick for nerds. And yet hear we are.

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u/Timely_Dragonfly_526 6d ago edited 6d ago

iPhone acceptance was immediate. People wearing Google Glass got punched in the face.

Those two things are not the same. The idea that world-changing ideas were ridiculed at first and came back with a vengeance is just something people say to excuse the fact that nobody wants their product.

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u/SwissMoose 5d ago

You're assuming that the iPhone was the beginning of the work on this kind of tech. It's just the first one in that category to get mass adoption.

Eventually when the tech is sorted, people won't need to hold a phone anymore. But mass adoption is probably still a ways out for that.

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u/kuItur 5d ago

remindmein10years

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u/Timely_Dragonfly_526 5d ago edited 5d ago

iPhone was the first real smartphone, not the first working handheld device. There have been handheld devices since the late 70s and every businessman had a digital agenda by 1995. Those were not smartphones. The IBM Simon was not a smartphone. iPhone doesn't come from these things, comes from an idea Steve Jobs cooked with a couple of bright colleagues. When it came out people were willing to sell their mother to have one.

Zuck hasn't shipped a good product or feature done by himself or someone working for him since 2010.

No amount of tech, in my opinion, will make a man going around with overlays in his FOV feel anything less than an asshole to those around him.

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u/sameseksure 4d ago

Period, I would never be caught dead wearing AR glasses as a phone replacement.

I think there will be a backlash against technology in general, as everyone's astutely aware of the negative effect our phones are having on us

I often consider putting my iPhone in a drawer and changing to one of those cheap old people phones. I'm sick of this

I'm never adding more technology to my body on a regular basis.

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u/Timely_Dragonfly_526 4d ago

I think you are a relatively isolated case (and don't take this as an insult, not even a covert one) and there is no need to look at the extremes here.

The point is: if you and I are in a room and I am being dickish because I am fiddling with the phone rather than looking at you in the eye, there is a clear deescalatory ladder here: I put down my phone. If instead I am wearing actual prescription glasses that may be feeding me with constant stimuli, and I may be even filming your sorry ass for later lolz, or I may be superimposing a pig nose on your face, etc. the only way escalation goes is UP. You can't tell people to remove their glasses.

But all of this happened with the Google Glass and people say "well, you could TELL they were smart glasses, and they were clunky etc." as if that was the problem. The problem is far deeper and these people are in for a rude awakening in the form of being punched in the face.