（预览）Meta加码智能眼镜，Nvidia与Intel合作，以及YouTube隐形巨头札记
Ben Thompson的核心判断是，Meta定价799美元的Ray-Ban Display，重要的不是镜片上的屏幕，而是随产品搭售的Meta Neural Band。 这款腕带读取电信号，支持隐蔽手势，甚至能让用户把手放在口袋里完成书写；Thompson认为，这是增强现实不可或缺的输入突破。他此前亲自测试过该产品，并表示：“我百分之百确信它能正常工作。”
9月30日以799美元出货，让Meta的眼镜项目从高价原型走向可量产的消费平台。 Thompson原本预计售价会达到四位数，听到799美元时“下巴都掉下来了”；Meta可能在每台产品上“亏得很惨”，但在Reality Labs已经投入1000亿美元之后，补贴早期用户、建立需求、提升良率并摊薄模具成本，可能仍然值得。
产品的严格限制可能反而是优势，因为Meta没有试图把手机重新装到用户脸上。 它连接iOS或Android，只提供少量Facebook/Meta专属体验，甚至把地图限制在步行导航；但Thompson认为，最终的界面应当“由AI主导”：用户需要时直接出现上下文信息，而不是让用户在传统App之间来回寻找。
Meta可以借助早期用户找到这个品类的切入口，而不是假装自己已经知道杀手级应用是什么。 Thompson认为现有Ray-Ban眼镜的销量好于预期，Oakley产品线和居中的摄像头也让运动场景成为潜在重点。目标是打造少数不可或缺的体验，而不是“堆一堆垃圾，让用户自己翻找其中的珍珠”。
Andrew Sharp对普及前景的质疑是：有用的功能，仍未必足以让用户改变已经固化的行为。 在他看来，一个平时不戴眼镜的人，必须接受把设备戴在脸上约6小时的续航，充电盒则提供30小时续航；而字幕和实时翻译解决的又是他很少遇到的问题。Thompson的回应是，Meta可能只打算先卖“10万台左右”，怀疑者本来就不在首批目标市场内。
两位主持人都认可Meta的野心，同时承认成功可能让无处不在的监控变得正常。 Sharp认为如果所有人都能录下对话，主流普及将呈现反乌托邦色彩；Thompson同意这是一个“讨论不足、重视不够”的问题，可能“不可避免、无法逃脱”，而且是他厌恶的结果。两人同样不认同Zuckerberg关于VR将成为电视未来的判断：个性化头显会取代朋友围坐在一起观看共享屏幕的场景。
1. Neural Band补上了智能眼镜缺失的交互界面
Meta的Ray-Ban Display将于9月30日上市，售价799美元，在右侧镜片中加入屏幕，可显示消息、视频通话、导航、AI结果、实时字幕和翻译。用户可以捏指完成选择，用拇指划过握紧的手来滑动，双击呼出Meta AI，或在空中转动手掌调节音量。
Sharp起初认为在“空中”书写文字毫无用处。Thompson揭示了这一功能的关键价值：腕带能够检测手腕处的电信号，因此用户可以把手放在口袋里书写，在地铁上安静回复消息，既不用出声，也不会做出明显手势。
Thompson将当前替代方案概括为两类：Vision Pro和Oculus代表的基于摄像头的手部追踪，以及实体控制器。腕带提供的是与增强显示配套的“增强输入”：“你可以看着某个东西，没人知道；你也可以和某个东西交互，没人知道。”
他的信心来自直接体验。几年前，这项技术在他的手腕上失效，当时他被告知不同类型的手腕可能带来挑战；但他去年再次试用时，设备运行完美。这一反转支撑了他关于该界面确实可用的确定性判断。
2. 每一种计算范式都需要原生控制系统
Thompson的历史类比是：PC与鼠标、键盘配套，iPod靠滚轮建立交互，iPhone则让多点触控成为基础能力。iPhone之前的智能手机让用户使用微型键盘或手写笔；智能眼镜同样需要适配自身物理场景的原生界面，而不是沿用其他设备的交互方式。
Vision Pro说明了输入设计失误的代价。Thompson称，Mike Rockwell认为Siri表现疲弱是严重的产品约束，因为替代方案——“在空中用虚拟键盘一下一下敲字”——体验极差。这也解释了为什么一位曾直接被Siri折磨的高管，最终会接手该团队。
Sharp的反驳仍然很实际：即使是在口袋里隐形书写，也需要用户建立新的肌肉记忆，而手机已经更适合输入文字。Thompson认为这只是V1阶段的质疑——“总得从某个地方开始”——并强调，即使还不能全面击败手机，先交付一个可信的原生界面也具有里程碑意义。
仅靠语音无法解决问题，因为语音会扰乱公共场景，而且具有“模态性”：一个边走边口述消息的人，看起来像是在自言自语。因此，腕带的价值不只是提高输入精度，更在于保持隐蔽，让产品更有可能在日常公共环境中使用。
3. 799美元的定价把实验变成制造项目
Thompson原本认为，眼镜加腕带的售价会远超1000美元，尤其是在Orion之后。Orion是一款独立原型，Thompson称其距离上市仍有数年时间，当前设想可能指向2027年，而且需要独立电脑、蜂窝网络能力和外置计算盒。“他说799美元时，我的下巴真的掉下来了。”
Meta可能在每台设备上“亏得很惨”，但Thompson欢迎这种激进定价：Reality Labs已经投入约1000亿美元，“再多花几十亿美元又算什么”，关键是先建立用户基础？他认为腕带是Meta的专有优势，因为Apple和Google都没有展示出同等能力，但也承认Apple可能还有未公开的研发项目。
出货本身就能降低成本。Thompson举了一个简单的模具例子：100万美元投资分摊到100万台设备上，每台增加1美元；分摊到1000万台，每台只增加0.10美元。反复生产还会提升工艺效率和良率，减少制造商必须报废的半成品数量：“做得越多，东西就越便宜。”
Sharp补充了供应链层面的限制：英国《金融时报》报道，Meta依赖中国供应商Goertek。他更广泛的观点是，PRC制造业的专业能力让尖端电子产品得以用799美元这样的价格触达消费者；Thompson对此表示认同，并称Apple帮助建立了一个如今惠及整个电子行业的能力生态。
4. 产品限制让Meta避免造出一部更差的手机
与Orion不同，Ray-Ban Display依赖iOS或Android手机，只运行一组受到严格限制的Facebook/Meta专属体验。其地图似乎使用OpenStreetMap或类似数据，只提供步行而非驾车导航；Thompson认为这种克制“是好事”，而不是令人尴尬的功能缺失。
他警告说，把“手机装到脸上”是一个陷阱，Apple和Google尤其可能掉进去。Vision Pro支持iPad App，虽然迅速补齐了内容库存，却也把大量没有针对新媒介优化的体验带了进来；Meta从零开始，反而必须只构建真正适合这一界面的功能。
Thompson预计，长期来看，这款产品将“由AI主导”，用即时信息取代App导航。用户离家时，系统可能已经知道目的地，因此自动显示相关路线；这会形成一层环境式计算：系统看见佩戴者所看见的东西，同时几乎不要求用户主动操作。
手机仍然是终极App平台：算力强、连接能力完整，尺寸也足以完成几乎所有事情。因此，这些眼镜应该作为补充设备出售，专门把少数任务做到独特而出色，“而不是让你得到一部恰好绑在脸上的更差版本手机”。
5. Meta需要先找到切入口，才能宣称自己掌握手机的未来
Thompson把这次发布策略与自己的订阅业务作了比较：Stratechery最初每周提供2篇文章，之后通过订阅增加更新频率，而不是收回用户原本能看到的内容。新硬件也应让用户觉得自己获得了想要的东西，而不是被迫接受已有能力的劣化替代品。
出货后，Meta可以观察谁会购买、谁会放弃眼镜，以及持续佩戴者究竟在做什么。Thompson认为现有Ray-Ban型号的销量好于预期；他还提到Oakley产品、明确的运动场景定位，以及居中的摄像头，这些因素都可能让运动成为该品类的切入口，就像健康和健身后来成为Apple Watch的核心场景。
Sharp认为，改变习惯需要一款明显更好的产品，尤其是对本来不戴眼镜的人。他估计这款设备的续航可能只有约6小时，充电盒则有30小时续航；实时翻译“真的非常酷”，但他想象不出自己会有足够多的使用场景。
Thompson回应称，Meta暂时不需要说服Sharp。只要先卖出“10万台左右”，就能在没有他这类怀疑者的情况下完成早期验证，从而找到一种增量式、具有吸引力的使用场景，再逐步叠加能力。“Display”这个略显干燥的名字也很贴切：它“刻意低调承诺，却可能带来超预期表现”。
6. 技术上行空间背后，是尚未解决的社会代价
Zuckerberg的框架是：增强现实将成为手机的未来，虚拟现实将成为电视的未来；两位主持人对此看法分化。Thompson考虑过眼镜是否能让移动计算从“掏出设备”变成“只需移动视线”，但表示手机替代仍然“遥遥无期”。
两人都不认为VR电视应当成为理想默认选项。Thompson称那“有点像Bugman世界”，想象自己困在一间小屋里逃往另一种现实；Sharp则更喜欢大电视、沙发和朋友一起观看，而不是每个人都进入各自的个性化现实。
Sharp更深层的反对意见是反乌托邦式的：如果Meta成功，这些眼镜可能变成无处不在的录音设备。Thompson完全认同，并将担忧延伸到始终监听的AI吊坠；他还指出，即使是不带显示屏的眼镜，也能放大周围人的声音——在嘈杂环境中很有用，但可能不合乎社交规范，甚至像Sharp开玩笑说的那样，成为一种“暴露年龄”的工具。
两人的最终矛盾没有解决：Sharp向Meta敢于出货、接受现场演示失误，并在多年批评下坚持推进的做法致意，但仍然担心这种野心成功后会创造怎样的世界。对于隐私与技术进步之间的交换，Thompson给出的结论很直接：“这可能不可避免、无法逃脱，而我讨厌它。”
Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how are you doing?
Doing well. Glad you decided to show up again after we kicked your Commanders' rear end last week.
A very humbling night last week at Lambeau Field, yes. This is why I'm not a Commanders fan. I'm a liberated NFL fan, not bound to any team, and it's a much better way to experience that sport and probably any sport, I would say.
Yeah, living a life without commitment. It's very sad.
That's true.
I'm glad you've rationalized that to yourself.
Indeed. Well, you're in Wisconsin now and not in Menlo Park. You don't have a pair of smart glasses on. How are you holding up in this time of FOMO?
Very disappointed in myself. I just dropped the ball on multiple angles here. I had committed to go to New York to do this YouTube thing, which I don't regret. I think we'll get to that in a little bit.
And so I'm like, "Oh, how am I going to make it to the West Coast for a Wednesday keynote?" By the way, Meta, can we do keynotes earlier in the week? They always do them on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Very difficult for me—
Inconvenient—
—personally.
—for the Stratechery publishing schedule.
Right. Apple does it on Mondays—
Note to Mark.
—and Tuesdays, okay?
Yeah.
And so I'm like, "Oh, I'll have to make sure to watch it. 5:00 PM Pacific?"
Mm-hmm.
What a weird time to have a keynote. I guess you could sit around your living room as your evening entertainment and watch Mark Zuckerberg onstage.
Well, they're trying to make this cool, Ben. They're trying to make these glasses cool, so start it later in the day and have sort of a festival atmosphere for people. I understand the thinking. That's part of the deal here.
Yeah. I'm just annoyed because I realized I—
You could have made it—
—there, and I could have tried them out. But I did not. I've not tried them. I can only view from afar and draw on my experience with Orion—
Yeah.
—which was sort of my thinking. I'm like, "They're not going to launch something like this for a while. It's fine. I kind of know what's going on." Anyhow, yeah, I do have FOMO. I have not tried them out, but I'm excited.
But we're going to talk about them.
It's cool they exist.
1. Meta Unveils Display Glasses
For anybody who missed it, on Wednesday evening in Menlo Park, Meta unveiled its first version of smart glasses with a built-in screen. The Meta Ray-Ban Display will be in stores September 30 and will sell for $799. This is the first version of smart glasses with a built-in screen that will be available for any of us to purchase beginning September 30. The right lens—
Well, unless you count Google Glass.
What's that?
But yes, unless you count Google Glass back in the day.
Yes. I miss the Google Glass era, but Google Glass was sort of the forefather to all of this. The right lens on the glasses features a screen that can show text messages, video calls, turn-by-turn directions in Maps, and visual results from queries to Meta's AI service.
And per a rundown from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, the glasses also introduce a new control system. While users can still swipe along the frame as with previous models, the primary interface is now hand gestures detected by a neural wristband strapped around the wearer's dominant hand. The user can select items by pinching their thumb and index finger, swipe through items by sliding a thumb across their gripped hand, double-tap their thumb to invoke Meta's AI voice assistant, or twist their hand midair to adjust music volume and other controls.
In addition to app interactions and the ability to handle AI queries, the glasses include a live-caption feature that displays spoken words in real time, including translations similar to closed captions on a TV. The video-calling function lets wearers see the person they're speaking with while sharing their own point of view. Users can reply to texts by sending an audio recording or dictating a response. Later this year, the wristband will add another option: handwriting words in the air. That last feature sounds incredibly useless, but I guess potentially cool.
What are you talking about?
Handwriting words in the air?
I'm sorry—you... No. Okay, I don't think you grasp why this is a big deal and why it's very exciting.
I clearly don't, because I read it and I was like, "Why'd they even include that in the rundown?" But sure, tell me.
So in this world, assume you're wearing a pair of smart glasses, which I'm sure you'll be doing on day one.
Oh, yeah. September 30.
How do you expect to communicate while wearing them?
Using my words.
So you're going to be on the subway, replying to a message, mumbling like a crazy man?
Oh, I see. So if I'm in mixed company, I can't be talking and dictating text messages like a psychopath. I still feel like you would look as ridiculous if you're handwriting words in the air with the glasses on. But I guess maybe that's better.
2. The Neural Band Changes Input
Why are you handwriting words in the air? No, this is the key thing. Sorry, I'll stop stringing you along. The key thing about this announcement, beyond just the fact that they shipped something with a screen, is the Neuralink bracelet.
Yeah.
You can have your hand in your pocket, and you can be writing letters. No one knows what you're doing. You should not be anchored on the Vision Pro, where the Vision Pro has incredible gesture control, but that is a function of the cameras seeing your hands. The two options to date have been, number one, you have cameras that view your hands. The Vision Pro does it very well. Oculus does it as well, the latest models. Or you have a controller where you actually have a physical item in your hand that you're manipulating.
Right.
So those have been the two options for input to date. The Neuralink bracelet detects the electrical signals in your wrist to determine what you're doing.
Mm-hmm.
And it works. I actually used it a few years ago. It didn't work for me, and they were saying at the time that there are just different wrist types, so sometimes it's harder to do. I used it again last year, and it worked perfectly.
So I have 100% confidence that this is going to work. I think they might have had the handwriting working last year. I feel like I tried it. But regardless—
And when you tried it, was it something that you could envision yourself doing on a regular basis?
I think you're a skeptic. I really don't think—
Okay.
—you’re grasping this.
If they had put that in the copy or in this German story from Bloomberg, I still probably would have looked at it as useless, but less useless than handwriting words in the air the way I was imagining when I read the story.
No, this is... The Neuralink bracelet is the big deal here. Every new paradigm needs a new user interface, and one of the challenges with the whole glasses paradigm is—and one of the challenges for Apple with Vision Pro—it was actually one of the reasons why Mike Rockwell, who led the Vision Pro, was very eager to fix Siri. He felt very limited and constrained by the fact that Vision Pro was dependent on Siri for input in a major way, and it sucked.
From what I've heard, he was very frustrated with the team and had tons and tons of feedback. That's one of the reasons why he's now in charge of the team, even though he's an executive who gets stuff done. He was also an executive at Apple who had a very real interest and frustration and a deep, tangible sense of understanding of why Siri sucking was a problem for other products.
With the phone, Siri sucking was whatever. You just type on the phone. If you have the Vision Pro, the alternative is pecking on a virtual keyboard in the air, which sucks.
So there was a real issue with the lack of Siri on the Vision Pro. But the issue isn't just how well it works. It could work perfectly, and you're still going to have the issue that the allure of something like this is that you can use it when you're out and about. It is augmented reality. You can be looking at the real world and getting information as you go. The problem is, what's the input method?
Yeah.
And all new paradigms come up with a new input method. Steve Jobs walked through this. At the original iPhone event, he said, “Well, you know, the PC had the mouse and the keyboard, and the iPod had the wheel.” I think the iPod was probably elevated a little past its purpose there, but to Apple it was very important.
Mm-hmm.
It is certainly a very important thing in terms of the iPhone. The iPhone was multitouch—the idea that you use your fingers. You go back to the smartphones before, and you had 2 alternatives. You had a keyboard that you pecked away at, and you’re a big BlackBerry fan, so I know you get that one.
Absolutely.
Or you had a stylus. And he said, “Why do we need a stylus when we have a stylus built in?” Our fingers.
Our fingers.
Right?
Yeah.
And so that was critical to the entire smartphone paradigm. You could make the whole thing a screen, get all that functionality, but still get all the input methods that you need. And to be fair to you, there were a lot of skeptics at the time about people touching a screen to type when they could just use a keyboard, right? You and Steve Ballmer were really not seeing the vision.
Oh, God.
Well, listen, I hear you. And honestly, when you were describing it, I was thinking to myself, “Well, maybe that’s just muscle memory that we’ll all develop, and everybody’s going to be sitting together on the subway drawing letters in their pockets, and that’s how we’ll communicate.” At the same time, a phone is just better at that right now. And so I would say unless this is a standalone device that replaces the phone, I can't imagine very many people using this sorts of technology.
You’re such a hater. You’re out here taking V1, saying no one can use it—
Just asking fair questions.
No, you have to start somewhere. The reason why this is momentous, and the reason why I found the price shocking—
Mm-hmm.
—is I did not realize that the Meta Neural Band—there’s—you could actually go buy glasses that project your phone into your field of vision.
Yeah.
That’s actually not a new thing. To do it in the way that they’ve done it, I talked to someone who was there, and they said it’s dramatically smaller and much more socially acceptable than the Orion glasses were.
Mm-hmm.
I thought the Orion glasses were fairly impressive. They weren’t as bad as I expected them to be.
I mean, they blew your mind last year, but they were also, what, $3,000 or something crazy?
No, probably more than that, and they were years out. I think the current thought is 2027, maybe. And again, that’s why I didn’t fly out there. I’m like, “Well, I’ve already seen what’s coming, and it’s not here yet.”
It’s going to be a couple years.
Yeah. So I’m very interested to compare what this is like to that, but the key is the input method, and the Neuralink bracelet was clearly—
The neural band.
—a key to Orion.
The Meta Neural Band is what they’re calling it.
They’ve changed the name a few times.
Okay.
Yeah, they acquired this company called Control Labs 4 or 5 years ago that had actually developed this core technology, and I’m telling you, it works. It’s augmented input, which is a key component of augmented reality.
Mm-hmm.
The idea is you have a display that is additive to your real-world experience. The problem with voice input is it’s disruptive. It’s a modal sort of situation where you’re just walking along the street or you’re out and about, and you start talking to yourself.
“Who’s that guy talking to himself?”
There’s—
Yeah.
Yeah, and so that’s always been a problem and a hang-up. This idea that you can be looking at something and no one knows, and you can also be interacting with something and no one knows, is pretty critical to making this category work. What shocked and surprised me is that this aspect of it was deemed ready to ship, and ready to ship at a $799 price point.
Yeah.
Now, I don’t know—
$800 is unbelievable. How are they making that happen?
They might be taking a bath on it, which I don’t mind. I think this is interesting and compelling, and if you’re going to—look, they’ve spent $100 billion on Reality Labs. What’s a few billion dollars more to actually start getting this out there and start building something out to get that core user base?
Mm-hmm.
And this input method is what they have that no one has. Apple hasn’t shown anything like this. Apple doesn’t show stuff until they’re ready, so who knows? Maybe they have something similar. Google hasn’t shown this. But I like it. I love the aggressiveness. I don’t mind if they’re taking a bath. I don’t know what their bill of materials is.
By the way, another way to get the bill of materials down is to start shipping stuff, to start getting it out there.
Yeah.
And these are very limited. Orion was a full-on phone replacement.
Mm-hmm.
It had its own computer. That’s why you had the external brick, and it had cellular and all those sorts of things. You could use Orion and not need a phone. But the parts of the Orion experience that I found compelling as a demo, but not interesting in terms of the long term, were the parts of the experience that aped the iPhone.
Yeah.
They had an Instagram app on there. I’m like, “I could just look at Instagram on my phone.” And there’s a bit where it’s not augmented reality. It’s taking over too much of my face.
Mm-hmm.
The whole point is to—
It’s ambient.
Exactly. The whole point is to experience the real world.
Yeah.
3. Limited Apps Keep Glasses Focused
These are very limited. They connect to your smartphone—iOS and Android. The number of apps is very limited. They’re all Facebook apps. Even the Maps app in here isn’t Google Maps. It’s not Waze. I have a Waze aside we could get to.
Oh, boy. Can’t wait.
They’re using OpenStreetMap or whatever. It’s only doing walking directions. It’s not doing driving directions. They’re all Facebook-specific apps that tie into the Facebook app, and they can use the limited bandwidth and capabilities. Apple allows background apps, and Android allows background apps. It’s very constrained.
Mm-hmm.
I think that’s a good thing.
Why?
I actually think that’s an advantage because I think you’re going to make progress on this front not by trying to rebuild a phone on your face. I think that’s a trap.
Mm-hmm.
And it’s a trap that I think Apple and Google are liable to fall into. I think Apple fell into that with the Vision Pro by supporting iPad apps. I see the allure on day 1 when you don’t have any developers. You have—
You need some apps.
—a bunch of app experiences.
Yeah.
Right. But the problem is it’s sort of a shortcut that you’re building in for everyone into the experience that’s not fully optimized for what it is. Facebook has to start from zero, and they have to deliver experiences that are constrained, that make sense for the user interface and nothing more.
I think in the long run, the core of any experience like this has to be AI-dominated, where AI is figuring out and showing you what you need when you need it. It’s not a navigation paradigm. It’s not going to an app and doing X, Y, Z.
In other words—
It’s the sort of—
The future of this product is you walk outside your house, and the AI senses where you are and asks, “Do you want directions to where you’re going?” That sort of thing.
Right, or even—
So you don’t even have to use the Neural Band in that scenario.
Or it already knows where you’re going, and it sort of just pops up, and it’s there—
Yeah.
—and it’s like, “Go, go X, Y, Z.” Yeah, definitely. Apple’s moving to this with the Siri watch faces. The idea is that it sort of brings stuff up contextually. This isn’t a new idea. It’s not even a new idea on your watch in an augmented fashion, but I do think there’s something compelling about it being on your face, seeing what you see, and all the sorts of things that Meta talks about.
And again, having the input method, I think, is key. It's like—
Are you shocked that it's come this far in the last couple of years here?
I'm shocked that it's ready to ship at this price point. When I realized that they were talking about it and saying it was going to include the neural band, I immediately assumed we're in the four figures somewhere, and I figured somewhat high in that regard. I was already thinking about my update in my head: “Well, it's good that they're shipping. They're going to have to—this will help get the price down,” and so on. My jaw literally dropped when he said $799.
When you say getting the price down by shipping, how exactly does that work in practice?
Because by building stuff, it gets cheaper. You learn how to build it more efficiently. You figure out the things and optimize your processes. Obviously, there are the components that go into it, but the more of a component that's made, the cheaper it gets.
It's easier to reproduce.
Because you need all the tooling or whatever that goes into it. So if you invest $1 million in tooling and you make 1 million devices, you need to recoup $1 per device just to pay for the tooling.
Right.
If you sell 10 million devices, you only need to recoup $0.10 per device.
Mm-hmm.
The leverage on your cost gets better, but your yields get better because you figure out how to make it more efficiently, so you're throwing away fewer partially finished items.
Yeah.
This is just the learning curve that's a critical piece of manufacturing in general. Making stuff makes it cheaper. This is basically a general rule of any physical good.
Okay.
That makes sense. The price is pretty incredible. It's a footnote to the conversation about what these glasses are and what they mean for Meta, but the FT had a story this week on Meta's reliance on a Chinese supplier called Goertek to make these products. I was just reminded that a huge benefit of relying on PRC manufacturing expertise has been the ability to disperse cutting-edge innovations at a reasonable price point for consumers. If that sort of dynamic goes away, it will definitely hurt the ability to push the envelope on price the way Meta is doing here.
Well, not just price, but also what you build.
Yeah.
This is the positive side of the critique of Apple building up China's manufacturing. Apple built up this entire ecosystem of capability that every electronics manufacturer benefits from.
Totally. And you look back at some of the ways Apple pushed leading-edge innovations to mass consumers, that just would not have been possible if China didn't exist. Clearly, Meta is now as reliant as Apple is, at least in this area.
4. Shipping Reveals The Use Cases
The other thing that you wrote when you covered this keynote that I really identify with is that I like the idea of just pushing this to consumers and letting them determine what the killer use cases are. That's the other benefit of shipping before you have a great idea of exactly how people want to use this.
For sure. And again, even though it's fairly limited, they'll get lots of data on what's actually used, what isn't, and which consumers stick with it. People will buy it and then never wear them. For the ones that wear them, what are they actually using?
I think they already got this to a certain extent by shipping the Ray-Ban glasses, right?
Yeah.
They sold, I think, better than—
They did pretty well.
—than expected.
Yep.
And now it seems like there's a real sports focus. They launched their first version of Oakleys over the summer. The new one is very explicitly focused on this. The center-view camera is cool. Maybe it ends up being a killer sports accessory, sort of like how Apple ended up making the Apple Watch about health and fitness—
I was going to say—
—the Apple Watch, right?
It's exactly like the Apple Watch trajectory. Apple launches the Apple Watch, they don't really know what the area is going to be, and it gets carved out and turns into a nice little niche for them over the last 15 years.
Which is great. With the smartphone, everyone got lazy—not lazy, but the smartphone was so easy. Everyone thought, “Oh, wait, here's the deal. You already have a phone. How about I give you a phone that's 10,000 times more capable, entertaining, and engrossing? Does that sound like a good deal to you? Will you pay an extra $300 for that?”
Yeah.
Who's not going to take that deal, right? That was the challenge. I've talked about this in the context of the Vision Pro, where Apple didn't have the muscle of having to create a new product category because the iPhone was trivial. Then, with the AirPods, it's like, “Well, imagine if you had headphones but way better.”
You don't understand this, but you can just imagine it being the case.
Listen, I take—
Same thing with—
John Gruber's word for it: the best tech product in the history of civilization, AirPods 3. I might have to check them out based on his endorsement.
Yeah, that was pretty wild.
But whereas with all these categories, you have to—it's not just that you have to build a better one.
Mm-hmm.
You have to convince people why they should buy one at all.
Yeah.
And that's where, for the Watch, the health and fitness thing has ended up being a home run for Apple. Is it a grand slam? No, maybe more of a home run, but a home run is still pretty solid. That's really moving the score along.
Mm-hmm.
Moving the runner along. How many metaphors can I fit into this example?
And so maybe it's a sports thing. It makes sense for these Ray-Ban glasses. If you're just passively recording and not interacting, in sports you're busy. You don't have time to interact and do lots of other things.
Even there, shipping the Ray-Ban glasses established the foundation for this display one to come out.
Yeah.
The Mark Gurman article was really good because he had an extended interview with Andrew Bosworth and another Facebook vice president. One of the things Bosworth was talking about was—what's their name? EssilorLuxottica? I can't remember the exact full name.
Mm-hmm.
They were a little skeptical about putting the Ray-Ban name on these, so they weren't necessarily going to be labeled that. But there was a bit where, number one, they got it small enough and aesthetically pleasing enough that they were willing to lend their name to it.
They felt comfortable.
But also, they're happy with the products to date, right?
Yeah.
They're happy to lend their names to those, so why not extend it just a tad? It probably also helps that Facebook put several billion dollars into the company. That doesn't hurt either.
So do you like the name? The name feels pretty dry to me, and the code name for this project was apparently Hypernova. Meta Ray-Ban Hypernova sounds much cooler to me and conjures the futuristic nature of this project better than Meta Ray-Ban Display.
I like the name.
Okay.
Because I think it's a name that underpromises, with the potential to overdeliver. They have the Ray-Ban smart glasses. These are the same ones with the display. It's not—at some point, this will be a Hypernova product.
Okay.
I doubt it is today. But the goal is what's out there—
So we're taking baby steps right now.
—in 5 years, in 10 years.
Yeah.
That's right. And so: underpromise, potentially, hopefully overdeliver. I went no because I didn't try them.
Well, they release in 2 weeks.
I think that's wise.
You're going to have your opportunity. I can't believe how quickly these are going to be in stores.
Well, yeah, you have to—
I can't believe it's $800.
The closest place to try them is in Chicago.
Oh.
Which is not ideal. And then every—it's, like—
Road trip.
Booked out for 2 months. Yeah.
Here we go.
No, that’s the whole thing. To actually go and try them is going to be about as much trouble as it would have been to just fly to San Francisco, so I really screwed this one up.
5. Meta Reframes The Future Of Computing
Yes. Zuckerberg appeared on the TBPN podcast in Menlo Park. TBPN made the trip. After the keynote, one of the things he said was, “Augmented reality is the future of phones and virtual reality is the future of TVs.” What do you think of that framing?
I mean, in a rather stark departure from underpromise and overdeliver, I don’t know. It’s interesting. I did feel like there was a lot of cribbing from Charcuterie in some aspects of this presentation.
Okay.
One was the discussion of just-in-time UI and stuff coming up when you want it. That’s obviously something I’ve been big on.
Mm-hmm.
Suddenly, after skipping it in my interview with him last year—I reminded him about it—Zuckerberg is back on the, “Oh, actually, generative AI is going to solve the asset-creation problem for virtual reality,” which, duh, has seemed obvious to me for years. I’m not—
You’ve been there for about 2.5 years.
I’m not sure what happened there.
Yeah.
I do think all that is interesting and compelling. I think a world where VR is better or preferable to TV does feel like a little bit of a Bugman world. I’m in my little hovel—
I know.
—and I can put my VR glasses on and escape—
I have a problem with it.
—to a different reality.
I really hope he’s not right about that because virtual reality is personalized—
I like having a big-screen TV—
—for individuals—
—with a big couch in a big basement. That’s a great advantage of living in the Midwest.
With friends coming over to watch the Packers every Sunday.
That’s right.
You know? Not everybody is sitting there in their individual headsets. That’s not how I want to watch TV in the future. He may well be right about that, but I hope he’s wrong. Augmented reality, though—the phone—it really depends on how you define augmented reality, but the phone already is sort of an augmented-reality device, which I think we’ve talked about in the past.
It’s interesting because there is this sort of—I’ve written about it, and I think it’s very interesting to incorporate physicality into your analysis of computing.
Mm-hmm.
So you go back to the initial computers, these mainframes. You had to travel to the building with the mainframe. You would go into the control center, put in your punch cards, run some computations, get them out, and then you could go back and digest them and figure out what they were. It was batch processing, and it was a real physical destination. You had to go somewhere to do it.
And that progressed to where you could go to a terminal that was wired in, and maybe it was in another building even. Amazing. This is where I was doing programming in college.
Yeah.
You’d go to the terminal with all these Unix stations, and you would get access to the central computer, whatever it might be.
19-year-old Ben just living the dream out there in Madison.
Yeah. Well, you could install—was it Telnet or something?—on your Windows PC, but it kind of sucked. It was just easier to be there because of the bandwidth. So anyhow, then you progress to the PC. The PC is in your home or it’s on your desk in your office.
Mm-hmm.
There’s still a physical aspect: You have to go and sit down at the desk and use the PC.
Right.
It’s more convenient, but there’s still a sort of batchability aspect where you go there and do stuff, then you leave and you don’t do stuff. Mobile is with you all the time, so you can compute wherever you are. You can compute in the bathroom.
So I’m on the subway—
You can compute on the bus.
—talking to you—
You compute on the subway.
—for years when you were in Taiwan, on the other side of the world. That’s what I mean: You’re sort of immersed.
Right.
You’re not in your own physical space as you’re computing.
That’s right. But the question is: Is that the end state, or is there a step beyond, where there’s actually a difference between pulling something out of your pocket and no longer looking up at the world, but looking down at the thing in your hand and conversing? Is that a meaningful break, in that there’s value beyond that—
Yeah.
—where it’s just sort of with you, and it’s a shift of the eyes as opposed to a hand in the pocket and a bending of the head?
Mm-hmm.
Now, again, you say, “Oh, that’s silly.” What difference is there really? Maybe that’s right. That might be the case. I think, in reality, to go back to the limited nature of these glasses and why it doesn’t bother me, I actually don’t think there’s a huge pressure to get a developer story out here.
Okay.
I think the phone is the ultimate in-the-app platform. It has sufficient processing power, sufficient connectivity, and sufficiently large screen space that you can kind of do anything on.
It’s hard to compete—
And—
—with a killer computer that you can walk around with wherever you go. It’s hard to imagine that any pair of glasses is going to supplant that at some point.
I mean, if they do, we’re a ways away. A long time away. So I like this approach: This is in addition to your phone. We’re not replacing the phone here. We’re delivering some unique experiences that are actually better.
Mm-hmm.
And the idea is, you buy this not so you can get a worse version of a phone that happens to strap to your face. You buy this—there’s a way that, when I first started doing the paid version of Stratechery, the one guy who had really done this before was, I think, Andrew Sullivan. He had a weird thing: He posted like crazy, and then after 30 posts, you had to pay or something like that. But even then, people would gripe.
Newspapers were introducing paywalls more and more, and every time someone did a paywall, people got upset because you used to have this stuff, and now you’re cutting it off and making people pay.
When I started Stratechery, I started it with the idea, “I’m going to monetize this via subscriptions.” I felt like this was the future business model. I thought it was viable. “1,000 True Fans,” et cetera, et cetera. Stripe had just launched this billing product. I thought, “That is so much better than the PayPal alternative. I think this is going to work.”
But I had to build an audience first. As I built the audience—as demonstrated by the fact that I’m still dropping takes 12 years later—I have a surfeit of takes. I have takes on everything, okay? So we have wife advice, right?
We’re going to take that up at the end of the episode.
Wives. I have a take on literally everything, okay?
Yeah.
So I’ve never had an issue with coming up with content. But when I started Stratechery, I purposely only wrote twice a week. The reason was, my idea was, when I add a subscription component, I’m going to say, “You enjoy twice a week. What if you got it every day?”
Mm.
People would be excited and sort of say, “Oh, I can get more of something that I enjoy and that I’m wanting.” I didn’t want to do more and then cut you off and have people develop a negative feeling. Maybe they’d overcome that negative feeling and still pay, but wouldn’t it be better if, in the user’s mind, it was, “Oh, I’m still getting what I wanted, but now I can get more if I want”?
I just think that’s sort of pay to get more—
Yeah.
—as opposed to pay to stop me from taking things away. I think that’s a really critical component. Think about when you want to launch this new category. You’re not replacing the cellular phone. You’re asking people to add something to their life that wasn’t there before.
I suspect—and we’ll see how this works out—but the way you do that is not by trying to do everything when most of it is crappy and worse than the phone.
Yeah.
You get a couple of little things that are really useful. So the key is going to be—again, I haven’t used it—but I can imagine, at least in theory, delivering a couple of things that, for most people, aren’t going to be worth it.
Yeah.
It’s just going to be a cool demo. But for some people, it’s like, “Yeah, this is so useful, and I use it all the time.” Then you have this foundation of a killer use case that is not just additive but aspirational, like, “I want to go do this.” Then you can start layering more and more things on top of that.
Maybe in the long run you end up in a state where you do replace the phone, but you get there by having a beachhead—
Mm-hmm.
—that people aspire to, not a collection of crap and people trying to dig through and find the jewels.
6. Glasses Need A Killer Use
Just throwing stuff against the wall. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense to me. I would say you've been making fun of me, calling me a hater throughout this conversation. I'm actually kind of torn when I look at this product because, on the one hand, I'm a podcast host who's consuming news about technology every week and talking to you about it every week, and on that basis, I salute the ambition that we're seeing from Meta. I think it's really cool, and I totally agree with the idea of them just shipping and letting actual customers figure out how they want to use it and discovering the killer use cases that way. I think that makes a ton of sense.
If I were to play the role of analyst, I would harken back to exactly what you're talking about there. We also discussed it a little bit last week—you wrote about it with The Browser Company—because to change user habits, you have to be so much better to justify changing user habits and justify me, someone who doesn't wear glasses, putting glasses on my face all day, or 6 hours a day, which I think is the battery life, with a 30-hour battery life for the case.
You have to be much better in terms of what you're introducing for people, and nothing that I saw from Meta at the keynote makes me think they're that close to clearing that bar. None of those features really moved the needle for me. I don't need captions from people in my daily life. I don't need live translations. The live translation thing is really, really cool, but I just can't imagine that many scenarios where I would need live translations. And then, if I'm playing the role of human, not podcast host or tech analyst—
Well, okay. We'll get to the human in a second.
Okay.
Meta is fine, or should be fine, with you being dismissive. You don't even bother trying AirPods. The idea is—
I don't want to charge my headphones. I don't need to lose the AirPods. Yeah, absolutely.
Right. I think the modesty of the launch, tied to the name even, is why that's the right approach. What they need to do is—I think their goal is 100,000 units or something like that. They can do that easily without any Andrew Sharps.
Good.
And your role in the ecosystem—and I appreciate you—
I sincerely wish them luck.
Yeah, I know. Your role is to be the hater and to be the skeptic, and that's fine. After everyone else has them and John Gruber and Dithering in 2035 can say that the Meta Display 27 is the greatest technological product in history, then you can finally go buy version 13.
Gruber got my attention, man.
That's fine.
Okay.
The rest of us will have enjoyed the journey along the way.
Fair enough.
As a human, I think these glasses are a little bit dystopian. If they were adopted by the mainstream and everybody were just going around and potentially recording conversations and whatnot, I shudder to think about that reality, but I do—
Yeah, no—
—acknowledge it's a possibility at some point.
I completely agree. That's the reality of these. It's the same with all those AI pendants that listen to everything. To go back to the glasses, even the regular glasses, not the display ones, have this functionality where they could elevate the volume of whoever—
Ah.
—you’re talking with, so in a noisy circumstance, which you could see being totally useful. You could also see—
Great age-dropping tool.
—totally inappropriate when you're. Yeah, exactly. Right? No, all this stuff, I think, is under-discussed and under-appreciated. It's probably inevitable and inescapable, and I hate it.
Yes. Honestly, I'm sitting there watching the keynote. They screwed up a couple of times at the keynote, and I love that they were doing it live. I love that there were mistakes as I was watching, and I salute how bold and aggressive they're being, despite people like me who've been calling them morons for the last 5 years with all these investments. I really do respect the ambition, but then I'm like, “Oh my God, if the ambition actually pays off and everybody's walking around with these surveillance devices,” that's probably a suboptimal outcome. But I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
I do appreciate—
—that you've managed to carve out a route for yourself where you can just be a hater whether they succeed or lose. It's perfect.
Exactly. Excited about the future. But Meta was not the only news of the week, because we also had news on Thursday, Ben, and we got an email from Ed who says, “Give me the rundown on this Intel news. More bullshit, or is this something that could actually give them life?” All right, and that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at email@sharptech.fm.