By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
Mark Zuckerberg stood on stage this week and held up two new gadgets: a $1,299 pair of Meta VR Glasses, and a smaller device called the Muse Charm pendant, both built to work with Meta's AI agents. It's a big price tag for a category that's still trying to prove itself.
Here's the fine print worth reading. Meta's earlier smart glasses, built with cameras that let wearers record anyone around them without an obvious signal, earned the nickname "pervert glasses" — a backlash serious enough that Meta has now released a camera-free, audio-only version, according to the BBC. That's the product now being tested for whether it can shake the image problem.
Think about what that means for the ordinary shopper. Meta is charging over a thousand dollars for hardware in a product line that's already generated public suspicion about surveillance. The company is betting that stripping out the camera — the very feature that drew complaints — will win back trust, even as it keeps pushing the $1,299 camera-equipped version alongside it.
What we don't know yet: how many units either device is selling, what Meta's margins look like, or whether workers in Meta's Reality Labs division — which has burned tens of billions of dollars in recent years chasing the metaverse and now AI wearables — see this launch as vindication or one more expensive gamble. Meta hasn't disclosed sales targets or unit economics for either device.
The pattern here isn't new: a tech giant ships first, absorbs the backlash, then ships a "fixed" version at a premium price. Whether customers pay that premium — or whether regulators start asking harder questions about always-on recording devices sold to the public — is the story to watch.
Somebody's paying for this. Let's find out who.
— Compiled from reporting by CNBC and BBC Business.
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