These companies are so unlikable, I don't understand why they think people want to permantly mount their data collection systems right in front of their eyes. You couldn't give me one of those for free. Its like someone breaking into my car and leaving 2 copilot licenses on the seat: a nightmare

>Meta's survival is fascinating to me

Their ad revenue is $243.46 billion annual, so not sure why you mention survival.

If a company making money spends that money internally on projects that is ok, it's when they borrow money that survival becomes a risk.

It's not Meta's survival that is fascinating, it's Zuckerberg's ongoing survival as CEO!!

Says a lot about just how much money they’re raking in from core business.

It's one of Microsoft under Ballmer biggest victory, and one that's proving to be harder than you would think for tech behemoth: when you have one product that's so overwhelmingly dominating and raking unlimited money, diverting into other product lines seems to be almost impossible, either they don't make enough money, or you don't have enough focus, or enough need for survival and such need for it to succeed.

Despite everything Google is still the Google Ads company, Meta is still the FB/Insta company, etc ... I would even add Intel in there, they're where they are in part because every new thing they made they killed off right away because it wasn't "a money printing large margin xeon with no competition".

Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are the big ones that got out of that trap. Though with Apple I would say it's more limited than it looks, it's just that their "product" is the ecosystem they build around, so while they have lots of lines they're all linked together and feed off each other with iPhone at the core.

On the other hand some would say, Ballmer decoupled Microsoft survival from Widnows survival so much that it leads to what's happening to windows those past 5-8 years, and that's not a plus for its users.

I think it is the shady stuff that earns them money. They cant survive without that. The rest is a corporate hobby, basically.

> their AI is not as good as their competitors

That's irrelevant because their AI was never a product they sold.

Hey, the sky's the limit. The next version can also shock the user!

It was 10 years ago. Today's preteens were infants then. Today's university students were preteens. Today's parents of infants were university students. Things change. Time destroys everything.

> Maybe it would have been more socially acceptable even back then if they hadn't made them look sci-fi and instead like regular glasses.

They literally couldn’t.

Glass cost $1,500 and had tech spilling out into separate modules attached to the (already too clunky) glasses.

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the problem is dropped by society at large because the hardware has become too subtle to notice,

and the “superpowers” (or draw of entertainment) are too strong to ignore.

I don’t think it should be banned but instead regulated and I think Apple has a unique opportunity here that will make them win this product category in fashion & social acceptability: Make the glasses glow. Have the top horizontal frame of the glasses illuminate when it’s recording and be able to glow on command

By making the glow a fashion aspect of the glasses, the fact that it should glow loudly will become a socially known part of the glasses. Because it’s Apple and because a good chunk of the frame needs to glow it’ll have a distinct look that’ll be easy to spot and if anyone has tampered with them to disable it, they can be asked to verify that it hasn’t by making it able to glow on command “Hey Siri, glow/party”.

Like all things, there can be positive use cases.

For example, a musician would probably rather have the audience wearing recording glasses and actually watching then recording on phone and watching the phone screen.

The 'creepy pick up artists' and other social media types have become synonymous with it unfortunately

absurd to ban cameras but allow firearms

You can look for smart glasses (hey cyan) in aliexpress, and use claude/codex to reverse engineer. There's a guy who put an sdk on github. All you need is bluetooth to your phone, and of you go. You can build an app that does whatever you want within the firmware limitations of the glasses.

Well, of course it's getting rate limited behind a subscription. Someone has to pay for all the additional compute and storage required to datamine your conversations.

They are actually selling really well. But sadly, they are selling because you can drill out the 'recording' indicator light and use them to secretly record people to make creepy TikToks.