Snap has announced smart glasses that cost nearly two grand. They ship in autumn. The company’s previous attempts at hardware have been so thoroughly forgotten that most people assumed they stopped trying after the Snapchat camera fell out of a teenager’s pocket in 2015.
But here we are. Two thousand pounds for glasses that will let you experience reality exactly as Snap’s algorithm decides you should experience it. The company is banking on a market that has repeatedly rejected expensive AR glasses from Meta, Apple, and Microsoft — all of whom have spent billions proving that people do not actually want computers strapped to their faces, no matter how many times executives insist they do.
Why would anyone pay this much? Snap hasn’t explained, which is the most honest thing any tech company has done all year. The glasses presumably do something — filter your vision, add digital nonsense to your surroundings, make you look ridiculous at parties. But the real innovation here is the pricing strategy: charge enough that only people who’ve already made catastrophically bad investment decisions will buy them.
Snap’s track record with consumer hardware is so thin it’s barely visible. Yet the company is launching this with the confidence of someone who has never once checked their own sales figures. The autumn release date gives them six months to build hype, which is exactly six months longer than the product will remain relevant once people realize they’ve spent two grand to see Snapchat filters on their eyeballs instead of their phone screen.
At least when the glasses inevitably flop, they’ll be expensive enough that the failure will be genuinely memorable.