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Snapchat Reportedly Stuck With 'Hundreds of Thousands' of Unsold Spectacles (theverge.com)
According to The Information, Snapchat expected demand for its camera-equipped glasses known as Spectacles to continue after the holidays and ordered "hundreds of thousands" of additional units. But demand didn't pick up after the company opened up its sales to a wider audience, leaving those units to collect dust in warehouses. The Verge reports: It's not known exactly how many Spectacles have been sold so far, but from the sound of it, Snap may have dramatically over-ordered units of its debut hardware device. Earlier this month, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said the company had sold "over 150,000 units," which sounds pretty bad in the context of having hundreds of thousands sitting around waiting to be sold; although The Information says that figure includes unassembled units with parts that could potentially be used in other products. Spiegel has tried to paint Spectacles as both relatively successful and merely an early start in hardware. He claims they outsold Apple's first iPod -- a comparison clearly meant to suggest they could eventually have enormous success. But Spiegel also said hardware would really only be important to Snap a decade from now.
Well too bad. Sucks to be you.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Seriously, I've never seen those things for sale anywhere, and I don't care enough to search them out, but I was interested enough that I might have bought them when the first came out. On the other hand I don't use snapchat, so maybe you have to order them off the website. Whatever.
What a spectacle they've made of themselves with their ambitions dashed.
Tech is supposed to be sexy. You're doing it wrong.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
in the context of them having 175 MILLION daily active users and they only sold a measly 150 *thousand*..
Are they compatible with all those ET game cartridges in landfill?
Table-ized A.I.
He claims they outsold Apple's first iPod
What a bizarre comparison, comparing sales of a music player to their camera glasses.
How is that even relevant ?
It'd be like Andrex comparing their toilet roll sales to iPod sales and shouting out "woohoo we're more successful than Apple"
Ordinarily I'd say that nothing of value was lost; but the raw materials now converted into snapchat spectacles could definitely have been put to more inspiring use.
has to be the only explanation for why this turd got funding
Couldn't resists.
The comparison to the iPod is backwards -- snap did precisely every wrong thing. By contrast, Apple works hard to create a broad-market appeal: even if the product is drenched in hipster niche mystique, everyone and I mean EVERYONE hears about it. Then they manufacture and stock the item, no matter what it is, for something like 60-80% of the expected actual sales on the first go. This ensures it's enough to get in the hands of someone you know even if you can't get it yourself... while also creating an artificial scarcity to ensure the perception of demand. The secondary manufacturing waves then kick in, according to actual orders, and they coast from one relatively successful debut to another.
Snap, on the other hand... did everything wrong. I'm the target market for damn near every stupid doodad, but I didn't hear ANYTHING about it because it was marketed within snapchat as if it were a limited upsell only to dedicated snapchat users.. because they designed it to be unusable to anyone not already sold on the service. Then they put all their eggs into the initial manufacturing run rather than a calculated step-by-step ramp up. What a fuck-up. Did no one inside Snap think to make it enticing the other way around -- to make it usable for non-chat users but so much cooler if you signed up for Snapchat? Did they soft-open to create sufficient buzz? Did they advertise ANYWHERE outside their own underpants?
SHM, if you were designing a product failure, they ticked every box except for the one where the glasses light on fire.
That's next week, undoubtedly -- after they firesale and start shipping swollen li-ion batteries that have been discharging in a hot warehouse for months.
I think not...(*poof*)
When you distribute new hardware, even cheap hardware, to the masses make sure it actually does something that said masses find useful.
>"Snapchat expected demand for its camera-equipped glasses "
I am guessing that the masses got the "glasshole" messages from the last several rounds. It isn't cool to be creepy, thank goodness. We all have cameras on our phones- they aren't hard to use, and it is far less rude/antisocial/ego-centric than making everyone constantly wonder if you are recording them every moment, especially in bathrooms, when having private conversations, when trying to eat, in sensitive business meetings, during exams, etc.
So please, take your "camera glasses" and shove them somewhere more appropriate than on people's faces!
I totally disagree. If you are going to wear ra camera on your face I am ONLY OK with that if is indeed "glaringly obvious", otherwise you are some kind of creep.
I thought the Snapchat glasses were actually well designed (not that I had one) and the delivery vending machine seemed cool (not that I ever found one). I think they could still sell the glasses if they actually put them where people were - I never once saw the vending machines that sold them...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I remember walking past Snap's outlet on Venice Beach a few times last June and noticing that customers were always outnumbered by security guards, and I never saw anyone buy anything. The Spectacles vending machine was pretty cute though - lots of tourists were taking pics of it.
$130 and they don't appear to list the technical specifications anywhere on the product page. Maybe I just missed it, but I did look and saw nothing. Not the resolution nor the storage capacity nor the estimated charge length. Also you have to touch the button every ten seconds. Also they're damn fugly.
I looked at these before for about 10 seconds. If you're going to have something that flipping ugly, the price needs to be $29, not $129.
Since they have so many of them, I thought "maybe they're selling them cheap". Nope. So, I guess I won't be buying any either to wear and use, or to chop up to get the camera out for robot vision applications :).
Maybe in another year or so when they finally liquidate the remainder...
Maybe the glasses were designed to sell at a loss or at a very low margin to build the brand of the Snapchat app/site and they couldn't afford for people to buy them for use by non-chat users.
A book will come out about it in a few years and it will all become clear.
"Snapchat Reportedly Stuck With 'Hundreds of Thousands' of Unsold Spectacles"
Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. That's because it was an expensive, goofy, bullshit product that was artificially crippled for no good reason and it was almost completely useless except for the selfie-addicted "lookit me" crowd. I'm surprised they only got stuck with hundreds of thousands and not millions. It serves them right and I hope they go out of business.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Essential has a more useful camera module but bundling poor selling products sometimes offers a little perceived value. They can put them in lucky bags for year end sales another clearance tactic.
Shareholders your first dividend commemorative snap spectacles someday might be worth more than your stock if you let that management team continue with these ventures into areas that are beyond their distinctive talent. It is not a major loss and if Snap learns , adapts they can of course find a better way. Amazon flopped with Fire phone but doing ok in assistant devices and tablets.
Same thing here. They made it too inclusive and thought people are gonna chase after them forever. They were cool but not cool enough to make me check every 2 days if there is a place nearby. Took way too long for them to make it online.PLUS came to Europe waaay later. I've just realized it is available online now. And even if it is available language is geo-based and you're not allowed to change. not everybody lives in US and not everybody speaks the language of the country they live in. ux fail for sure.
Stick to software. Stick to admin'ing an HP supplied server. Don't get into hardware more complicated than a t-shirt.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Yes but who did actually lie ?
There might be a very slim chance that these first 150k units sold weren't bought by Snap users, but by Facebook employee asked to buy them so Snap's team would wrongly think that there some existing interest into this crap, order 500k more units produceds and then bankrupt with their unsold stock, enabling the Zuck to finally buy them out.
Sound like bond vilain scheme, but I still believe that there is a tiny chance that this might be true.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Maybe the glasses were designed to sell at a loss or at a very low margin to build the brand of the Snapchat app/site and they couldn't afford for people to buy them for use by non-chat users.
LOL.
The 2000s called, they want their CueCats back.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
What a lot of these one-trick pony startups fail to understand is when to leave well enough alone. "Well, we solved the problem of posting selfies to the internet. Time to fire all the developers other than the maintenance crew and switch to operational mode."
How could they even expect these things to sell more than maybe 1000 units? Snapchat is relatively niche as it is. Then add in the fact that most Snapchat users are probably 15-18 and probably don't have the money (or rich parents) to buy them the stupid glasses. It really narrows down the number of sales. Maybe if somebody had have found a way to hack them into doing something useful they would have sold.
Shades of Ronco.
geo-based languages is fucking stupid
most browsers tell the website what language the user prefers with the "Accept-Language" http header.
MP3 players had been around for a few years, and everyone knew they wanted one (we were still using Walkman-type cassette players back then). The problem was the ridiculously convoluted process of transferring your music collection over to the MP3 player. Many of us already had an MP3 collection on our computer. In theory you should be able to just drag and drop it. But most MP3 players used some proprietary ordering scheme so dragging and dropping destroyed your playlist info (e.g. your music would show up in alphabetical order, or worse yet ordered by file creation date). In order to preserve your playlists, you had to go through some proprietary software which had a terrible UI, didn't work all the time (or even most of the time), and frequently didn't do what you wanted. There was no real standard for organizing music into playlists, and the MP3 manufacturers were having trouble grappling with the multitude of different ways it was being done.
iTunes is what made the iPod. The iPod with iTunes nailed how synchronization of your music collection between devices should work. You organize it in one place (iTunes, before it became the horrible monstrosity it is today), and it reflected that organization onto all your devices. That's why it went on to tremendous success despite having "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame." People (the technically illiterate people who make up 95% of the population) bought it because it just works. I complain about Apple's hardware and their policies. But their software and their approach to UIs is top-notch - make it so an idiot could use it (the complete opposite of most open source).
I think that's what Spiegel was going for with his iPod analogy. He felt there was some impediment to widescale adoption of the technology, and he thought his company had solved it.
I'd heard about it (and I don't use Snapchat), but every online discussion was derailed by a few people vociferously ranting about glassholes. It was impossible to find any real user feedback amongst all their noise.
Actually I thought Apple would do fine ever since they bought NeXT and announced they were going to replace MacOS with a NeXT derived operating system. Apple was selling the Mac equivalent of Windows 3.1 with a beautified UI in 1996. It took them until 1999 to get MacOS X in working condition (develop the Blue Box and Carbon, etc). Around that time I was using Windows 2000. The first iPod never exactly took off because, like you said, it's not like it was the only MP3 player in the market, and it used a Firewire port which most PCs back then didn't have. I don't think there was an iTunes for Windows even. It was something for Apple users basically. Only with iTunes for Windows and the USB versions did it ever reach mass market appeal.
In hindsight I probably should have bought their stock back then but again I was never a fan of playing in the stock market.
Maybe the glasses were designed to sell at a loss or at a very low margin to build the brand of the Snapchat app/site and they couldn't afford for people to buy them for use by non-chat users.
That would make sense... if the Snapchat brand needed such exposure. This is exactly the opposite. The product was made and expected to sell due to the existing high recognition of the Snapchat brand and existing app userbase, but the product wasn't that interesting and people are happy with current space of the Snapchat brand (smartphone apps).
The company is trying to branch out into something with a more concrete revenue stream and failed.
They're cheaper than the cheapest Luxxotica frames that fit me, $130 to $150. About $29 for prescription lenses, and I have some cheap prescription glasses.
You heard me. Cheap glasses.
D: