Snap’s the long-awaited AR glassesSpecs didn’t make the best debut.
Company shares has not been on the healthiest trajectory lately. It has decreased by 30 percent in the last year. It fell more than 5 percent after the specs release, down from $5.86 a share on Tuesday to $4.83 a share Wednesday morning. As of this writing, the stock has yet to regain its pre-announcement position.
A big concern surrounding the new smart glasses, which Snap has been working on for more than a decade, is price: the company maintains they will retail for around $2,200 each.
It’s worth noting that Snap’s core user demographic — teenagers — aren’t typically equipped with that kind of pocket change, leaving followers to question the new product’s path to profitability.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel did interview with CNBC on Tuesday (he sported new glasses) and answered a question about the high price: “The most important way to think about features is the computer, and so they’re compared to other high-end PCs or high-end laptops.”
Spiegel went on to justify the price, saying that the Specs occupies a unique niche in the AR market between Meta’s Ray-Bans, which cost less but provide significantly less computing power, and bulkier headsets like the powerful but very expensive Apple Vision Pro.
Spiegel said his product is both “highly wearable and incredibly capable of immersive computing.”
