Written edition
Meta's $1,299 glasses just punctured Apple's Vision Pro bet
The frontier's shape-shifting today: hardware giants are racing to become platforms, and platforms are racing to become infrastructure.
From Apple's spatial computing stumble to Kraken's pivot toward plumbing, the winners are betting on lock-in and ecosystem depth rather than raw specs.
Meta's cheap glasses undercut Apple's Vision Pro bet
Apple spent three years and roughly $3,500 per headset convincing people that face-mounted computers would reshape work and play. Meta just released glasses that do many of the same things for under half the price and, crucially, look like normal eyewear rather than ski goggles. The timing is brutal for Apple, which has reportedly cut 60 people from its Vision team and shifted resources toward AI wearables. This isn't just a pricing skirmish. It suggests the contest for spatial computing was never really about display technology, it was about whether anyone would actually want to wear the thing every day, and Apple's flagship bet just took a serious hit.
