Comment by donpdonp
6 years ago
Magic Leap One has been for sale for 6 months. At $2.6B in total funding, thats $433,333 per unit for 6,000 units. The sticker price is $2300 per unit.
By comparison the Nintendo VirtualBoy was for sale for one year at $180(in 1995/$300 in 2018) and sold 770,000 units[1].
Man, a Virtual Boy comparison is just the deftest diss one could possibly offer here.
The VB also makes me wonder if AR isn’t practically impossible for the foreseeable future since lots has changed since then, but not the vaporware of this stuff.
The Virtual Boy was VR, not AR. VR is suffering a “hype hangover” of its own these days, sure, but I’d say not to the same degree as AR. The tech works much better (it’s just a screen with a fancy lens in front), it has at least one solid use case (games; mostly played at home, so less worry about the social awkwardness of wearing something on your head), and millions of VR headsets have been sold.
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https://www.tiltfive.com/
Edit: Adding a Tested review...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jse-GwkcYgI
> 6,000 units
This number gets more mind-blowing the more you think about it.
It's small enough that one needs to start considering the units bought by management, employees, investors, suppliers, competitors, et cetera to say nothing of their friends and families.
A friend worked for them and (if I recall correctly) employees got a free unit. Not sure if that’s included in this number.
Honestly, with high priced dev kits they just need to be given out for free like Valve did with the Vive. Magic leap has given out thousands just to get devs on board.
That’s not how funding works. If you believe the product is worth exactly what you pay that’s not funding, that’s buying. Funding is the belief that at some point the ownership will be worth the wait given the investment.
That’s not how funding works, but it is how profit works.
So you cannot have companies like Amazon which had no profits for like a decade.
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That sounds like buying with extra steps. I agree its a flawed comparison but still interesting