I always get laughed at when voicing this, but I was one of the (admittedly ridiculous-looking) …

Same here. Was flown out to Google to pick them up. It was an awesome product, for hardly any of my use cases. But I could see where certain industries or applications they would excel at.

I, too, was a Glasshole for a bit but I really didn’t try to “normalize” wearing them in everyday life. They weren’t quite ready for that and the software was pretty limited at the time - but they were interesting none the less. As others have pointed out in this thread people want full pass through wide field of vision AR and that’s not going to happen soon enough. I feel like the breakout application won’t be the home consumer but rather some industrial use. Augmented reality could easily level up an entry level assistant faster by visualizing the task they need to do. Disassembling and repairing equipment you’re unfamiliar with would be easier when the overlay tells you what bolt to turn on which widget.

Cannibalization is a non-issue when the product requires you to have an iphone as well, which depending on form factor and price point could be reasonable.

Yep big believer that just as mobile was the huge step change in interaction vs the PC, widespread AR glasses will be next. Maybe that's too obvious, don't know. The when is maybe more interesting. The matrix dropped in 2000 (useful milestone for the usage of cellphones) but Uber only started to hockey stick around 2014. So finger in the air analogous reasoning suggests AR glasses maybe 10 years from now, with saturation maybe 20 years from now (marked by our now 20 years older parents owning a pair and being glued to tiktok) With all this chatGPT hype of late maybe we really will all be rocking JARVIS style glasses come 20 years from now

Yeah, I have one of the Explorer models, it was also great to be able to wink to take a picture - it made it much easier to capture fleeting moments than pulling a phone out, especially when I didn't have hands free. It was also super easy to check emails/texts and decide if I needed to pull out my phone, which ironically made them less disruptive. Shame about the PR backlash, all I ever got from anyone was curiosity and a desire to try it out, which makes me think that the PR backlash was partly manufactured by trumping up an unrepresentative sample. It's not like these things were recording video constantly (though a query-able augmented memory made via transcription/abstraction of always-on video would be awesome ).

I would think Apple still exists precisely because it knows that, if they don’t cannibalize their own product, somebody else will. The Apple II paid for development of the Mac, the iPhone cannibalized the iPod.

Apple famously cannibalizes their existing products deliberately, so I don't think that's what's holding them back. It's also strongly possible that Apple's eventual product will require an iPhone to function, so cannibalization might not even be an issue. Apple also famously tries not to release products first, waiting until they can deliver something that fits well into their ethos. How well they succeed at that is an open question, and whether it's a wise approach is an open question, but it's their approach. I'm not sure Apple can deliver another home run, but so far they've delivered more than anyone else I can think of, so I wouldn't bet against them either.