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Meta’s Reality Labs has lost more than $21B since start of 2022
- imtringued 3y agoAll that money yet they still use an off the shelf Qualcomm chip? Their budget is so large they could build a custom chip with better performance for their VR headset. They also have spent enough money to fund 200 juiceros.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>Their budget is so large they could build a custom chip with better performance for their VR headset. No they couldn't. Unlike Apple, Meta doesn't ship enough headsets in such volumes that makes it economically viable to develop your own ARM SoC with GPU from scratch, with no guarantee that the resulting SoC would be superior to what you can already buy from QUALCOMM (there's a reason even Samsung & Google can't beat them), so it makes sense to buy COTS parts where you can and spend your money on VR R&D, polishing the UX and developing great SW instead. Think of it this way, Apple didn't start developing SoCs from scratch for the original iPhone, but it was entirely built with COTS parts (Samsung ARM SoC) and all the R&D money went into great SW & UX. Only generations later they could afford to start rolling out custom HW parts.
- pleb_nz 3y agoYeah but look at all the cool stuff there makeing....(tumbleweed rolling by)....
- siva7 3y agoUsually i know how expensive things can get in corporate world so i don’t act like i know better from my armchair but that number is literally insane for a VR headset.
- andybak 3y agoConsidering their competitors have got alarmingly close for a fraction of that. However I suspect there's a ton of stuff that's not obviously visible. 1. Their software stack and default apps are generally a lot more polished than the competition. I suspect they are doing a lot of UX work. 2. Some of the money has been spent of features and apps that their competitors don't even have. (the utility of those can be debated but they exist and they cost money to design and build) 3. They were first movers for some of their feature set. It costs more to make than to copy. 4. There is probably a ton of R&D for things that haven't seen the light of day. 5. They probably pay higher salaries than many of their competitors. (They also probably have a bigger bureaucratic overhead on account of their size and the regulatory scrutiny they are under)
- fatnoah 3y ago> 4. There is probably a ton of R&D for things that haven't seen the light of day. For all of the lampooning of Meta, VR isn't their endgame. Other justifications for the effort are to build a platform that's not owned by Google or Apple, plus the "ultimate" goal of wearable AR devices. The latter requires substantial innovation in terms of battery life, compute power, heat management, display, input schemes, the vast amount of world 3d mapping required, enabling AR content creation & consumption, etc, etc, etc. There are literally thousands of people working on this and there are some truly impressive things being designed and built there. What we'll be able to see in the world are the elements of these and/or proof points that get baked into the "intermediate" stuff being released, like Oculus w/improved mixed-reality, and wearable devices.
- wkat4242 3y ago> Other justifications for the effort are to build a platform that's not owned by Google or Apple You know the Quest runs Android right? They don't use play services but they're never going to be fully independent from Google this way.
- fatnoah 3y agoSorry, more specifically, platform meaning reliance on Play Store or App Store. Work was also being done to build their own OS. That's been canceled for now, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it come back.
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- oskarw85 3y agoGood, good...
- mytailorisrich 3y agoLooking at their quaterly results, they spend about $1 billion a month. It's difficult to imagine what they spend all that money on.
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- penjelly 3y agowveryone loves to say "metaverse lost 20billion!" implying that 20B was spent on a software game in vr. In reality moat of the money is spent on research, hardware and salaries. Meta has been producing better headsets, researching haptics and becoming a game studio, not simply making horizon worlds.
- JohnFen 3y ago> implying that 20B was spent on a software game in vr. I didn't get that implication at all.
- andybak 3y ago"Spent" not "lost"
- andrewstuart 3y agoThere’s certainly some sort of altered reality playing out at Metas VR division. VR is at best a niche. VR will never be huge. So Apple, Meta,Steam, whoever is playing in the VR game is kidding themselves if they think a day will come where my mother and father wear a VR headset. They do love their iPhones and iPads though.
- lockhouse 3y agoBack in the 70s the idea of a home computer was incredibly niche. Same with the precursor to modern smart phones, the PDA in the 90s. People legitimately believed that video games would only be played on expensive machines that lived in arcades. Technology evolves. I do believe at some point there will be a tipping point where AR and VR become commonplace. There are so many applications for it. I'm very excited about where Apple takes this space. If they can bring the cost down to $1500-2000 and bring the battery life up to 6-10 hours I think it will become a very compelling product for a lot of people.
- JohnFen 3y agoExamples of things that turned out to be big despite expectations are misleading, because there are far more examples of things that most people were skeptical of that didn't go anywhere. All it says is that nobody can reliably predict what's going to be huge and what isn't.
- freilanzer 3y ago> because there are far more examples of things that most people were skeptical of that didn't go anywhere. Such as? What's an equivalent to VR in that category?
- lockhouse 3y agoI wish Microsoft had bought Oculus instead.
- casey2 3y agoReminds me of Xerox's great pile of burning money in Palo Alto.
- JohnFen 3y agoStill, I would have loved to work at Parc during their heyday. It was a career goal at the very start of my career.
- pjmlp 3y agoIf Facebook would have produced half as much value for the industry as Xerox did.
- euroderf 3y agoI suppose that in the same way, you could say that at its peak, Bell Labs was a money bonfire.
- throwaway56782 3y ago[dead]
- tiborsaas 3y agoI know it's not a fair comparison, but still, GTA 5 cost $265M to develop, while GTA 4 was "only" $100M. https://gamerant.com/grand-theft-auto-5-development-cost-budget-breakdown https://gamerant.com/grand-theft-auto-5-development-cost-bud... furthermore: "GTA 5 has made nearly $7.7 billion since its release in 2013" https://www.sportskeeda.com/gta/how-much-money-gta-5-made-since-release https://www.sportskeeda.com/gta/how-much-money-gta-5-made-si... You can also look at Valve, they are profitable too. --- I'm not sure what Zuckerberg's idea of a successful operation is, but all this research and development leading to a legless 90's looking VR ecosystem is absurd. It's probably a good indicator of how efficient Meta really is, it feels like headless chickens running around aimlessly.
- mrguyorama 3y agoSV types have a really really bad habit of thinking that, because they are "smart" at doing one thing, they are smart enough to be the best at anything. It happens in STEM fields too but it just seems to be a core ideology of SV everything.
- euroderf 3y agoSo what's a good estimate on Apple's expenditures to date on VR/AR ?
- Tiktaalik 3y agoIs it reasonable to expect that Apple has invested a similar amount of money in their project? Presumably a fair amount less considering that Apple hasn't shipped anything to date.