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Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

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Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#111

Post by filoleg »

unlinked_dll wrote: post #84

>He still personally signs off on new hires, who are told that it’s harder to get a job at Magic Leap than it is to be accepted into Harvard I doubt that. South Florida isn't crawling with engineering talent, we all left. Having known, studied, and worked with several people who work(ed) there, I sincerely doubt they can claim to have such a deep bench of talent.

South Florida doesn't need to have all that talent. Pretty much none of the people I know who were considering offers from Magic Leap, with some eventually accepting them, were from Florida at all.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#112

Post by fastball »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #48
gonehome wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music). It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything. Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more fo…

I believe this is what you're referencing: https://twitter.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457

Oh man I'd forgotten about that edit.

Cracks me up every time.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#113

Post by ericd »

pvarangot wrote: post #27
paxys wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original Microsoft HoloLens was $3000-$5000 and sold 50,000 units in two years. Now the US Army is paying them $480 million for 100,000 units. The problem isn't the price IMO, but the fact that Magic Leap hasn't been able to make a case for what exactly it should be used for. Random enthusiasts aren't going to shell out thousands of dollars, but a company or government definitely will.

The problem is that it doesn't work, it's bad. You can make a bad product with a company with a "valuation" in the billions, we need to start to understand that. And there's good alternatives to the product that actually do work better at a similar price point. This is not a "product market fit" problem, this is bad tech being pushed down the pipes until it makes it out of a fucked up company.

In what way is it bad? From the various video reviews I’ve seen, it seems to work a lot better than the Hololens circa a couple years ago.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#114

Post by filoleg »

aaron695 wrote: post #107

AR fundamentally can't work. To work, it has to understand the world around us. It needs to be full AI. There's also no reason why we would want it. Nothing. As we develop ways to augment our world a simple phone can deliver the info. VR has a use case for entertainment. It has no business or education case. Work is done by reducing dimensions and abstracting things not adding dimensions and unabstraction. But at lea…

I have a feeling this comment will be linked on HN eventually (in about a decade) the same way people link that one infamous comment about Dropbox being an unnecessary thing that no one needs or wants. Or the same way people in 2019 mock those from a couple of decades ago who were saying that internet was "just a fad" that will go away sooner rather than later.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#116

Post by simonh »

gonehome wrote: post #42
daenz wrote: post #12

The thing that got me about the Magic Leap is I couldn't find a reliable video of what it looked like through the lenses. Everything was clearly a CGI overlay or recreation. Reviewers claimed they were prohibited from showing video through the lenses.[0] I can understand not wanting their product misrepresented, but all the secrecy and censorship about it makes me believe it is bad, and I'm not going to spend money o…

There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music). It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything. Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more fo…

I don’t know if any are at Magic Leap, but other General Magic alumni include Andy Rubin (Android) and Tony Fadell (iPod) so at least some of them did ok eventually.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#119

Post by nrp »

bumblebee4 wrote: post #92

Haven't they learned from General Magic [1]? >“Magic's just science that we don't understand yet.” [2] If you call your company magic then the product most likely is not just at the brink of your understanding but so far out that it is impossible to close the gap by hard work alone. Steve Jobs mentioned in a very early interview somewhere that he wants to build a computer for everybody. He waited years and decades pa…

On Apple (as opposed to Magic Leap), I believe a lot of it is figuring out a customer need and audience that can be satisfied by a set of technologies that are just at the edge of mature, and then not shipping the product until it actually satisfies those needs. This means not shipping a technology as a product just because it may be useful in the future, and it means resetting a products at the prototype stage often.

Both are hard for startups to take on. The former because many of the founders are heavily focused on a technology they came up with and attempt to shoehorn it into products that don't quite make sense. The latter because it requires either very patient investors or a big bank account.

Both are also hard for established, mature companies to take on. The former because they seem to believe that innovation for innovations sake is a useful thing to do, and for whatever reason the tech press seems to encourage them. The latter because they are focused on delivering quarterly results over building long term platform and ecosystem value, and because politically a cancelled project can be career ending.

Re: Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses

#120

Post by fastball »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #58
MBCook wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is their product works (to some degree) as opposed to being total vaporware like Theranos.

The original product is still vaporware.

Pretty sure they had an original product that was definitely not vaporware, the issue is it turned out to be not scaleable at all.

A product that is obscenely expensive and therefore can't be sold as a consumer device is not vaporware.

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