Snap Inc’s third-quarter report has revealed that its Spectacles product was indeed a flop, as previously alluded to by Walter Isaacson. The firm revealed that it had lost $40 million thanks to the failure of the company’s first foray into the hardware market; Snap has blamed an excess of inventory and cancelled orders as contributors to the big losses.
Last month, sitting down with Isaacson, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, admitted that the company had only sold 150,000 units, a figure the journalist picked up on saying that Snap"s Spectacles didn"t seem so hot. Spiegel was adamant, however, that his company’s future was in hardware, saying:
“Our view is that hardware is going to be an important vehicle for delivering our customer experience maybe in a decade. But if we believe it’s going to be important in a decade, we don’t want to be starting a decade from now.”
After the company announced and launched Spectacles, it gained a lot of media attraction due to the fact that the specs could only be picked up at vending machines across the US for the first several months of availability. The overly constrained access to the wearable device could have been the underlying reason that it failed to catch on.