This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Aren't you supposed to wait for something to be widely adopted before you enshittify it?
I get long-term enshittification in pursuit of short term Line Must Go Up but I feel like this would significantly impede it even in the short term.
Kinda reeks of Meta being in financial trouble.
This is the kind of enshitification thats good for society.
Fuck these privacy invading creep goggles. I hope they continue to make them worse to use and posses
I'm actually OK with this enshittification, and hope it continues into oblivion on the Facebook spyglasses. Personally
def hope it reduces the glass-pervs out there.
Im sure the pervs will gladly pay extra
depressingly plausible;
good! hopefully this will discourage everyone who bought them from using them, so they just sit in a drawer somewhere or get recycled instead of spying on unwitting people, and meta will fail to make back the huge amounts of money they've invested in tech that most people don't want 😌
It's funny, I would love to some have the novel tech they developed (HUD / display built into glasses since I'm wearing them anyways). The problem, as usual, is corps taking the piss with prices and profit then spying on you and everyone around you non-stop anyways....
I would 100% be open to some HUD glasses delivered with a FOSS OS that works completely offline and/or via your phone (but still offline). But that's seriously wishful thinking given our corporate and political overlords
Yah, like videos or guides on screen whilst I have my hands full soldering or something seems like a great application.
beginning of the end for yet another set of AR glasses
And thank god for that. Right now they're just going to be secretley-always-on Zuckerberg surveillance tools in ways that phones struggle to replicate.
I'd say this is more like the middle of the end, with the beginning of the end being the Meta logo on them.
Meta's finances must be in the shitter to be enshittifying a premium product.
Zuck is fucking desperate. He’s grabbing hold onto anything he thinks might make money right now. Tossing more and more money at the current Mets problem to try to force himself to relevancy.
People think mush is a loser but it’s clearly zuck that is barely invited anywhere.
I don't mind if the people who wear these get ripped off
Good. Enshittification of the panopticon goggles.
Subscriptions for offline features should be completely illegal. In fact Meta is probably already technically illegal.
If we lived in functional democracies most large multinationals would've been split up a long time ago, including Meta.
Instead we live in a grey area of plutocratic corporate dictatorship.
Garbage in - garbage out
Lol.
This should be in "leopards at my face." They didn't care about the impact of their carless decisions, and now they are getting screwed.
My mom just caught one of her kids using these to cheat on a final. He had them Bluetoothed to his laptop and it disconnected at some point and she heard "the answer to number 7 is...." But she said he barely got a C on it even while cheating. So since she didn't know about the glasses until after that student left and another student told her it was the glasses, she just kinda let it go saying "it's honestly going to be his problem in the future."
Edit: she couldn't pin point the kid at the moment, and wasn't informed who it was until after the kid was gone and the other student told her.
I'm not a teacher, but I dunno if that's the right response to someone cheating. It is going to be his problem in the future, but as a teacher, isn't it her job to teach the kid that that's not OK? Sorta depends on the age, I suppose, but I'd definitely give the kid a 0% instead of a C.
She couldn't really have done anything considering she didn't know which kid it was until after they were gone and the other student informed her.
You know, if the kid is using state of the art tech to cheat and he still only got a C, then maybe let this one go.
Maybe this kid needs all the help he can get.
Teaching someone that cheating is a way to get a pass vs a fail isn't helping anyone, in my opinion, but it could be situational.
yeah, i tutored a fair amount of pre-med students who had to take economics as a general education class. dullards to the last one (these were the ones who needed a tutor for introductory economics) and every single one tried to pay me to do their homework. i kept their names and about half are now working in medicine, because "that'll be their problem" turns into "that'll be the patient's problem".
please remind your mother that if y'all keep failing them through, look what happens
These will identify sad nerds the way taped glasses identify the nerd in old movies.
If I see anyone with meta/snap/etc glasses, I’m going to just assume they’re fucking pathetic assholes.
I don’t know if “taped glasses nerd” was such a negative term in old movies.
And I correlate the Meta glasses more with a “tech creep” and manosphere Musk worship culture.
Like, I’m an introverted nerd. I could be “taped glasses guy” if I wore glasses; hell, my sunglasses are glued. But even if I was a full throated Tech Bro trying to idolize Zuck, I’m way too introverted to wear these out in public because you’d be filming people; thats mortifying to me.
It needs a different kind of personality, I think.
I cant wait till they are discontinued.
@Wispy2891, the 'offline feature that runs on your own hardware' framing is the part that stings most here — Meta's basically renting you back functionality baked into silicon you already bought. The ANC earphone comparison is dead-on; my $40 Ankers do ambient boost passively, no subscription, no timer. What's wild is 3 hours/month math: that's 6 minutes a day. Barely a commute.
What, were they too popular before? lol
Non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/vGVor
Complete Article:
Would you pay $20 a month for access to AI hardware you already own? That appears to be one of Meta’s next bets. This week, it quietly announced that your glasses’ Conversation Focus feature will soon be limited to three hours of use per month, unless you pay for a $19.99 Meta One Premium subscription.
In a help article, the company insists that it won’t require a subscription to use your glasses, period; it’s merely erecting a “rate limit” for certain AI features. Even premium subscribers will only get 15 hours of Conversation Focus per month under that “rate limit,” it claims.
Problem is, Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. The Conversation Focus feature, which amplifies the voice of the person you’re speaking to so you can hear better in noisy environments, is not something that should plausibly be rate-limited, because it doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses that you’ve already purchased. I turned off my internet, and it kept working.
Meta’s description of “rate limits.”
Meta’s description of “rate limits.” Image: Meta
Here’s how the company introduced it last year: “[C]onversation focus uses your AI glasses’ open-ear speakers, beamforming technology, and real-time spatial processing to dynamically amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to.”
Not only does it avoid Meta’s servers, but Conversation Focus doesn’t technically require an internet connection at all. I double-checked by turning off my phone’s Wi-Fi and cellular, turning on Airplane Mode, and I was still able to use Conversation Focus just fine by tapping a button on my phone.
Does Meta have some secret licensing deal with another company that costs it money every time a person uses Conversation Focus? Failing that, the rate limit sounds utterly bogus.
Meta is feeling some financial pressure trying to make AI happen, recently laying off around 10 percent of its entire workforce — around 8,000 people — to help offset its AI investment costs. It also recently managed to make three pairs of AI glasses $80 cheaper by nixing the Ray-Ban name. But perhaps ditching the branding isn’t the only way it plans to subsidize that move.
At a time when hardware is getting increasingly expensive, I suppose this isn’t as controversial as Meta quietly beginning to embed a facial recognition upgrade for these glasses in millions of phones, code that it has since quietly removed. Still, I’m filing this under “Meta will ruin its smart glasses by being Meta.”
We asked Meta if it could explain the move and whether the company plans to put other on-device features behind a subscription. Meta did not reply to those questions, but it did reach out to make it even clearer that the subscription is optional. “Most people will use Conversation Focus without hitting the monthly limit. The subscription is for power users who want expanded access and additional benefits like premium device support,” Meta spokesperson Tyler Yee tells The Verge.
“Out of the box, you’ll get core AI features like voice assistant, live translation, look and ask, and more. The subscription simply unlocks more access and more powerful features on your AI glasses. Currently, this only includes expanded access to Conversation Focus and premium device support.”
That “currently” does make it sound like Meta might put more features into a subscription bucket, but it also sounds like a few features will stay out of it.
Pretty sure the author nailed it, but I hit a paywall before I could copy it.
Anyways:
The only plausible explanation is they licensed this feature, expected huge sales to cover the license, and now can't.
I don't think they have licensed it per use, it was likely a flat fee and now they're desperate to recoup it. They can't do it by sales, so it's monthly fees.
It might not even be this directly, but some other license and this is just where they can squeeze consumers. They might have even just picked what gets used the most
When did these come out? Wow, that was a steep enshitification slope.
Sight as a service
They've sold something like 10 million of these things, probably more.
We can do something about it. The same way we shut down google glass, make them socially unacceptable. Ridicule anyone you know who owns a pair, loudly point them out when you see them in public, etc. Bring back "glasshole".
