Snap’s long-awaited AR glasses, Specs, didn’t have the best debut.
The company’s stock price hasn’t been on the healthiest trajectory lately. It has fallen 30% in the past year. After Spex’s launch, the stock price fell more than 5%, from $5.86 per share on Tuesday to a low of $4.83 per share on Wednesday morning. As of this writing, the stock has yet to recover its pre-announcement position.
A big concern surrounding Snap’s new smart glasses, which the company has been working on for more than a decade, is cost. The company claims the retail price will be close to $2,200 each.
It’s worth noting that Snap’s core user group, teenagers, usually don’t have that kind of spare change, leaving onlookers questioning the new product’s profitability prospects.
In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday (wearing new glasses), Snap CEO Evan Spiegel responded to a question about its high price by saying, “Specs are the most important way to think about a computer, so it’s priced in line with other high-end computers and high-end laptops.”
Spiegel further justified the cost by saying that the spec occupies a unique space in the AR market between glasses like Meta’s Ray-Bans (much cheaper but with much less processing power) and larger headsets like the powerful but much more expensive Apple Vision Pro.
Spiegel said its products are “not only highly wearable, but also incredibly capable of immersive computing.”
