It's really weird to see this headline where underneath is a stock ticker showing "AAPL -0.41%" and "META +21.0%" and then another article on the side under Trending titled "Meta shares surge 20% on soaring profit, better-than-expected guidance and first-ever dividend".<p>Nothing is a lie here, but clearly the headlines convey certain ideals to people and those might not really match reality. And it seems like they're just playing the field, writing positively and negatively framed articles to appeal to whichever audience wants what. Why can I not just get one self contained coherent article that's something like "Meta shares surge despite major losses ahead of Apple's Vision Pro launch"? (or the reverse order). These are clearly aimed to be shared on social media and generate particular sentiment to those that only read headlines. Boy is the news a confusing mess.
Meta is a revenue generating machine. They keep beating quarterly estimates. I think they have every right to invest in R&D that isn't profitable yet (or ever). Their staff are well compensated already so what should the do with the money in ways that won't hurt their revenue? They already open sourcing a lot of things and have committed to reaching net zero emissions in 6 years and I'm sure other "good" stuff.<p>Note: I'm no fan of Meta's products and I've blocked FB/Meta domains for over a decade.
I assume most of losses come from headsets R&D, and subjectively i would bet on them too, the progress are amazing, a today 350$ headset have better quality than 5 year ago 1500-2k ones. Honnestly I thinks VR/AR is becoming really amazing for games, if a quest 3 quality headset is available for less than 400$ in a year of two i'm expecting a massive adoption in a few years.<p>There is currently a bit of content problem : no enough gamer with headsets to attract spendings so no enough games to attracts gamers, so not enough gamers with headsets ...<p>But I went again on vr game development some months ago and the technical progress are really sweet and major downside are being removed.
What is the breakdown for how this money is being used/spent? Understandably AR/VR is costly (hardware, software, etc), but I am wondering what percentage of this money is going to the AI research that can certainly help AR/VR but also be used in other contexts (as in the research allocated to AR/VR can be multi-purpose and not really a pure loss).
It's actually very interesting. A lot of the things that people have been impressed by about Apple Vision pro was already possible with the Quest 3 (much of it with the Quest 2 as well). There are a lot of things wrong with Reality Labs as an organization (I used to work there) but I do think they're chasing something real.
You gotta burn money to make money. This much cash burn is required to build the next gen level of infrastructure. Its a big bet for the company, let's see how it pays out. Haters going to say its all in vain, but no one knows how the future will look. Stock at ATH btw.
Meanwhile "Meta shares jump after profit triples and company announces first-ever dividend", also from CNBC<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/01/meta-earnings-q4-2024.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/01/meta-earnings-q4-2024.html</a>
When I read article headlines like this... It just makes me want to buy some Meta stock. It's not like Quest 3 is a dud, it's a great device. And it is not a given that Vision Pro will be a hit. So that makes me think someone wants to spin a narrative and is trying damn' hard to sell it.
They lost $42 billion on Oculus 3/Pro research. My brain cannot process these numbers. I do not see how it's possible. It's as if a football stadium of fans each had a suitcase of a million dollars and all threw it onto the field, then they torched it all with gasoline. They burned a million dollars, then burned another million dollars, then repeated that a thousand more times. Then this entire story repeated, 42 times. Nope, brain still isn't wrapping around it. I know how many useless product managers a big tech company can have wandering around making tiktoks, but that still doesn't explain the scale.
> The metaverse division has now lost more than $42 billion since the end of 2020<p>I can't help but think of how this cash could have been spent on something that benefited everyone (in the dire covid/postcovid years no less) rather than the world's most expensive trial on whether people would rather meet in a MMO world than with their web cameras in a meeting app.<p>Makes Star Citizen's $0.7B crowdfunding look cheap.
The stench of doom emanating from Meta is starting to become over-powering. An out of touch CEO surrounded by yes men, who won't let him know the emperor has no clothes.