Meta is shutting down its Portal smart display business | Hacker News Reader

Meta is shutting down its Portal smart display business

reuters.com

53 pointsmfiguiere23 comments

I bought one of these for my grandmother who was going into a care home. Unfortunately I ended up sending it back as I wasn’t aware of how far she had declined; she wouldn’t have been capable of learning how to use it even with voice control. I played around with it and it would have been great for any elderly relatives who weren’t that far gone, had no interest in technology but wanted to video message people. For everyone else, they were probably better off buying a cheap second hand iPad for the same price and getting the extra functionality.

They've been on 70% markdown at my local Target for about a month now. They knew.

It looks like a pretty decent piece of hardware for that price, but apparently they're locked down very well. Would be nice if Meta/FB gave away the keys.

Retailers are often the first to know, happens when game consoles are going EOL. Manufacturer will issue a "last call" to order any stock. But Target may not have been told that the whole smart display side of the business was going away as it could have been hints at a product refresh instead.

But retailers are not idiots, they would have looked at the numbers they were selling and would have put 2 and 2 together.

I'm sure Target called up Meta this summer and asked if they were going to lease the shelf space in the fall and Meta said nah.

But its not just Target that are offering the discount, Amazon and the UK retailers have been offering the discount too (Was half tempted to pick one or two up just for parts, Been looking for a decent touch screen I can put near the front door to turn into a Home Assistant control panel, prob would have to design a new PCB for it as its pretty locked down, but you know a decent LCD panel with touch for £40 is rather tempting, but I got to complete atleast one of my ongoing projects before I pick up any more).

I guess it would depend on how much Meta valued controlling the information about it. They could have saved cash and told everyone they were giving up the shelf space and risk it getting leaked or eat the cost of the discounted units and any penalties for late notice to retailers and pull the trigger on the news on their terms.

I was thinking about getting a Portal TV for my parents so they can see their grandkids on the big screen. I ended up not going for it b/c if you are watching TV and someone calls on Portal, you need to use your TV remote to switch to the HDMI port your Portal is on and then you have you use the Portal remote to answer the call. You end the call using the Portal remote and then use the TV remote to switch back to watching TV. Even for me, that's too much.

LG seems to have solved this remote switching issue by integrating[1] their TV remote with Portal TV but my parent's cable TV provider, Spectrum, doesn't have an app for LG TVs.

Long story short, we do iPad to iPad calling with FaceTime.

[1] https://www.lgnewsroom.com/2021/06/video-calling-from-the-co...

It's crazy how much friction friction switching HDMI ports adds. I had the exact same problem trying to get my parents to use full screen video chat.

Ipads are ok but the experience of video chat on a 65 inch screen feels qualitatively different. I would buy a TV for my parents on the spot if it had a high quality built in camera. I didn't know about LG, too late now anyway.

It's 2022. I want high qualify camera on a giant screen that is so seamless it's like sharing a window in my home. It seems like a tractable problem!

Is this really an issue?

I never used a portal, but all of my devices seem to have some kind of override, even with an HDMI dock. I press the home button on my Roku and my Roku is switched over, I press the power button on my switch and my switch takes over. The old direct TV box that came with my apartment even switches over, although it does ignore other devices after. It's not perfect but there does seem to be an HDMI protocol for asking for control

Probably HDMI-CEC One-Touch Play. CEC stands for Consumer Electronics Control, and it's a suite of control signals that can be used through HDMI. However, support doesn't seem to be universal, and it seems that some TVs implement slightly different subsets of the standard.

It's interesting that Portal never benefited from the COVID work-from-home boom, as it was excellently positioned for that.

People who had them loved them, but I think FB's reputation cost them here. Nobody wants the internet's least scrupulous site running a camera inside their homes.

I also think the closed platform hurt.

Why buy a webcam desk tablet thingy that only works with Facebook when you can get an iPad and use FaceTime, Zoom, Google Meet, WebEx, and the list goes on into infinity?

An iPad is only $329 or less if you buy and old model and it can run millions of apps and be taken with you.

I think Facebook thought that this product might be nice for people who are too non-technical to use a tablet. But like, who is that customer exactly?

Reminds me of those internet appliances from the 90s. It was inevitable that regular computers would replace them.

Agreed. This is a case of FB product managers/engineers trying to solve a problem that is not worth solving for.

Yes, having some sort of inexpensive video calling tablet can be more convenient but it's not convenient enough to justify over an iPad or phone video call.

I think the actual history is that they built them for internal videocalling inside FB and then decided to sell them without really doing the research on the outside market.

1. "Man videoconferencing totally blows and is really expensive!" [1] "We've got lots of smart people and expertise in streaming video from live events, bet we could knock together a solution in no time" (a team builds internal FB solution)

2. "Man our internal FB videoconferencing rules! It's a shame all those plebes in the wider world can't experience how great this is" "What if we take the gizmo we've built for every meeting room and turn it into a consumer device?"

3. <don't worry about step 3>

4. Profit!

[1]This was absolutely the case circa like 2012. Cisco had the only really decent enterprise option and it was really expensive. All the other ones couldn't interoperate and were terrible.

Most remote workers at my company either have a company-provided laptop with a webcam or have a company-provided webcam for their company-provided PC. The only reason someone would buy a Meta Portal would be if their company exclusively did their remote work via Meta’s platforms. Most companies use Teams or Slack anymore, and those can be used with any old webcam and/or a headset. Most folks on my team don’t even turn their webcam on during our weekly stand-up meetings, and we aren’t required to do so.

I'm sure they took privacy and data security very seriously, but they do have a Reputation.

People I talk to thought of it as a telescreen, not a video conferencing tool. That probably hurt sales.

I wonder if Meta could have made better pivots if they had accepted and embraced their untrustworthy image.

Yea. They’re great hardware it seems and they’ve been still adding features. I recently learned you can screen share with it as a second screen.

I’m sorry to hear this. I purchased one for my mom who had largely lost the ability to speak along with the use of her dominant arm. This was the only effective way we were able to communicate remotely.

Are these $50 tablets which only let you video call or use Alexa? What reason did they have to dump hardware at these prices?

They were like $300 when new. They’re dumping the hardware at those prices since it’s being discontinued and they don’t want the inventory.

I hope they unlock the bootloader. The portal+ was quite a little machine

It should be required by law to unlock the bootloader of any device once discontinued, IMO.

So may good news coming from Meta lately.

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