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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

Losing close to $4B per year, it’s safe to say they are already giving away the hardware.

Pretty wild that someone has the audacity to claim that $500 is expensive in this case. It's basically a high end tablet with a lot of low-volume custom parts. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd need to charge $1000 with no loss in sales to break even on just the headset's hardware+firmware (never mind the "metaverse" stuff they're dumping money into)

Even if it is not a success in any business context of meta, they still sold millions of it.

Economy of scale is definitely a thing here.

hmm, I didn't realize they'd sold around 20 million of these things

You aren't going to get iPhone/Samsung Galaxy-level scale effects out of that kind of volume, but it's enough that they might be able to break even within 50% over public BOM estimates

Yes it surprises me too.

And it even makes it weirder to me that I never felt seeing or hearing much about those headsets. Are they all sleeping in some boxes put away?

I believe it's losing $4B per quarter, not per year. And it's getting worse:

> We continue to expect Reality Labs operating losses to increase year-over-year in 2023.

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

Not at $500 a pop. The question is, do they want to sell hardware or do they want to sell the metaverse?

Reality Labs is losing a lot more than $4B

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