[mindgam3]

The optics of this aren't great for Magic Leap. AR pun not intended. Really all this does is present Nreal as a legitimate threat to a company that raised approx 100x more money* before shipping a product.

(* Magic Leap funding $2B+, nreal $16M ish)

[khuey]

I don't want to take any position on either Magic Leap as a product/company or on this lawsuit, but it's not at all unusual for R&D to cost far more than production. This is how drug development works: someone spends billions researching and developing a drug and gets a temporary monopoly on production. Once competition is allowed and prices are competed down to the marginal cost of production the generics are close to free in comparison to the original branded product.

So "Nreal copied Magic Leap's product after Magic Leap sank billion into R&D" is an entirely plausible explanation for the comparable results despite the dramatic gap in funding.

[mindgam3]

I mean, I’m not arguing that there is no plausible explanation for Magic Leap’s inability to ship a product with only $1B in funding. The plausible explanation is that they are running a tech startup like a drug development company, to use your analogy, which is just a terrible way to do startups.

AR/smartglasses is not a market where you will have “generics” any time soon. You’re going to have the iPhone of smartglasses which will dominate, and then everyone else will try and fail to copy. Like Facebook dominating social, then google+ failing. Or iPhone vs Android, although Android did finally manage to achieve market share thanks to googles muscle.

Tl;dr: successful startups don’t raise billions of dollars before shipping a product as mediocre as ML’s v1.

[briandear]

And removing the mistakes made my Magic makes the derivative cost less; Magic used a lot of money figuring out what doesn’t work, money that the competing company did not have to spend. If I make an iPhone copy, I didn’t have to spend all the money Apple spent figuring out what wouldn’t work. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison.

[Retra]

They also used a lot of that money to develop a 'premium' aspirational product.