[hintymad]

The All-In Podcast had a chart (https://youtu.be/A-bIpJdaCnM?t=2126) that compared the Meta's investment on VR with the investment that changed human history in the past, all inflation adjusted. It's pretty interesting. iPhone: $3.6B, Tesla: $25B, Boeing: $32B, Apollo: $253B. And Meta's Reality Lab: $4B a quarter!

[pchristensen]

Just to be clear, "Apollo" here is the Apollo space program that invented and manufactured space flight and moon landing and return, over 13 years, in inflation-adjusted dollars. Through all the Meta-verse skepticism, I kept thinking that the payoff could be worth it if they capture the next big platform. But this put the scale of the investment in context, and now I doubt that even the wildest success will payoff for $250B of spending. And that's not even counting the opportunity cost of what else FB could do with that money.

[throwthere]

The $250 billion spend is "projected" over 10 years by the commentator.

Would META spend $25 billion/year indefinitely without earning a profit? I don't know but other scenarios seem plausible too.

[nicolashahn]

As long as Zuck is in charge, yes.

[gordon_freeman]

This. The problem with Meta is that nobody can confront Zuck and remind him that this is really a bad idea RoI wise. Zuck is unhinged and makes the decisions as he pleases even at the company of this scale.

[a123b456c]

That's what they said about libra, about marketplace, about...

[csomar]

Libra was killed externally by regulators. It is a solid idea, however. FB marketplace is a big thing is some markets.

[karmakaze]

I can't comment on how that 4B/quarter is being spent. However the Quest 2 has been the biggest success in VR to date. Why couldn't some of those billions have been spent on getting a Quest 3 ready for sale for Fall/Xmas 2022? It would be like Apple not releasing new iPhones level of missed opportunity.

Or perhaps it's a huge selfish gamble thinking, let's get our product perfected before everyone realizes how big this is. This sounds like a small startup more worried about having their unknown product's secrets stolen rather than how to market it so enough know it exists.

The business angle also doesn't make sense to me. Maybe during severe lockdowns it might have had a chance, but now we should be betting on the tech and performance/price improving in service of games first and foremost.

I hope SteamVR wins, otherwise I don't care whether Apple or Meta's device wins. And where is MS in this, too late as usual?

[squeaky-clean]

There's the meta quest pro which released last week, but the tech for something in the same price range as the Quest 2 but better probably isn't a thing yet. The Quest 2 did have a $100 price increase 6 months ago.

[andybak]

Carmack was arguing for a cheaper, lighter headset instead of the Quest Pro:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/carmack-wants-a-250-v...

> As a "counterpoint" to the push for the Quest Pro in the Meta offices, Carmack says he "personally still [tries] to drum up interest internally in this vision of a super cheap, super lightweight headset." His rallying cry, he says, is a target of "$250 and 250 grams" for a headset that cuts out as many extraneous features as possible while still being usable (the Quest Pro weighs 722 grams, while the Quest 2 is 503 grams). That could help bring "super light comforts" to "more people at low-end price points."

[karmakaze]

This reminds me of the Woz/Jobs divergence--Apple under Jobs did well.

Without experiencing Project Cambria/Quest Pro, I can still imagine the hard-to-believe-it's-not-real feeling of presence with the incremental improvements + real-time facial expressions. That does seem important to be able to demonstrate. I haven't as yet heard reviews that express this though.

[baby]

Yeah, I don’t understand why there was not a quest 3. My guess is that they wanted to launch a good entreprise headset and focused on that.

[onepointsixC]

There will be one, it's just still hasn't launched yet.

[JoeJonathan]

Blows my mind that just as everyone was crazy to return to normal life, Meta was like, hey wouldn’t it be great if we could do more of that?

[paxys]

"Is [Metaverse] going to be a leap in humanity at the scale of the Apollo program?"

That is, IMO, the key question behind this entire discussion. Zuck certainly thinks so. I'm sure a lot of people at Meta and outside think so as well. And their detractors obviously don't.

There isn't going to be any consensus on whether Meta is spending too much money or not because ultimately it is a referendum on the concept of VR/AR/Metaverse itself.

[hintymad]

The All-In hosts gave a reasonable comment: Meta may well get a leap in humanity, but it should at least show incremental progress to the investors given such a huge quarterly investment.

[paxys]

In terms of pure technology there has been a crazy amount of incremental progress in the area. We have gone from the first kickstarter for Oculus (when VR was just a sci-fi dream) to the release of Quest Pro and games like Half-Life: Alyx in under a decade.

Of course shareholders really want to count actual monetary returns as progress, and it's the job of the CEO to decide whether prioritizing short term gains is actually in the best interests of the company or not.

[JetSpiegel]

> the first kickstarter for Oculus (when VR was just a sci-fi dream)

What? Virtual Boy was released almost 30 years ago, that's a consumer product that sold in the same ballpark as the Oculus Rift.

[JoeJonathan]

The thing is, speaking as a total non expert here, people have been taking about VR since the 90s, and it’s always kind of sucked. It’ll get much better over the next decade, of course. But even then, how many people want to sensorially sever themselves from the outside world? Lots of people who Meta thinks might use VR for work have, you know, other human bodies to take care of.

[andybak]

> and it’s always kind of sucked.

Some of us quite like it.

[colinmhayes]

Why? Meta is controlled by someone who is completely unanswerable to his investors. What incentive does he have to show any progress?

[tomaskafka]

> iPhone: $3.6B

Is that an amount to create an initial iPhone? While it was awesome, if it stayed like that, it wouldn't change the industry. It would seem fair to add up all the R&D costs that went into getting iPhone to where it is today, which will be much higher.

Dtto Tesla. For Apollo, we know the total.

[paxys]

I'm not sure how the numbers really compare. If they are showing development costs for a product before it entered the market then it should probably be $2B for Meta, since that's what they paid for Oculus.

[MarkMc]

The Apollo space program had almost no effect on human history

[Kye]

What has Tesla changed? All it did was show a market for non-garbage electric cars. Other more established companies are running laps around it now. How much of that $25B went to the ever-retreating promises of self-driving?

[dabeeeenster]

I'm not a Tesla fanboy, but come on. The model Y is the best selling car currently in Germany

[ChrisClark]

> Other more established companies are running laps around it now.

Huge citation needed. You can't just lie and will it to be true. :D

[nr2x]

When was the last time they had a new model? I’m seeing a virtual Cambrian explosion of non-Tesla EVs in the South Bay in just the last year. Bolt and Leaf are the entry level models that make EV accessible. Tesla is still way out of reach for most people, serving a niche audience, and now merging their brand identity in many peoples minds with the toxic soup that is Twitter.

I’m all in on EV, but Tesla blew it by failing to focus on the Bolt and Leaf market. And their SWEs are now apparently spending their time solving twitters HR problems.

[simonebrunozzi]

Not a Tesla fanboy, but it seems you're dismissing many of Tesla's accomplishments here. Unless @Kye is the username secretly used by Jeff Bezos (hi Jeff!), I'd recommend you weigh how difficult it is to build something similar to Tesla.

[bryanlarsen]

1900 car companies were started in the US. There are only 2 that have never gone bankrupt: Ford and Tesla.

[jjulius]

One of those has been operating ~100 years less than the other.

[bryanlarsen]

Tesla has been operating far longer than the vast majority of the 1898 others.

Maybe a better way to state it is that Tesla has been alive and independent longer than ~1895/1900 American car companies.

[baggy_trough]

"All it did"