[vinkelhake]

It’s a cool lab demo that they’re presenting as a finished product.

They do? It seems to me that they've been looking for early adopters that can provide feedback. It'll be a finished product once it's available for order on Google Play.

[reidmain]

They've said that they are going to release the consumer version in 2014. Sure it could drastically change from what a developer could be receiving in December 2013 but odds are it is going to be stuff like the price that changes the most, not the actual hardware.

[turing]

That's not really relevant. The point was that Gruber stated that Google is presenting Glass as a finished product, which is something they have never done.

[reidmain]

Based on this website they are putting A LOT into presenting it to the public as pretty polished http://www.google.com/glass/start/

That isn't a developer website that is a website designed by marketing.

[magicalist]

Glass uses a TI SoC, and TI doesn't make SoCs anymore, so the odds are actually quite high that the hardware will be making a change before going into mass production. It was actually a surprise when they did a feature bump in October and it was still on an OMAP.

A hardware change makes a lot of sense, besides. It's running slightly older phone hardware, but its still phone hardware. It would be silly to say that "odds are" a new phone coming out a year (or even 6 months) after the last version would be keeping the same hardware; I see no reason to assume that here. As long as you can keep power usage down (or lower) and heat down (or lower), there's no reason why you wouldn't upgrade from what's essentially a phone from 2011.

[reidmain]

The phone manufacturers have been doing this for so long that they have the process down to an art. While I think Google could gain this ability in the future nothing they have done with hardware so far makes me believe they have the ability to drastically overhaul hardware in a short period of time. If they do radically change the Google Glass hardware so that it doesn't have the "glasshole" look or drastically improve the software I will be shocked.

It is entirely possible that I am wrong. But the look of Google Glass has barely changed since it was unveiled in the beginning of 2012. If they are truly going to try to push a consumer version of a brand new line of products you better be damn sure that when someone puts on Google Glass they instantly become attached to it. They want to know where they can get one. To do that you gotta test the hell out of it and make sure there are no sharp edges. That hardware would need to start getting into people's hands now and if they've just released a new model how much runway are they going to give between releasing the "golden master" version to their tester and getting it to market?

I've used Google Glass personally and seen dozens of people try it on around me as well. Most of the reactions are "Oh that is cool" but none want to actually buy the product. Compare that to the Occulus Rift where the people I've seen use it want to know when they will be able to buy it.