The Wacky World of Wearables

Glassholes, Mark Zuckerberg is a robot, and the secret life of AirPods

Two things pushed wearables out of Drafts into The Wirepine Weekly:

1. Coach made me to do it. I can’t count underwater. Makes swim workouts tricky. So when the coach told me to go onto the next set and I told her I didn’t think I got all the laps in from the first set, she told me to get a watch. This confused me at first (my comprehension also seems to suffer in the water) but then I understood she meant a smart watch which apparently will count laps for you which would be very nice. So maybe it’s time to get a smart watch.

2. I need to make fun of Mark Zuckerberg. A video of Mark Zuckerberg hyping smart glasses popped up on my feed. TBH I thought this was a spoof making fun of Zuckerberg because he’s one of my favorite tech bajillionaires to mock so I see quite a few. But it’s true! I can’t believe Facebook, er Meta is making a go at glasses (again!) which has been a money pit and epic FAIL for so many companies before them. Also … what about the metaverse and Virtual Reality headsets?!

Anyone know what time it is?

I Will Wearables ever be Bearable?

More than bearable - they'll be as indispensable as that phone in your pocket. Every tech company knows a future is coming enabled by further component miniaturization and emerging AI/VR services that will enable new form factors and new scenarios and wearables will be everywhere. There won’t be a single form factor or single company - it'll be a ginourmous market and of course everyone wants to have a horse in this race and that's the reason this space has such a colorful history.

Here's something to blow your mind - ultimately it won't be a thing you wear but a thing you are. You can find implants under development to address blindness and hearing. The over-the-top example is Elon Musk's Neuralink. Their mission:

Create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.

'Unlock human potential tomorrow' 🤔 I listened to Kara Swisher's podcast with Elon Musk last year and the most interesting thing Musk talked about was General AI getting bored with humans because of how slow we communicate. Human speech is around 125 words per minute or in computer terms 40 bits per second. That’s super-duper slow for a computer - the first computer modems 30 years ago for example were 1200 bits per second so human communication is 3% of that! It’s a crazy thing to think about.

Kara asked Elon to explain what Neuralink is in the “dumbest possible way.” Musk’s answer:

“So think of it like a FitBit in your skull. Or an apple watch in your skull. So, we take out a section of skull, we replace that with the chip and the inductive charger and Bluetooth antenna, and it’s really quite, almost quite literally like, a FitBit in your skull,” he said, “With tiny wires that go into your brain.”

I'll just leave that there.

II Ridiculous

Let’s go from the sublime to the ridiculous starting at ridiculous. There are many ridiculous examples to choose from, here are some of the more memorable.

Nintendo is a creative video game company and I am the proud owner of a vintage game cube with Donkey Kong bongo drum controllers and they are still the best thing ever to happen in a video games. I dig the Nintendo Switch too and we have one in the fam. However, Nintendo has the dubious distinction of one of the 1st wearable fails with the Virtual Boy. Imagine a viewfinder device perched on a tabletop tripod you awkwardly stick your face into along with a wired controller (that you can’t see because your face is in this silly tent thing). Also, who wants to be a virtual boy? Check with Pinocchio - you gotta be a real boy. The tech (more like 2D stereo vision than VR) couldn’t overcome the awkwardness, cue fail.  But hey it came out in 1995 so perhaps they were just ahead of their time.

Here's a true wearable for you - the venerable Keyboard Jeans. Who's down to pound away (in public) on your crotch keyboard!?

Fashion is always the tryhard - Project Primrose from Adobe announced earlier this month. It's a dress that changes designs with a little built-in controller that appears to be on your behind. Beats the jeans, but would you wear it? Adam DeVine was Adobe's requisite relatable celebrity color commentator for this event - his only job is to humanize the tech - his contribution watching this demo (while drinking a beer) is 'that's insane'😂

#ProjectPrimrose | Adobe MAX Sneaks 2023

Fitness Bands were the first legit wearable trend that broke around 2010. Take Jawbone - they made their name with industrial styled bluetooth headsets - I had one, it was arright. Honestly the Star Trek Lieutenant Uhura headset never worked for me regardless of styling. Geordi's headset? Yah now we’re talking. Jawbone saw the fitness band trend and went all-in pouring everything into the cool looking but poorly executed Jawbone UP. Fail; they went bankrupt. Fitbit ultimately won this market hitting payday when Google bought them in 2021 for $2.1B. Microsoft also had a go at this market with the now defunct Microsoft Band - there is much roadkill on the road to fitness.

But the absolute biggest wearable fail of all time with nearly $1B of dirty advertising money, machismo and ego spilled is Google Glass. Time to mock Mark Zuckerberg!

III Glasses

Glassholes! When a product creates its own consumer language you go into the marketing hall of fame, think Kleenex or Band-Aid - product names that are so ubiquitous they represent an entire product category. But when your product name becomes profanity used to characterize people you hate complete with an unfortunate anatomical reference, well, that's just no bueno. Looks like the remedy is to have an affair with your boss - Sergey Brin Amanda Rosenberg Affair. Long read but kind of fascinating in a watching-a-car-crash kinda way, at least check out the picture.

Here is a mockery of a bunch of glassholes firsthand courtesy of the Daily Show's Jason Jones. If you watch one video in this article this is the one.

Glass Half Empty

Google Glass was an epic fail because you looked like a colossal cyber-dork filming people in public. The tech was cool especially for 10+years ago (heads-up-display!) but it didn't have the app/services to backing it up. Regardless Sergei Brin (Google co-founder) went BIG with glass. At their annual tech conference in 2012 (Google I/O) Brin's egomaniacal hubris was on overdrive as he had a bunch of flat-brim bro extreme athletes parachute off a big zeppelin above San Francisco’s Moscone conference center, land on the roof, ride BMX bikes across said roof and through the conference center while another set of flat-brim bros rappelled down the side - all while live streaming into Google Hangouts via Google Glass. You can’t make this stuff up. See it all here:

Project Glass: Live Demo At Google I/O

Next up was Snapchat - 4 years later in 2016. If you ask me to rank my top 5 favorite social media apps then or now, Snapchat would be #1, #2, #3, #4 and tied at #5 with reddit. Snapchat's key demographic is 13-29 year olds so there you go.  Snapchat shot up super fast in the early days and I really though Snapchat Spectacles were going to make it. I would've bought a pair if they weren't already DOA by the time you could buy them online. Initially they were only available in pop-up automated kiosks. They were actual glasses not cyborgy weirdness like Google Glass but were chunky with obvious cameras embedded. Anyhow, fail they did. It still fundamentally comes down to you didn't look cool and - are you recording me right now?! Techcrunch breaks down the fail. Why Snapchat Spectacles failed | TechCrunch

Ok with two mondo fails as backdrop, Mark Zuckerberg stumbles onto the scene. Facebook called their first release in 2021 Ray-Ban Stories. WSJ breaks down the Fail. Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses Fail to Catch On. But they're baack - announced just a few weeks ago by Mark 'the robot' Zuckerberg himself (or was it his metaverse doppelganger?)

Why is Facebook err Meta back for more punishment in a wearable market that is obviously inherently limited? Are they pivoting from their now namesake Virtual Reality Metaverse?¹

Go big or go home. Fail fast. Learn from your mistakes. Iterate. I believe in all these things and have seen them work. Products become great through iteration and often you learn more from failure than success. But sometimes your company is run by a robot and he is just not making smart decisions.

There is one rational explanation. Virtual Reality is coming and if you've been ignoring it check Apple’s Vision Pro. Apple has a good record on market timing and they are great at building, marketing and selling hardware. VR is coming. Meta has been working on VR hardware since they bought Oculus for $2B in 2014. If you think of wearable headsets as a spectrum, smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses are on the far left while immersive VR headsets like Meta Quest 3 are on the far right. They'll be an ever-richer continuum like this in our future and I only hope - for Meta shareholders sakes - that is Zuckerberg's strategy here.

IV Sublime

For sublime we gotta go with the best wearable ever; hope you get one of these in your Christmas stocking. The Ben 10 Omnitrix. IYKYK.

What’s the one wearable that's killing selling over 100 million unites and making bazillions? AirPods. Check this out, thank you StatsPanda:

If AirPods were a standalone company they'd be bigger than Intuit, Spotify, eBay, on down the list. From what I can figure Apple earns about the same - maybe a little less from the Apple Watch and that's probably where our story ends for me - I'll get one :)

I did my research. Three friends have Garmin watches and 3 have Apple watches. Out of this representative sample set I have determined that Garmin is for the more athletically inclined and Apple is for the more I just want to know how many laps I swam and maybe the time, inclined.

Looking ahead, will every Tesla owner happily get chipped to be one with their car and tell the rest of us about it? Will something even more ridiculous than the crotch keyboard hit the market for influencers-of-the-moment to hype? Will some startup gobsmack us all with a wearable we can't live without? Will Zuckerberg's New Horizons metaverse get more users? I believe all but the last will happen. Regardless, it's going to be super entertaining - be sure to watch ⌚

1. Sidebar on Zuckerbot’s infatuation with the metaverse:

1. He rebranded the whole company Meta. Weird to say, weirder to write.

2. He poured money into it with zero returns - Meta lost about $25B across 2021-2022 alone and the losses keep coming.

3. Nobody uses it! The last time they reported numbers for Horizon Worlds it was a couple hundred thousand users. Compare that to Facebook at 3 Billion.