Google Glass had a lot of impact when they were presented. Everybody talked about all the possibilities they had, both positive and negative, as they can offer a whole new Augmented Reality experience, but they could also cause a privacy invasion.
So far it’s not easy to see people wearing them because the first sets were intended for developers and the price was $1500. Recently Google has offered the chance of buying to the general public, but if someone was expecting some kind of reduction in the price, their hopes were immediately shot down.Not a single dollar of discount.
People many times wonders if a device really costs what the producers ask for, how much is the profit for each sale, and the guys from teardown.com disassembled one of the Google’s devices trying to answer that question.
The result is that they are surprisingly cheap. Barely $80 for the whole pack. The result can be seen in the next picture:
But is that a the real price? The display costs just $3? It’s really easy to think that Google is making a profit of more than $1000. Maybe producing them at the moment can be that cheap, but what people doesn’t realise is that to get that tiny piece of glass showing us the info like if we were looking at a big screen requires a lot of work. Behind the materials used in the glasses there is huge amount of engineering building all the electronics and software, physics for the optics, design for the visual aspect… And all this needs to be paid somehow. We have to recognise the job done by all the team who took part during the development.
It’s true that some things can be absolutely overpriced, and if Google doesn’t follow the same strategy as with its Nexus devices, they might not have the same success, but it’s important to learn that when we’re buying something we’re not just acquiring components, we’re also paying hours of work.