Sources: Snap badly overestimated demand for Spectacles, has hundreds of thousands of unsold units in warehouses, either fully assembled or in parts
Snap badly overestimated demand for its Spectacles and now has hundreds of thousands of unsold units sitting in warehouses … Tweets: @mims , @mattmcgee , @adamsinger , @kantrowitz , @caro , @daniel_rubino , @stevekovach , @moorehn , @ow , @rishmishra , @howardlindzon , and @shiraovide Tweets: Christopher Mims / @mims : I think it was clear this wasn't going to work when people who waited in line hours to buy them stopped using them after about a week. http://twitter.com/... Matt McGee / @mattmcgee : Somewhere the old Google Glass team chuckles. http://twitter.com/... Adam Singer / @adamsinger : I live in tech capital of America and have still never seen anyone wear these outside. Cheap, ugly, disposable junk. Sorry Snap. http://twitter.com/... Alex Kantrowitz / @kantrowitz : Spectacles = light up sneakers. Concept is cool. But wear them outside? Nah. http://twitter.com/... Caroline McCarthy / @caro : I thought this was a publicity stunt from day one, but it sounds like it wasn't even a very effective one. http://twitter.com/... Daniel Rubino / @daniel_rubino : Shocked this didn't catch on. Or that Snap is overestimating it's value to this planet. http://twitter.com/... Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : They're fun for about 15 minutes http://twitter.com/... Heidi N Moore / @moorehn : If only Google Glass had provided some sort of previous proof that people don't want stupid digital eyewear http://twitter.com/... @ow : all you have to do is offer custom glasses lenses in them @snap are you there http://twitter.com/... James Mishra / @rishmishra : Just like Google Glass, there's always only a tiny number of weirdos willing to put cameras on their faces http://twitter.com/... @howardlindzon : Swipe right to make inventory disappear ...?? http://twitter.com/... Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : Hardware is hard, example No. 9,721: Snap has hundreds of thousands of unsold Spectacles. https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Spectacles arrived in late 2016 as Snap's first hardware bet, built on tech from its 2014 acquisition of Vergence Labs, and coverage at launch already flagged the gap between novelty and sustained use. The demand question sharpened through 2017: Snap's Q2 report missed on both revenue and DAU growth and sent the stock down more than 12%, so the company entered the fall under pressure to show its camera strategy extended beyond the app.
This report supplies the answer investors feared: sources say Snap has hundreds of thousands of Spectacles sitting unsold in warehouses, fully assembled or in parts. Weeks later, Snap's Q3 results confirmed the scale of the miscalculation with a $39.9M inventory write-off inside a $443.2M net loss.
First-order effects
- Snap is carrying hundreds of thousands of unsold units as dead inventory, a cost that surfaces directly in its financials — realized weeks later as the $39.9M write-off within the Q3 loss.
- The company's hardware narrative takes the hit now: a product once positioned as proof Snap could be a camera company is recast as evidence its demand forecasting failed, compounding the credibility damage from the Q2 miss.
Second-order effects
- Christopher Mims's observation that early buyers who queued for hours stopped using Spectacles within about a week points to a retention problem, not just an ordering error — meaning even discounted clearance of existing stock does not fix the underlying usage curve.
- Matt McGee's quip that 'the old Google Glass team chuckles' frames the competitive read: Google absorbed the same lesson years earlier, and Snap now inherits the burden of proving consumer smart glasses have a market at all.
Third-order effects
- If Glass and now Spectacles both overestimated willingness to wear cameras on faces, the structural lesson for consumer hardware teams is that distribution stunts and scarcity cannot substitute for daily utility — a pattern any future entrant into smart glasses must price in.
- For Snap specifically, the write-off pushes the company back toward software-led monetization of its camera, with hardware demoted from strategic pillar to experiment — a rebalancing that shapes how investors weigh any future device announcements.
The trend: Consumer smart glasses keep failing on the same axis — demand and retention, not technology — as each new entrant repeats the overproduction cycle Google Glass began.