North stops selling its Focals smart AR glasses 14 months after debuting them, says it plans to launch a sleeker version with 10x higher resolution in 2020
North, an augmented reality (AR) wearables company backed by Amazon and Intel, has announced that it's pulling its current Focals smart glasses off …
Context & Ripple Effects
North built Focals on technology it picked up when it acquired the IP behind Intel's cancelled Vaunt glasses in late 2018, pricing the result at $999. Fourteen months later the company is pulling the product from sale entirely, while still promising a sleeker successor with 10x higher resolution for 2020.
The retreat lands mid-crisis: after raising roughly $170M from Intel, Amazon, and others, North was reported in March 2020 to be running low on cash and shopping for a buyer. By June, Alphabet had agreed to acquire the company — winding down Focals 1.0 and cancelling the very Focals 2.0 this announcement teases.
First-order effects
- Existing Focals owners are stranded with $999 hardware that no longer has a sales channel or a committed upgrade path, since the 10x-resolution successor never ships under North.
- Backers Amazon and Intel face a write-down on a consumer product whose first-generation sales were reported as minuscule, converting their wearables bet into an acqui-hire asset.
Second-order effects
- The demand failure forces the exit Alphabet ultimately makes at a reported ~$180M — and Google immediately kills Focals 2.0, folding North's team into its own AR efforts rather than continuing the retail product.
- Rivals reading the same signal hold back from consumer launches of their own: Snap's Spectacles, impressive in demos, stay off shelves over overheating and a 30-minute battery.
Third-order effects
- Consumer AR glasses are consolidating out of startups' storefronts and into big-tech research labs, where the hardware gets rebuilt without a price tag — leaving the category with no proven mass-market form factor even years after Focals' debut.
The trend: Standalone smart glasses keep failing as retail products and getting absorbed into big-company AR programs, shifting the category's center of gravity from startups selling hardware to platform owners building it internally.