So Tuesday was the one-day-only thing where Google let anyone in the US buy a pair of Glass without an invite, a referral, or having won some contest back in 2013. $1,500, one day, first come first served, and apparently they didn't even cap it by frame count this time around. I spent a good chunk of my afternoon with the tab open, added to cart, just sitting there.
I didn't buy one. I want to be upfront about that before I go on a whole thing about why I almost did, because otherwise this reads like sour grapes from someone who couldn't afford it. I could afford it. I just couldn't justify it, which is a different problem entirely.
Here's the thing about $1,500 for a piece of hardware that's explicitly still labeled "Explorer Edition." That's not a consumer price, that's a beta tester price, except normally when you're beta testing something the company pays you, or at least it's free. Google flipped the whole arrangement so you pay them for the privilege of finding their bugs and getting yelled at in bars by strangers who've decided you're recording them. I've read enough of the "glasshole" pieces from the past year to know that's a real, documented experience and not just internet exaggeration. A guy in San Francisco got his Glass ripped off his face in February. That actually happened.
And yet. I watched a demo video for probably the ninth time this year of someone getting turn-by-turn directions projected in the corner of their vision while biking through traffic, and some small dumb part of my brain went "yeah, okay, that's the future, I want that." Which is exactly the reaction Google is fishing for with a stunt like this. Make it scarce, make it a story, get bloggers like me typing sentences like "some small dumb part of my brain" at 11pm on a Wednesday.
What actually stopped me wasn't the money, it was that I don't have a good answer to "what would I actually do with it." Directions I already get from my phone, which lives in my pocket and doesn't make me look like I stepped out of a low-budget sci-fi short. Photos I already take with my phone too, and honestly the phone camera is probably still better than whatever's crammed into that little prism housing. The pitch for Glass has always been about presence, about not having to look down at a screen, and that's a genuinely good idea. I just don't think this version of it, the version that costs as much as a decent used car and makes you a target for both thieves and internet ridicule, is the one that proves it out.
I keep thinking about how this compares to smartwatches, which everyone assumes are coming later this year in some real form (Samsung's already three watches deep and nobody I know owns one). Wearables in general feel like they're in this weird adolescent stretch right now, all promise and no polish, and companies are trying to buy their way past that stretch by pricing the early stuff like jewelry instead of like gadgets. It works, sort of. People buy it. Somebody bought a bunch of these on Tuesday, because within a few hours the coverage was already calling colors "sold out."
My actual complaint, if I'm honest, isn't even about Glass specifically. It's that "explorer program" has become this convenient label tech companies use so that when the thing embarrasses you in public, or the battery dies in ninety minutes, or a stranger asks if you're filming them, that's just part of the deal you signed up for, no refunds no complaints. It's a great framing if you're the company. Less great if you're the one wearing it on the bus.
I'll probably still try one at some point, if a friend has one or Google does another one of these open days and my curiosity wins out over my wallet. Just not this week.