Last Tuesday, of all days, Google decided to let anyone in the US buy Glass for $1,500 plus tax, no invite required, no waiting list, nothing. Tax day. I don't know if that timing was some cruel joke from the Glass marketing team or just a coincidence, but I spent that afternoon watching my Twitter feed split into two camps: people who'd just filed their returns complaining about how broke they were, and people who'd just spent fifteen hundred bucks on a computer you wear on your face.
I did not buy one. I want to be upfront about that before anyone assumes this is a "just got mine, here are my first impressions" post, because it isn't.
The sale only ran for one day and, from what I've read since, it sold out of most colors pretty fast. Charcoal and Tangerine went first, apparently, and Cotton (the white one, if you're not keeping track of Glass's slightly precious color names) was still around by evening. I have a friend, a guy I used to work with, who's been an "Explorer" since sometime last year through the invite thing, and he texted me a photo of himself wearing his second pair like it was a normal thing a person does.
Here's my actual opinion on this, since apparently I have to have one: I think Glass at $1,500 is a bad deal for what it is, and I think the timing of a public sale a full year after this thing supposedly launched tells you Google still doesn't know what it's for. It's not a phone replacement. It's not really a camera you'd want to trust with anything important, the video is fine but nothing special. Battery life is bad enough that most Explorer owners I've talked to (three, but still) say it's dead by mid afternoon if they've used the camera much at all. And the social cost is real! I don't care how many "Glassholes are just early adopters" thinkpieces get written, wearing a camera on your face in a coffee shop makes people around you uncomfortable, and they're not wrong to feel that way.
I got into an actual argument about this with my friend the Explorer guy, the one from a few paragraphs up. His position is that everyone said the same thing about people wearing Bluetooth headsets in 2006 and now nobody blinks at those. Fair point, sort of. But a Bluetooth headset doesn't have a camera pointed at you, and I think that's the whole difference. People aren't weirded out by wearable tech in the abstract. They're weirded out by not knowing whether they're being recorded.
Also, separately, and this has nothing to do with Glass really, but I spent most of the weekend before last going through every password I own because of the Heartbleed thing, and I am still not done. I thought I was being thorough two weekends ago and then I'd find some login I forgot existed (a forum I posted on twice in 2009, an old Newegg account) that was still sitting there with the same password I've used since college. If you haven't run your important accounts through one of the Heartbleed checker tools yet, do that before you do anything else this week. It takes five minutes. Buying face computers can wait.
Anyway. Maybe Glass gets cheaper, maybe the next version fixes the battery and drops the price to something a normal person would consider, and maybe in five years I'll feel dumb for writing this. That's fine. I've been wrong about gadgets before (I said nobody needed a tablet bigger than the iPad mini and then bought a Nexus 7 within a month, so). But right now, for fifteen hundred dollars, I'd rather keep the money and the dignity of not being the guy other people assume is filming them at brunch.