Meta is not in the hardware business, they’re in the software and data transport business.
The hardware is just an intermediary step while they wait for someone else to take on that burden
Facebook / Meta is one of the few data hoarding companies that doesn’t have “full control” of how their products are consumed / used and how much data gets collected in which way. Apple has the Mac, TV, Watch, and iPhone platforms. Google has the Pixels, Android, and Nests, Amazon has Kindles, Fire, Alexa devices, and so on.
Facebook doesn’t have any of these. The best they can do today is being a parasitic add-on to a platform they have no total control over like “the others” do.
Making their own hardware is a key element, not a burden. But they’re still treating it like the latter. If the Metaverse would already have been the New Thing ™, they’d have been the quasi-dominators of that territory because they’re pioneering the hard- and software. But along came AI which doesn’t need it’s own hardware platform, and still nobody wants to live in the Metaverse.
