Snap’s $2,200 AR Glasses Tank the Stock — No Surprise There

Snap finally showed off its AR glasses, Specs, after more than a decade of development. The debut didn’t go well.

The company’s stock has been sliding for a while — down 30% over the past year. But the Specs launch pushed it further off a cliff: it dropped more than 5%, from $5.86 a share on Tuesday to a low of $4.83 on Wednesday morning. As I write this, it hasn’t crawled back to where it was before the announcement.

That’s a rough 24 hours for a company that was already in a rough patch.

The big problem? The price. Snap is selling these things for nearly $2,200 apiece.

Snap’s core user base is teenagers. Teenagers don’t have $2,200 to drop on a pair of glasses, unless they’re already influencers or trust fund kids. So the immediate question is: who’s actually going to buy these?

CEO Evan Spiegel went on CNBC on Tuesday wearing the glasses and tried to justify the cost. His argument: “The most important way to think of Specs is as a computer, and so they’re comparably priced to other high-end computers or high-end laptops.”

I get the comparison, but it’s a stretch. A laptop is a general-purpose tool you use for work, school, entertainment — basically everything. These glasses are a niche AR device with a very specific use case. Nobody’s writing essays or editing spreadsheets on Specs.

Spiegel also positioned Specs as a middle ground between Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses (which are cheaper but less powerful) and the Apple Vision Pro (which is powerful but bulky and even more expensive). He claimed Specs is “highly wearable but also incredibly capable for immersive computing.”

That’s a fair positioning on paper. But in practice, $2,200 is still a lot of money for something that’s not a primary computing device. The Vision Pro is $3,500 and even that’s struggling to find a market. Meta’s Ray-Bans are around $300 and actually sell because they’re affordable and don’t try to be too much.

Snap’s problem isn’t just the price tag. It’s that the company has been hyping this product for years, and what they delivered is something most of their users can’t afford. The market is voting with its dollars — and its stock price.

I’ll be curious to see if Snap can pivot on pricing or find a way to subsidize these things. But right now, Specs looks like a cool demo that nobody’s going to buy.