Meta's Frenetic Connect Keynote
At this point, I'm basically a reviewer of keynotes. Apple's most recent? Didn't like it – way too long, lacking the live energy.1 Snap's? Nice work by Evan Spiegel. I even gave Google's most recent event some quick thoughts. That brings us to Meta's keynote today for their Connect conference...
I've been writing about Meta keynotes for a long time. Some I loved. Others I didn't. This one was a bit weird to me. First and foremost, it started late – about 15 minutes late. That's pretty strange in this day and age for a major company event. But that ended up being fine because it was short: about 45 minutes. Mark Zuckerberg was able to pack a lot into a little time – perhaps too much as everything sort of felt a bit rushed over until we got to what he was clearly excited to show off at the end: Meta's new "Orion" AR glasses. We'll get to those.
In general, I found Zuckerberg's performance a bit off. From the moment he walked on stage wearing one of his now signature big, baggy custom Latin letter shirts,2 it was just a weird look, quite literally. Whereas Apple's keynotes now feel entirely too slick – because they are still pre-recorded – Meta's was almost too frenetic. This gave spurts of good energy, but Zuckerberg couldn't seem to strike a balance between scripted and off-scripted, so the cadence was chaotic.
From his opening attempt to connect to the audience with "it's pretty awesome" which was awkward to the "hell yeah" after the Quest 3S price announcement which just felt forced, it felt like we were watching someone rehearse not present. Look, as we're all well aware by now, Meta is an almost infinitely more successful company than Snap from a pure business perspective (in that one is wildly profitable while the other is not), but Zuckerberg could learn a thing or two or a thousand from Evan Spiegel when it comes to these keynotes.
It just feels like they need to play into Zuckerberg's strengths. But I suspect part of the issue here is that he's clearly going through some sort of phase, emboldened by the company's renewed success after years of being beaten down, and he's gonna wear chains and self-referential shirts on stage if he wants to. And he's gonna swear if he wants to. Did you hear that he's done apologizing for everything? He's just gonna go out there and wing it! Hell yeah he is! But also not really, because being on stage and presenting during a keynote address is insanely hard. Doing so while millions of people around the world are watching may as well be impossible.
So you need a script. Nah, screw the script! No, you need one. "Alright, look... but..." No, you need one. "My friend Kenny..." Zuck...
I'm just saying that some people have a weirdly natural ability to do these types of presentations. Steve Jobs obviously did. It seems that Spiegel does. Others have to either stick to a script or lock in some sort of persona, like an acting performance. Zuckerberg's method now strikes me as part him, part cool guy on stage, part scripted. It's disjointed.
The good news is that the announcements themselves sort of made it all moot. No one (besides me) is going to be talking about the performance and instead they'll be talking about the $299 Quest 3S compared to the $3,499 Vision Pro. Or Llama 3.2 versus the performance and parameters of the other models out there. Or the new voice capabilities compared to OpenAI's and Google's. Or the new celebrity voices until they're inevitably sunset in six months. Or the new Ray-Ban smart glasses features, including a new limited edition transparent body and transition lenses. But really all they'll be talking about are the new AR glasses.
While a few folks at Meta, including Zuckerberg, have been teasing them for a while, the company still tried to inject a bit of intrigue in their unveil by having them come on stage via a steel briefcase handcuffed to a man. It was a bit flat. It was fine. The glasses themselves look... chunky. Not like the Vision Pro, but not like the Meta Ray-Bans either. They look better than Snap's stab at the space, but they're still pretty big. And Zuckerberg tried like hell to slip the "and the small puck that goes with it" under the radar. But yeah, they'll be tethered to an external brick just like the Vision Pro is, at least in prototype stage.
Update: While the glasses are technically tethered to the puck, they're connected wirelessly, so it's not like the Vision Pro with its (really annoying) battery tether.
The demos and first-hand accounts all sound promising. As does the neural interface system – shout out CTRL Labs tech!3 But this is clearly very much a work-in-progress. Zuckerberg noted that they'll only be working with a handful of partners externally during this stage of the device – which is probably why Snap over-emphasized that it's AR glasses were going to be the most developer-friendly platform. They knew what was coming. The battle is back on between these two. Hopefully Snap's plan to actually pay for their development works out...
Zuckerberg closed his keynote by talking about the "competition for what the future will look like." I think most people will assume he was yet again calling out Apple, but actually it feels like Meta is now in the midst of fights on a few fronts, with regard to a few different pieces of technology. Yes, Apple for VR. And Snap for AR. And OpenAI for AI. And Google. And Samsung. And Microsoft. And Anthropic. And Mistral. And others on various things in between. Also, the EU, which got a special shout-out from Zuckerberg during the keynote, noting that he "remains eternally optimistic we will figure that out."
Eternally optimistic, or as Mark Zuckerberg might say, "aeternaliter spe plenus".
1 Apple really, really, really needs to go back to live events. And I think they will.
2 "All Zuck or all nothing". Okay.
3 An investment I did at GV back in early 2018 before Meta smartly acquired them in pre-launch in late 2019.