Facebook Portal is no more under Musk
(Picture: Facebook)Last week, Meta made more than 11,000 workers redundant — a cut of around 13 per cent of the workforce.
While it wasn’t immediately clear what this would mean for Meta’s bread-and-butter services - like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp - Reuters has revealed that these cuts will mean an immediate hit to the company’s hardware ambitions.
Portal, the company’s collection of video-conferencing smart screens and cameras, has reportedly been axed, and Meta has also apparently given up on its ambitions of entering the smartwatch market.
In the case of Portal, it simply wasn’t growing fast enough, with an estimated one per cent of market share as of earlier this year. “It was just going to take so long, and take so much investment to get into the enterprise segment, it felt like the wrong way to invest your time and money,” Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth reportedly told a company town hall meeting.
The changes already seem to have been reflected on the official Meta site. If for some reason you try to buy a Portal today, you’re greeted with a message at the top of the screen saying that Meta Portal TV, 10”, and Go will be available until December 31, 2022, or “while supplies last.”
You’re also warned that “you may see changes to the experiences and apps available,” but “many experiences on Meta Portal will remain and be supported”.
While Meta’s smartwatch never even got to this stage, the groundwork was reportedly quite far along — so much so that the company was already sketching out plans for the second and third generations, according to The Verge. Indeed, the below image of the watch was found by Bloomberg in the Meta’s Ray-Ban app, giving us an idea of how the first generation might have looked.
To its credit, Meta was reportedly planning something quite different from the designs that dominate our list of the best smartwatches. As well as the usual fitness features and focus on messaging — unsurprising given Meta runs both Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp — the smartwatch would be all about photography and video capture.
To aid this, the purported design not only featured a front-facing webcam for video calls, but was built around a watch body that could be physically removed from its frame to reveal a 1080p auto-focus camera on the back. With the screen likely used as a viewfinder, you would then be able to snap shots or video more flexibly, with the ability to easily share with both Facebook and Instagram baked in.
The patent image uncovered by GizChina earlier this year gives you a better idea of how this might work in practice.
It’s certainly an innovative idea, though whether it would catch on in an age where everyone already carries around a very capable point-and-shoot camera on their phone is anybody’s guess.
It sounds like we’ll never know. For now, the smartwatch team has reportedly been shifted to work on augmented-reality glasses, which could be a clue as to where the company’s Ray-Ban Stories eyewear collaboration will head next.
