I think Meta’s problems are largely similar to Google’s: they have very bad leadership, specifically Zuckerberg, and thus can’t leverage their existing talent to execute/compete. The whole Metaverse fiasco would seem to demonstrate he’s effectively a “mad king” at this point, and probably surrounded by a sycophantic c-suite. Having the best talent in the world (which they obviously do by how fast LLama was spit out) isn’t going to matter that much if its all serving at the behest of someone who has become deluded by their initial success and has no ability to course correct.
Those headsets are subsidized, do you really believe that level of hardware costs less than the unit price of 300 dollars? Meta is trying to gain market share via selling at a loss and perhaps making money through games or simply getting everyone inside the "metaverse" to then show them ads.
They would've sold exactly as many of those if they didn't jump full-speed into the Metaverse rabbit hole. Even the Quest 2 release predates that direction shift.
