Remember how crazy everyone went in 2016 when buyers stood in long lines for the chance to buy Snapchat Spectacles from a robot?
The gambit may have garnered social media company Snap 150,000 sales of the glasses that shoot and broadcast snaps, but a new report from The Information (paywall; via Quarz) suggests that the hype overshadowed demand, leaving potentially hundreds of thousands of unsold Spectacles and their parts moldering away in warehouses. Last February, the sunglasses stared selling online.
A surplus in Spectacles would indicate that Snap intended to sell far more units of the social headgear. A failure to do so would explain why Snap has had to lay off staff.
Snap may not have given up on its hardware aspirations, though; there's been talk it would buy drone maker Zero Zero Robotics. Could snaps-on-a-drone be next?
Snap did not respond to a request for comment.