Kanye did one of his popup stores near my house recently. Line of teenagers two blocks long waiting to buy $400 T-shirts. If it's cool, they'll find the $.

Kanye is cool and his clothes have massive resale value. Clunky nerd gadgets spotlighted in the WSJ have neither.

snapchat is cool. whether these glasses will be cool...who knows, but they certainly have a good shot at it.

These are the same teenagers/college-age persons who own $600+ iPhones.

Most phones are subsidized by wireless contracts.

Cell phones aren't subsidized, they are just financed over 2 years (with the payment often hidden in your monthly cell phone bill). If the price of the glasses is a problem (I doubt it is), they could be financed the same way "Just give us $11/month for a year and you can have them today!"

That's becoming more common but is not universal yet. Phones often still are subsidized, even when the buyer is still paying something for the phone.

The phone-sized early termination fees put the lie to it being any sort of subsidy.

(for "subsidy" to be a reasonable description of the flow of funds, the phone company would probably have to be losing money on the most expensive phones; of course they aren't. They provide the phone up front with a minimal payment, but they have structured the monthly fees to more than cover their costs for doing this.)

Except they charge me the same rate if I already have my device as the person in the long-term contract, just without the early termination fee. If they have structured the locked-in person's contract to cover hardware costs then they have structured mine for that as well, despite the fact that I didn't get hardware from them. Therefore, I am paying part of the hardware costs for the people who buy phones from the provider; i.e. I am subsidizing them.

Furthermore, early termination fees are constant for all contracts. The person who got the $150 phone has the same termination fee as the person who got the $600 phone. Thus again, someone is subsidizing someone else.

I'm pretty sure that people using paid for hardware are just more profitable than people that are still paying for hardware. But they make income on all the people.

And the fees aren't necessarily the same for cheaper phones:

https://www.verizonwireless.com/landingpages/return-policy/

Cheaper than a pair of raybans, which are fairly ubiquitous. If they are successful, the price will drop too. If the hardware is minimal, and people like the design, why not buy these instead of whatever other sunglasses they were going to buy and get a fun toy as well?

Raybans actually look nice and maintain their value. These look like they were designed by a committee that googled "cool millennial"

All the young 20 something year olds that I know are still not dropping $120 on sun glasses unless they are young college graduated professionals. Most are not. And I'm a 28 year old professional that wears $10 knock offs.