>> "The whole point of 'Explorers' was explicitly stated as being for finding the kinks in the system outside the lab."
Originally. Then they started to sell it on the play store for $1500 with a full marketing page and no explanation that it was a beta product.
Indeed. It was one thing to release a prototype to people interested in experimenting and playing around. It was another to push it through a retail channel alongside designer frames.
Certainly the time they released it to the UK market Google would have known that they were selling an evolutionary dead end as if it were a product.
I would assume this was more an act of internal political cowardness at recognizing reality rather than grubbing for money.
> It was a marvellous bit of well-made kit
Marvelous other than the 1500 dollar price tag for an unfinished product, the lack of software, the abysmal battery life, and the obvious privacy concerns of this device being constructed by one of the most invasive companies on the planet?
I agree with the fact that it's the first, but calling it marvelous is a bit of a stretch.
Adjusted for inflation Glass was the price of an Apple One or the launch price of a Commodore 64 (which, if you preordered, came with a free cassette drive for storage: a $70 value.) It was priced correctly for for true early adoptors who wanted a prototype. Not as a consumer product. Google's stated target price for commercial release was "about the price of a smartphone."
It seems to me your adjusted for inflation price is talking about currency inflation and not the deflation in tech prices. $1500 is quite a bit of money for such tech in my opinion. This is especially so in light of Google's legendary poor customer service.
One of the problems it did have that I thought was a problem for adoption was that it didn't handle being lent out very well. If you calibrated it for yourself, it was pretty responsive, but hand it over to someone else, and it was out of whack in didn't really respond. I lost count of the number of times I'd show someone something cool, hand it over to them to try, and have it not work on them because the calibration wasn't suitable. Understandably, this left them with the opinion "this is shit".
It was a marvellous bit of well-made kit, had a couple of problems, and as you say, was in the first generation of it's kind.