Matthew Dowd, in a long, devastatingly careful post on Twitter/X:
If they’re suggesting their waveguide displays are bright enough
and vibrant enough to see clearly in direct sunlight, that would
be yet another innovation they’ve discovered that every other
player in the market (including the Chinese manufacturers where
the waveguide displays come from) has missed.Meta has access to every display manufacturer and their Display
Glasses’ peak brightness is ~5,000 nits, itself very power
heavy. These glasses came out just last fall and there is no sign
of significantly brighter waveguides shipping for commercial
products since then. It’s also worth noting that Meta Display
Glasses users have noted poor readability in direct
sunlight, suggesting a greater leap would be necessary to
meet Pickle’s claims.Put simply, Pickle having much brighter waveguides that also have
a 30-degree FOV is extremely unlikely. It would mean that some
waveguide manufacturer out there (there aren’t many) recently
achieved a breakthrough and has chosen Pickle to be the first
device it’s found in. Oh, and it’s going to ship next quarter.
I don’t know what these scammers at Pickle think is going to happen, but they sure as shit aren’t going to ship a product that does anything vaguely close to what they claim they’re on the cusp of shipping. I doubt they’re going to ship anything at all, ever. The whole thing is the like the Big Lie, but for technology not politics.
One of two scenarios is true:
-
Pickle, a 15-person startup founded in 2024 that has raised less than $10 million, is the most advanced personal computer hardware company in the world, on the cusp of launching multiple hardware and software technologies that put the company 5-10 years ahead of established rivals like Apple, Meta, Samsung, Google, Sony, and Zeiss. The Pickle 1 glasses are the most amazing consumer electronics device since the original iPhone. CEO Daniel Park will go down in history as one of the most innovative leaders and inventors in the history of the world. Or:
-
Pickle is a complete and utter sham that is accepting $200 pre-orders for a product that exists only as a fabricated fake in its launch video. CEO Daniel Park is a liar and fraud, and, depending upon what they do with the pre-order payments they are now collecting, perhaps a thief.
Either (a) is mostly true or (b) is mostly true. Given that there exists not one single independent person other than Park himself who vouches that the Pickle 1 actually exists and functions in prototype form, I think it’s pretty obvious which scenario is the case. Which makes me wonder what the hell is going on at Y-Combinator these days.
