Meta halts development of Portal displays and smartwatches – Gaming – News

Meta will discontinue a number of hardware products and divisions. The virtual reality headsets will continue to exist, but the company will stop developing the smart Portal hub and its smartwatch project, among other things.

Meta managers said at a general employee meeting this week that Meta is discontinuing those products, writes the Reuters news agency. The company would stop altogether with the Portal, a smart speaker with a screen intended primarily for video calls. The former Facebook introduced that device in 2018.

Later, the Portal division came under the company’s Reality Labs division. This is the Meta department that also deals with the metaverse hardware. The company will not stop producing that hardware, necessary for the future of its work in the metaverse.

However, Meta would stop working on its smartwatches. There rumors had been circulating for some time that Meta will still come with a smartwatch with two cameras in 2022, where already leaked photos. However, that watch never materialized and would never happen again.

Half it laid off 11,000 workers last week, about thirteen percent of its total workforce. The company did this due to disappointing results. Mark Zuckerberg attributes the low turnover, among other things, to the economic situation and Apple’s new measures regarding advertising on iOS. Investments in metaverse assets have also cost the company billions and have yet to yield anything.