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Snap may have flown a bit too close to the sun in its development of the palm-sized selfie drone, Pixy. Following a late-April announcement, the social media firm has already begun pumping the brakes on the project, per a Wall Street Journal report. CEO Evan Spiegel has apparently relayed the message that the hardware is one causality of re-prioritization, amid broader economic concerns.
All is not lost for the product, exactly. Snap will apparently continue selling through its already existing limited inventory of the $250 device. The company declined to offer a comment on the report.
The firm hasn’t exactly been a hardware powerhouse. The Pixy joined the company’s Spectacle glasses, which have been something of a mixed bag – though the product recently shifted from the novelty of face-worn cameras to a product focused on the burgeoning AR category. Pixy, it seems, won’t be afforded the luxury of finding market fit. Hardware is hard, of course. Meta has notably been going through its own recent struggles with its Portal devices.
Even so, it’s hard to know precisely how seriously Snap was taking its efforts with the Pixy. The system was, itself, a bit of a brightly colored toy, lacking in the sophistication (and years of development) of a DJI. Hell, even DJI ultimately killed off its closest equivalent, the Spark, in a bid to streamline its consumer offerings — and don’t even get me started on the whole GoPro Karma debacle (it involves the drones falling out of the sky, for starters).
Between higher-end products from companies like DJI and much cheaper knockoff systems, there may not ultimately be a lot of consumer drone market to play around in. That, coupled with some internal Snap restructuring, means Pixy simply wasn’t long for this cruel world. But hey, now you’ve got a collector’s item and a strange little piece of tech history on your hands.
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