Yes, it’s expensive as hell, and my suspicion is that long term the displays will be replaced with a waveguide (Stanford’s looks pretty good at this point), so it won’t need the external-facing display

Interesting; any more information on this? I tried a search but didn’t turn much up.

I think that they saw what Google glass could become capable of, and thought that the phone as it is now (screen, etc) was going to become obsolete at some point, and they were terrified of losing that race.

That’s very fair… I definitely think the only viable future here is lightweight AR glasses.