Surely when factoring the profit/loss of a product, one must include all aspects of that product’s revenue stream? Which in this case, one would assume, will also include the continued advertising targeting revenue.
Not to mention it wasn’t long ago that the Quest 2 got a not insubstantial price increase which in their own words was: “By adjusting the price of Quest 2, we can continue to grow our investment in groundbreaking research and new product development”.
The key takeaway from that statement for me is, continue to grow our investment. Regardless of what those extra funds are used for, there’s no real getting around the layman’s translation of: we’ll make more money from it.
Even in the current climate, with supply and demand as it is, it’s pretty unusual, though not unheard of, for a product of that age to do anything but go down in price. That’s generally what happens in manufacturing, the longer something is made, the cheaper it becomes to do so.
While the majority of Meta’s profits naturally come from advertising, when you’re generating over 117 billion dollars a year in revenue and roughly 40 billion in net income, the overall picture is not one of selling at a loss. In the grand scheme of things at least.
Of course, that’s just a personal opinion, which is to say, I sure as heck wouldn’t complain if I were in such a position
