The Gamers Nation: The Morning After: Facebook is now called Meta

Friday, 29 October 2021

The Morning After: Facebook is now called Meta

While Facebook the social network is still Facebook, the overarching company that it created is now called Meta. Facebook Inc. is changing its name in order to distinguish its myriad parts from the social network, which has an increasingly poor reputation pretty much everywhere. Particularly in the last few weeks.

While the company hopes it’ll offer some degree of distraction from current sentiment (and political focus), it’s not going to stop people talking about Facebook Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg announced the new name during his keynote for the company’s Connect event. He said: "From now on, we're going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook first."

The change appears very similar to how Google, the search and tech part, was bundled inside Alphabet — a bigger company to contain all the other parts.

The timing is, perhaps, even odder. The Facebook Papers — internal documents detailing the social network’s major failings and issues — encompassing misinformation, hate speech and censorship, are now public knowledge. Is this a distraction or Facebook wilfully forcing its own transformation at a time when most of us are more interested in how it’s going to fix its current state.

If I don’t want to use Facebook — why would I want to use its take on VR and the metaverse?

-Mat Smith

Meta is retiring the Oculus brand

Facebook Portal will also be known as Meta Portal moving forward.

Following the above announcement, a Facebook post from incoming CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth revealed that Meta is retiring the Oculus brand. Beginning in early 2022, the Oculus Quest will instead be known as the Meta Quest. Similarly, the Oculus App will be called Meta Quest App. According to Bosworth, the intention is "to make clear" to consumers Quest is a Meta product. "We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make," Bosworth said. The name is trickling down to other physical products. Facebook Portal will also become Meta Portal.

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Teenage Engineering made a mini ITX PC case called Computer–1

The $195 chassis is already sold out.

Teenage Engineering is best known for its synths, but it likes to explore other avenues, from designing wireless buds to games consoles and even an IKEA collaboration. It has announced an ITX PC case it’s calling the Computer-1. The company says it has been working on the design since 2014. “It’s not a ground-breaking PC case, but we like it, and use it every day,” TE says on its website. Alas, iIt’s currently sold out, but you can sign up to get a notification once it is available — which is what I just did.

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Mac revenue hit an all-time high last quarter, even without new MacBook Pros

The iPhone remains the money-maker though.

The company just reported its results for the quarter ending on September 30th, and Apple made 29 percent more revenue than a year ago — that's $83.4 billion, for those keeping track. While iPhone sales made up almost 47 percent of Apple's total revenue. While Mac revenue was only up two percent, that was just enough for Apple to say it was a new all-time high for the Mac.

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Sony has now sold 13.4 million PS5s

A boost in third-party games helped offset a drop in first-party sales.

Sony's PlayStation 5 sales remain relatively steady and strong, despite widespread supply shortages, with 3.3 million units sold in fiscal Q2 compared to 2.2 million last quarter. That brought total sales up to 13.4 million units, Sony announced. Game sales were also up significantly at 76.4 million units compared to 63.6 million in the previous quarter. The company has already stated that it has enough components for 22.6 million units to be sold by March 2022. That would be enough to meet its sales projections, but if sales really explode during the holidays, that could mean shortages could continue.

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Meta’s first leaked product is a watch with a notch

The company is reportedly working on three generations of smartwatches.

Bloomberg has published an image showing a Facebook/Meta smartwatch with rounded corners. It also has a notch with a front-facing camera. App developer Steve Moser found the image inside the company's app used to control its Ray-Ban Stories AR sunglasses, hinting that it could also be used to control the watch in the future.

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