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Meta will pivot the Portal away from consumers

The company is looking to reposition its smart display as a business product instead.

A photo of a Portal Go smart display

Meta's Portal Go will soon be gone.

Photo: Facebook

Meta is moving away from its goal to establish its Portal smart display as a consumer product, Protocol has been able to confirm. The company will not make any future versions of Portal geared toward consumers, and will instead focus on selling Portal to businesses.

The shift was first reported by The Information Thursday, which also said that the company was switching up its road map for AR glasses and postponing the launch of a consumer-ready AR product by a few years. All of this is part of efforts to control costs of Reality Labs, Meta’s unit focused on metaverse software and hardware.

Meta first introduced Portal as a video calling-centric smart display in 2018, and has since released a number of iterations of the hardware, including a version that uses TVs as displays and a portable Portal Go. Portal sales went up during the pandemic, but the company hasn’t been able to compete with similar products from Google and Amazon.

As a result, Meta is now looking to more specifically target businesses that are looking for ways to keep their hybrid workforce connected. Meta is expected to continue to sell its existing devices to consumers, and provide buyers with support for some time to come.

Janko Roettgers

Janko Roettgers (Twitter, Mastodon) used to be a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.

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