Mark Randall, Snap Inc.’s vice president of hardware and lead on Spectacles, has left the company.
Randall, who joined Snap in 2016 to head up its Spectacles project, announced his departure in an internal memo obtained by Cheddar. It's the latest shake-up for the Specs division, which saw layoffs last year, and for the company at large, which has struggled to impress Wall Street since going public.
Read this: Snap Spectacles 2 review
According to Randall's memo, Snap is going to "realign" its hardware initiative under the leadership of Jerry Hunter, Snap's SVP of Engineering. Meanwhile Randall is off to work on his own company.
It's been a tough few months for Snap, whose Spectacles haven't proven to be a significant hit for the company. Snap had to write off almost $40 million in unsold inventory last year, although it recently rolled out a second-gen pair which fixed some of the frustrations of the first, while adding more options for customization.
Randall's departure leaves a lingering question mark over the future of Spectacles. While limited for now, Specs are a promising vehicle for Snap's augmented reality efforts, which are blossoming slowly. Sadly, we don't yet know how well the latest pair of Spectacles have been received.
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By Hugh Langley
Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.
Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.
Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.
He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.