Snap (SNAP.US) stock price fell to a monthly low: SPECS was criticized, Meta's low price matrix was besieged, and Musk's exposure to Grok Bot's growth intensified AI FOMO

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Snap (SNAP.US) closed down nearly 6% on Wednesday, setting its lowest closing price in more than a month, for the second consecutive trading day. The cumulative decline in stock prices this week is close to 5%, and the weekly line is likely to close negative for the second consecutive week. Retail sentiment on the market sentiment indicator Stocktwits has also turned bearish.

The trigger for this round of sell-off did not come from financial reports or regulations, but CEO Evan Spiegel (Evan Spiegel)'s promotion of SPECS AR glasses on social media. Spiegel shared his early experience with SPECS on Tuesday and emphasized that the company is expanding the college developer community. However, the comment section quickly deviated from the product itself — some users directly asked when Spiegel would increase its stock holdings, others asked “would you buy it now”, and another user even predicted that SPECS would become “one of the biggest failures in technology history.”

Investors' discontent is understandable. According to information, SPECS is priced at $2,195, and pre-orders require a refundable deposit of $200. It is expected to be the first to ship in the US, UK, and France this fall. The glasses provide a 51-degree field of view and up to four hours of battery life, and the included charging case can extend the total usage time to 20 hours. Since then, Snap has also launched the $2,395 Connected Case package, added cellular connectivity, and announced commercial application partnerships with business partners such as Nvidia (NVDA.US), CRM.US (CRM.US), and Amazon (AMZN.US) AWS. The offline demo will launch in Los Angeles on October 1. Additionally, the company is developing SPECS Intelligence — an AI assistant across glasses, iPhone, and Mac platforms. Currently, limited previews are open on iOS, and the Mac version is still invitation-only.

The problem is that Snap's core user base — young people and teenagers — can hardly spend more than $2,000 for a pair of glasses. This structural contradiction has been repeatedly mentioned on Wall Street since SPECS was released in June.

Rohit Kulkarni, an analyst at Roth Capital Partners, maintained Snap's “neutral” rating and a target price of $7 at the time, bluntly stating that “distribution will be biased towards developers, professional consumers, and wealthy early adopters, with little synergy with Snapchat's young and price-sensitive user base.” Management sees the sales volume of 100,000 units as a “sprint target”. According to this estimate, the revenue is about US$220 million, and the revenue contribution to the market's consensus expectation in 2026 is only about 1%.

Nick Jones, an analyst at BNP Paribas, also expressed similar concerns, believing that pricing and continued investment demand will limit the product's immediate impact. He pointed out that although SPECS is lower than the starting price of Apple (AAPL.US) Vision Pro at $3,499, it is far higher than Meta (META.US)'s product line starting at about $250.

Meta is blocked by a “full price band” matrix

A few hours after Spiegel promoted SPECS, Meta released a complete smart glasses product line with a huge pricing span at the Connect conference, directly suppressing SPECS's pricing strategy.

Specifically, the Meta Adventurer glasses start at $249 and go on sale on October 23; the camera-less Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses start at $349 and are shipped on October 13; the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 with a camera starts at $449 and is already available for purchase. Meta said its eyewear line will cover more than 100 models by the end of the year. In addition, Meta also previewed VR glasses priced at $1,299 for the spring of 2027 — this product uses an external computing unit, follows a completely different technical path from SPECS's standalone design, and should not be directly compared. The $349 Audio version, on the other hand, has no visual display function at all, which is essentially different from SPECS.

Regardless of the differences in product forms, Meta's market dominance in the smart glasses circuit is real. According to Counterpoint Research data, global AI glasses shipments increased 263% year on year in the first half of 2026, with undisplayed AI glasses accounting for up to 96%. Meta's share of shipments in this market segment reached 94%, and shipments increased 260% year over year and 22% month over month. This size means that Meta's advantage in supply chain bargaining, channel distribution, and brand awareness is difficult to shake in the short term.

As a result, Snap's situation is more delicate: it chose a more technologically aggressive and more expensive route to try to get ahead in the “real AR” field that Meta has yet to conquer. However, the current feedback from the market is — investors can neither see strong support from short-term sales, nor a clear path to profit. Snap announced the layoffs of about 1,000 employees in April 2026 (accounting for 16% of global employees). The goal is to reduce annual operating costs by more than 500 million US dollars by the second half of the year and reallocate resources to core areas such as AI R&D and user growth. Q2 revenue increased 19% year over year to US$1,599 million, net loss narrowed from US$263 million in the same period last year to US$164 million, and adjusted EBITDA jumped from US$41 million to US$250 million. Fundamentals are improving, but the continued investment required by SPECS and the long cycle of AR hardware moving from “developer tools” to “mass consumer goods” are testing investors' patience.

Grok Bot user data switches with AI storytelling

On the same day, another piece of news indirectly intensified the market's scrutiny of Snap. Musk retweeted user growth data for SpaceXAI's Grok Bot on X: In the week ending September 14, the weekly active users of the product reached 418,000, an increase of 24% over the previous week.

Launched in mid-August, Grok Bot is not a traditional conversational AI, but rather an “autonomous digital employee” that can handle enterprise workflows such as email management, database updates, invoice processing, scheduling, and software bug submission. SpaceXAI packages it into a multi-tier enterprise AI subscription plan, and also provides independent applications. The pricing for the team version is $120 per seat per month, and the personal version is priced at $200 per month, making it competitive among enterprise-grade AI smart devices.

Notably, Grok Bot's enterprise customer service application has shown initial results — SpaceXAI said its customer service team increased its work order processing capacity by 175% without increasing manpower, and the cost of solving some issues was only $0.20 to $0.30. The company also simultaneously released the Grok 4.7 model for programming and intellectual work.

The core reason why this news is relevant to Snap is that the market's attention has turned to AI FOMOFERENCE (that is, it is feared that companies are falling behind others because they are not keeping up with the development of AI technology). When Musk uses “we've never seen anything grow so fast” to describe the growth rate of users of an AI smart product, investors' tolerance for hardware narratives — especially AR glasses that require long-term investment and uncertain short-term returns — will decrease accordingly. Currently, the AI smart device market is on the eve of an explosion. According to data from the research institute MarketsAndMarkets, the global AI smart device market is expected to be 19.3 billion US dollars in 2026 and reach 205.88 billion US dollars by 2033, with a compound annual growth rate of 40.2% during the period. Meta's Muse AI, OpenAI's Agent products, Anthropic's Claude Cowork, and SpaceXAI's Grok Bot are heating up this racetrack.

Snap's Specs Intelligence direction is in line with this trend, but progress is clearly lagging behind. There is only a limited preview on the iOS version, and the full service on the Mac is still in the invitation-based stage, which is a long way from actually participating in the AI smart competition.