Palmer Luckey, the founder of military tech firm Anduril Industries and a VR innovator once fired by Mark Zuckerberg for supporting Donald Trump, is considering entering the laptop market with a fully American-made product.
Toms Hardware reports that Palmer Luckey, best known for founding the virtual reality company Oculus in 2012 and later founding the military technology startup Anduril Industries, is now considering a foray into the laptop market. In a recent tweet, Luckey posed the question, “Would you buy a Made In America computer from Anduril for 20% more than Chinese-manufactured options from Apple?”
This is not the first time Luckey has brought up the idea of a domestically produced laptop. At the Reindustrialize Summit, a conference focused on the intersection of technology and manufacturing, Luckey interrupted a speaker to ask the audience, “How many people in the audience would buy an American made computer if it was 20% more expensive?” He went on to discuss the extensive research he has already conducted regarding building a PC in the United States.
While there are currently some laptops assembled in the U.S., these products use components sourced from elsewhere. According to the FTC’s Made in USA Standard, for a product to be truly considered “Made in USA,” it must be “all or virtually all” made in the U.S., with negligible foreign content. This means that the final assembly, processing, and sourcing of all or virtually all components must occur within the United States.
Luckey has passionately defended this concept in social media posts this week.
Producing a laptop that meets these stringent standards would be a significant challenge, and it remains to be seen whether sourcing exclusively American-made components would result in only a 20 percent price increase, especially if the laptop’s performance is to be competitive with recent MacBook models.
Luckey’s interest in creating a fully American-made laptop comes on the heels of his announcement of a cryptocurrency-focused bank called Erebor earlier this month. The bank’s name, along with the names of Luckey’s other ventures, reflects the unabashed obsession that he and his co-founders, who previously worked at Palantir Technologies, have with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Meta has teamed up with Anduril to work on VR solutions for the military, years after Mark Zuckerberg fired Luckey for supporting Donald Trump:
The new system, named EagleEye, will feature sensors that enhance soldiers’ hearing and vision, allowing them to detect drones from miles away or identify hidden targets. Additionally, the devices will enable soldiers to operate and interact with AI-powered weapon systems. The technology will be underpinned by Anduril’s autonomy software and Meta’s AI models.
This partnership is particularly noteworthy given the history between Meta and Anduril’s founder, Palmer Luckey. Luckey, who founded Oculus VR at age 15, became a billionaire when Facebook (now Meta) acquired his company in 2014. However, Zuckerberg fired Luckey in 2017 following the 2016 election. Luckey’s support for Donald Trump and his enthusiasm for building lethal tech for the military made him an anomaly in Silicon Valley at the time.
