The tech world is buzzing over a skeptical story by The Information's Reed Albergotti about Magic Leap, the augmented reality startup that has been valued at $4.5 billion without having yet released a commercial product. It's an important piece, but also one that is being lazily extrapolated by headline pundits.

Here are the three critical highlights from Albergotti's report:

Magic Leap distributed a promotional video about an in-office robot invasion that "was not actually filmed using any Magic Leap technology," in a bit of PR bait-and-switch.

Magic Leap had expected that its revolutionary "fiber scanning display" technology would be a major product component, but it's been put on the back burner after development troubles.

Magic Leap allowed Albergotti to test a version of its product, which he reported was a tethered, helmet-like device that is inferior to the HoloLens device that Microsoft has already shipped to developers.

Reaction to Albergotti's report has been swift and withering. Most notably, many have compared Magic Leap to Theranos, the secretive blood-testing startup that has become Silicon Valley's poster child for over-promising and under-delivering.

How ridiculous.

The scandal of Theranos is that it delivered a product to market that not only didn't work as advertised, but which put people's health at risk. Magic Leap has delivered nothing to market and, even if its product sucks, it won't result in users following improper cancer treatment regimens.

At worst, Magic Leap would end up in the bucket of companies like WebVan. Failure, not life-threatening fraud.

But even that is very speculative at this point.

For example, there is no question that the "robot invasion" video was deceptive. But Albergotti also reports that Magic Leap's more recent promotional videos were "shot through its prototype devices."

Moreover, Albergotti readily acknowledges that the device he demoed was not the Magic Leap's latest prototype, which is more spectacle than helmet. Or, put another way, he was forced to compare a product brought to market (Microsoft HoloLens) to a product that will never be brought to market (Magic Leap's helmet). To be clear, I'm not arguing that the first commercial Magic Leap device will be any good. I'm arguing that none of us ― including Albergotti ― has any idea yet.

And this is where another comparison between Magic Leap and Theranos falls apart. Most of the former's investors are sophisticated tech venture capitalists, who Abovitz says were “sending their brilliant professors from all the top schools to try and shoot us down.” Theranos, on the other hand, largely raised money from rich individuals whose life sciences experience began and ended with high school biology. Magic Leap's board includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai ― whereas Theranos directors used to include former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.

Yes, even the top tech minds can be wrong (at best) or bamboozled (at worst) ― but Magic Leap has not created the conditions for fraud as did Theranos.

It is very tempting to assert parallels between highly-valued, hyper-hyped and secretive private companies led by idiosyncratic outsiders. In this case, however, the parallels don't work.

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