Last month, I had a conversation with someone wearing glasses — and couldn’t see that they had a display right in front of one of their eyes. Through a monitor connected to the glasses, I watched in awe as my colleague Victoria Song scrolled through and wrote WhatsApp messages, used the display as a viewfinder for a photo, changed the volume on Spotify by turning her hand as if she was holding a knob, and even looked at directions on a map. And when I looked Victoria in the eye, while I could tell she was looking at something on the glasses, I couldn’t see the display at all.
This was my first look at the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the company’s new smart glasses with a monocular screen. It was a hugely impressive demo. And it was all happening on a pair of glasses that, while bulky, could totally pass for something a normal person would wear. Ray-Ban put its name on the glasses, after all.
As we walked away from the demo, I remember thinking that an Apple version of those glasses would be the most obvious thing in the world. Can you imagine how useful it would be to have a pair of glasses connected to your iPhone with speakers, a camera at eye level, and your own private display to show you things like notifications, music, and directions right in front of your eyes?
Apparently, somebody at Apple thinks that, too. Bloomberg reported this week that Apple is pausing work on a lighter Vision Pro headset in favor of speeding up its smart glasses efforts, which include pairs with and without a display.
Even the non-display glasses seem like a slam dunk for Apple. Imagine AirPods, but sunglasses; if that was the entire product, I’d probably be first in line. Apple’s first glasses will reportedly have a camera, too, and while I’m a little more skeptical of cameras on your face, the millions of people who have already bought Ray-Ban Meta glasses prove that there’s a market for something like that, too.
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are a hit even though iOS limits what Meta can do. A pair of Apple glasses that’s fully integrated into the Apple ecosystem would presumably be able to smoothly sync your things like your iMessages, photos, maps, contacts, and music so that you have everything handy, just like you expect when you unlock your iPhone, tap your Apple Watch, or open up your Mac. Even if the glasses just serve as a very fancy extension of your iPhone, that would instantly be a very compelling product. And given Apple’s extensive expertise in making highly capable hardware with tiny components, like the Apple Watch and the AirPods, it seems likely that a pair of Apple glasses could have best-in-class hardware.
The thing is, these rumored glasses from Apple might still be a long way away. Bloomberg says Apple may not announce the glasses without a display until as early next year ahead of a 2027 launch. Apple apparently planned to release its glasses with a display in 2028 before this renewed effort. If and when Apple actually ends up releasing these, Meta will have years to iterate on its own hardware and get it in the hands of users.
Following the demonstration of its Orion augmented reality glasses last year, which put virtual objects onto the real-world in front of you, Meta will almost certainly beat Apple to the punch on releasing true AR glasses to consumers, too. And it’s not just Meta that Apple has to worry about: Samsung and Google are working on a pair of AR glasses, smaller hardware companies have lots of ideas of their own for smart glasses, and ex-Apple design chief Jony Ive is even rumored to be working on AI glasses for OpenAI.
For Meta, its huge push into smart glasses is about cracking the smartphone’s dominance. (“One of my formative experiences has been building our services constrained by what Apple will let us build on their platforms,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last year.) For Apple, it’s about not losing that dominance and not missing out on what’s next — and given Apple’s current struggles with AI and Meta’s lead in smart glasses, Apple is already on its back foot.
But Apple has built a reputation for arriving late to the party; it wasn’t the first company to make an MP3 player or a smartphone, and we all know what happened there. I just hope Apple calls its product iGlasses.