Meta has done the impossible: it got people to wear smart glasses in public. Not just in demo videos, not just at tech conferences, but in actual coffee shops, concerts, sidewalks. That’s an achievement, especially when Google Glass, Snap Spectacles, and Oakley’s endless experiments never made it out of the punchline bin. Ray-Ban branding helps — everyone looks passable in Wayfarers — but the bigger surprise is that the “Glasshole” stigma didn’t immediately return.
I’m still not buying them. Literally and figuratively.
I had LASIK years ago, not because I hated glasses, but because I wanted freedom. Freedom to pick sunglasses without worrying about prescriptions, freedom to choose cool shades even if I’m not cool myself. Now people are strapping cameras and mics to their faces again. I get it. I don’t buy it.
First problem: batteries. Wearables always die on this hill. (I have Motus stories …) Shrink the hardware and you shrink the power. Make the power bigger and suddenly you’ve got a brick on your face. Either way, you have to charge it. Apple solved it by admitting the obvious with Vision Pro: a tethered battery pack. Fine for watching an 8k 3D video on a couch. Not fine for walking down Main Street looking like Egon Spengler.
Second problem: the Glasshole effect never went away. I remember it vividly. I was on a panel with Jamey Newberg — Jon Daniels spoke too, but the panel I was on ahead of him is fuzzy — when a guy sat down in the third row wearing brand-new Google Glass. This was peak hype. He looked like a cyborg dropped into a SABR convention. We were supposed to do Q&A, but all I could think about was whether he was streaming us. A lot of places banned Glass outright, and the insult stuck. That problem hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything, it’s worse.
On my Iceland cruise this summer, I found myself hesitating to take photos. I use an Insta360 Go, which is small and discreet, but still obvious enough that people can roll their eyes or wave. That’s the point - everyone gets the choice. Smart glasses remove that. They turn every face into a potential broadcast without consent. Coldplay fan cams anyone? It’s not hard to imagine this ending up legislated.
Third problem: Meta AI. It’s the weakest of the bunch. Zuckerberg knows it too, which is why he’s throwing Juan Soto money at AI talent. Maybe it catches up. Maybe it doesn’t. Right now, buying Meta glasses is buying into the worst assistant in the market. Kickstarter is littered with startups promising glasses that use OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini instead. The problem is longevity. Tech products age like warm milk in the sun. Are you dropping a few hundred bucks on a pair of shades that will be obsolete before your next passport renewal?
Even then, you still need your phone. The glasses are just peripherals. The processing, the connection, the heavy lift is still in your pocket. I’ve got my iPhone’s action button mapped to ChatGPT’s voice mode and I use it all the time. Not in public, not yet, but everywhere else. It’s scary good. Alexa and Siri never got past the light-switch-and-timer phase. GPT does the real work.
Case in point: watching Only Murders in the Building, I blanked on what made Logan Lerman famous. Asked GPT. Boom: Percy Jackson. Not only the right answer, but the right answer right then in a voice that sounds human. That’s the kind of contextual help that changes things.
The liquor store’s another example. I snapped a photo of the Scotch shelf, asked GPT what I should buy, and ten seconds later it gave me a list. Which I’d like, which I wouldn’t, which were worth the money. It even editorialized: “You’d love that bottle of Hedonism, but you’re a writer with a Substack. You can’t afford it.” That’s not just data, that’s personalization. It worked fine with my phone.
Could glasses do it faster? Sure, but the ten seconds mattered less than the fact that everyone knew what I was doing. That friction — pulling out the phone, snapping the picture — is what makes the system livable. Without it, we’re back to the Glasshole problem.
So no, I’m not buying Meta’s Ray-Bans and I am admittedly the ultimate early adopter. I’ll stick with my Persols, my Akilas, my Smiths, and a Cosmic Orange phone that already does the job. Invisibility isn’t always the future. Sometimes the second it takes to pull the phone out is the feature, not the bug.
Gonna make locker rooms interesting