The tech industry has spent roughly a gazillion dollars trying to convince people to strap face computers on their heads. It hasn’t worked.
But the tech guys haven’t given up. Their new pitch: Instead of buying bulky goggles that replace your reality with a computer-generated version of something else, what about some glasses?
You can see evidence of the switch-up with a couple of recent news stories:
- Apple is reportedly cutting production of its expensive, heavy Apple Vision Pro headsets, which went on sale two years ago but never seemed to find a market. (Apple declined to comment.)
- Meta says it can’t keep up with “unprecedented demand” for its Ray-Ban Display glasses it started selling last fall, and will have to delay plans to sell them outside the US. (I’ve asked Meta for comment.)
- Or, if you like market research: IDC estimates that shipments (not sales) of virtual-reality headsets dropped by a staggering 43% last year. IDC also says teched-up glasses shipments shot up by more than 200%, but that was from more or less a standing start.
At first glance, this makes a bunch of sense: People don’t wear big heavy stuff on their head unless they have to — like if they’re skiing, perhaps. But lots of people wear glasses. So if the tech guys want to sell new tech, they should stop trying to make things people don’t wear and focus on the things people already wear.
The reality is a little more complicated: Shrinking a computer — or even parts of a computer — into something that looks, feels, and weighs like glasses is incredibly hard. The lighter and cheaper you make them, the less they can do — which makes it harder to justify why you’d wear them at all.
So when Meta says it has been selling a ton of Ray-Ban Display Glasses, which start at $800 a pair, you need to put that in context: The company sold an estimated 15,000 units in the last three months of 2025.
We are likely to get a much better sense of consumer demand for this stuff in the next couple years, as more competition arrives.
Google plans to sell glasses that work much like Meta’s this year, though I assume they will be cheaper, since they don’t use the “neural wristband” Meta includes with its glasses. It is also working on more ambitious glasses with more functionality — seemingly like the “Orion” headset Meta showed off in 2024, but has yet to start selling.
Apple, meanwhile, has reportedly shifted resources from its Apple Vision Pro so it can make some Meta-style glasses itself. And Meta is plugging away at “Phoenix” — a headset that’s bigger than its Ray-Bans but still much smaller than the Quest headsets it has been selling for years. Those were supposed to launch in 2026 but have been pushed back to 2027, Business Insider’s Jyoti Mann reported this week.
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