I’m waiting for Apple’s Ray Bans

I got the Meta Ray-Bans primarily as a specialty camera. But they've turned out to be a good deal more. Not only are they functional prescription glasses that automatically transition into sunshades when I’m outdoors, the audio function is also good enough to replace replace my ear buds for when I’m walking about, except when I really need to focus on what I’m listening to. You miss out on bass and noise cancellation, but it’s far more comfortable than having something stuck in your ears for long periods at a time.

For me, the biggest USP of the Meta Ray Bans is that unlike my Fuji XH1, Canon R5C and even the vaunted DJI Pocket Osmo 3, it’s a camera I can actually use hands-free. No backpack or chest or head mounting accessories required. I just put the camera on my face, like glasses. Because they are glasses.

And when the battery dies, it does not become a worse pair of glasses. Just a very expensive pair of glasses.

I have no interest in Meta’s glasses AI features — they are permanently turned off for me — because I’m fairly certain that the handshake between Apple and Meta will never be deep enough to make them truly useful to someone who lives almost entirely in Apple’s ecosystem. The most frustrating way this manifests is in how difficult it is to get my media off the glasses onto my iPhone.

Nobody seems to know when Apple will roll out glasses, in this form factor, but it’s good to know that they are apparently thinking about it. That doesn’t tell us a lot about how far they’ve gotten in the development cycle, but hopefully it doesn’t take too long. Meta is following up in 2025 with a version of the Ray Bans that have screens in them. I don’t have a dog in the ambient computing or broader computing continuum arms race, but the FOMO is real, and I’d prefer that there was an option that talks natively to the software and hardware I already use, so I don’t have to pony up for the default state of the art, when it’s actually going to be a sub-optimal experience relative to my native computing ecosystem.

The Meta Ray Bans are pretty good. Apple, come and do your own. Please, and thanks.