Mark Zuckerberg mostly uses the new Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses to send text messages. Lots of them.
He has been wearing the glasses around the office, firing off WhatsApp pings to his execs throughout the day. “I run the company through text messages,” he tells me recently.
“Mark is our number one heaviest user,” Alex Himel, the company’s head of wearables, confirms. Zuckerberg is known for sending lengthy, multi-paragraph missives via text. But when he’s typing on the glasses, Himel can tell because the messages arrive faster and are much shorter.
Zuckerberg claims he’s already at about 30 words per minute. That’s impressive considering how the glasses work. The heads-up display isn’t new; Google Glass tried it more than a decade ago. What’s new is the neural wristband Meta built to control the interface and type via subtle gestures. Instead of tracking your hands visually or forcing you to type out into empty air, the band picks up signals from your arm’s muscular nervous system. “You can have your hand by your side, behind your back, in your jacket pocket; it still works,” Zuckerberg says. After trying it, I can confirm he’s right. It feels like science fiction come to life.
“Glasses, I think, are going to be the next computing platform device.”
“Glasses, I think, are going to be the next computing platform device,” says Zuckerberg during our recent conversation, which airs in full on the Access podcast Thursday, September 18th. He argues they’re also the best hardware for AI: “It’s the only device where you can basically let an AI see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day, and then once you get the display, it can just generate a UI in the display for you.”
While Zuckerberg has been advocating for this idea about the next major platform for a while, numbers — not just hype and flashy demos — are now beginning to support his theory. Sales of Meta’s existing Ray-Bans have reached the single-digit millions and increased by triple digits from last year. The broader market for tech-enabled eyewear is projected to reach tens of millions soon. Google is releasing AI glasses next year, and Snap has a consumer pair of AR glasses shipping then as well. I expect Apple to release its own glasses as soon as 2027 — the same year that Meta is targeting to release its much pricer, full-fledged AR glasses.
For Zuckerberg, the prize is enormous. “There are between 1 to 2 billion people who wear glasses on a daily basis today for vision correction,” he says. “Is there a world where, in five or seven years, the vast majority of those glasses are AI glasses in some capacity? I think that it’s kind of like when the iPhone came out and everyone had flip phones. It’s just a matter of time before they all become smartphones.”
Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth recalls how EssilorLuxottica initially thought the display glasses would be too big to sell as Ray-Bans. “Then, last year, we showed it to them. They were like, ‘Oh, you did it. Let’s put Ray-Ban on it.’” They’re still chunky, but less noticeable than the Orion AR prototype Meta showed off last year. With transition lenses, the new display Ray-Bans start at $800 before a prescription. Bosworth says the target customers are “optimizers” and “productivity-focused people.”
Meta isn’t making many of them — reportedly a couple hundred thousand — but Bosworth predicts “we’ll sell all of the ones that we build.” When I ask Zuckerberg about the business potential, he hints that the real margin will come later: “Our profit margin isn’t going to come from a large device profit margin. It’s going to come from people using AI and the other services over time.”
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