Jason Hiner/ZDNET
If you're interested in buying a pair of the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, good luck. They are only available in the US, are back-ordered for weeks or months in several places, and Meta is reportedly only planning to produce 150,000 to 200,000 units over the next two years. That's fewer sales than the Apple Vision Pro.
However, throughout 2025, ZDNET has seen much stronger interest in smart glasses than XR headsets from our audience of professionals and technology enthusiasts. With that in mind, I wanted to flag an alternative to the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Displays that you can get outside the US, which have unique features you won't get in Meta's futuristic glasses, and cost $200 less.
I'm talking about Rokid Glasses, which I've been testing for the past few weeks.
Also: I tried smart glasses with a built-in display, and they beat my Meta Ray-Bans in key ways
And while they are going to retail for $599 when they are released in November, they are available in their preorder marketing campaign on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter campaign has eclipsed $3M in orders, and Rokid told ZDNET that it already has worldwide pre-orders for over 300,000 pairs of Rokid Glasses.
Jason Hiner/ZDNET
I've tried the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses -- and I'll be testing them more fully starting next week -- but I found plenty of things that the Rokid Glasses can do that I can't do with Meta's new flagship smart glasses. Conversely, there are areas where the Meta next-gen glasses have some advantages.
So I thought it would be helpful to break down both lists, based on my experience with the two products.
Where Rokid Glasses are better
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