GoKawiilEvan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap, during the Axios Media Trends Live event in New York, Sept. 18, 2025.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel is betting consumers are so tired of looking at smartphone screens that they'll be willing to pay over $2,000 for augmented reality glasses that bring digital visuals into a user's field of vision.
"Almost 20 years since the launch of the iPhone, people are ready to think about computing differently," Spiegel said in an interview with CNBC.
On Tuesday, the Snap co-founder debuted Specs, his company's first AR device geared towards the broader public instead of developers. At $2,195 with a $200 refundable deposit, Specs are more than 15 times the price of Snap's $130 camera-only Spectacles that debuted in 2016 and never became a hit.
"Specs really represents a way to use computing together in shared experiences in the real world, looking up through see-through lenses rather than at an opaque screen," Spiegel said. The device is expected to ship later this year in the U.S., U.K. and France.
It's a nascent market but one already featuring more well-capitalized competitors. Meta's Reality Labs has found some success with its Ray-Ban Meta glasses in partnership with EssilorLuxottica , after the company struggled to find a mass audience for its Quest-branded VR headsets. And in May, Google showed off its upcoming AI-powered glasses, being developed with Samsung and eyewear makers Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, with an emphasis on audio.
Spiegel dismissed audio-only smart glasses, characterizing them as "very lightweight glasses that really don't do much."
"They're kind of like a phone accessory or an open-ear headphone," Spiegel said.
But Meta and Google have built dominant digital ad businesses that generate enough cash to allow the companies to experiment with costly hardware efforts. Snap, by contrast, has struggled to impress Wall Street, losing money every year that it's been a public company.
In January, Snap created a subsidiary dubbed Specs Inc. to house the development of its AR glasses.
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