Last week I was at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked and got to take a closer look at Samsung’s smart glasses for the first time. After the moderate success of larger headsets, the sleeker smart glasses have seemed to be the way most major manufacturers are going. Inspired by the initial success Meta had with their Ray Ban glasses.
However, Meta’s Ray Ban glasses have also received a lot of criticism. Privacy has become the focus of smart glasses and what used to be smooth photography, interpretation of what you see and intelligent conclusions have now instead been turned into fear of surveillance, harassment and abuse.
Especially for Apple, personal privacy is something the company has set as one of its main strengths. Therefore, now comes information that their smart glasses are delayed. They certainly don’t want to end up in the same bad weather as Meta, even if Meta has now acted and is said to block Instagram users who recorded and posted dubious clips where the glasses are used for hidden or otherwise inappropriate recordings.
Last week I was at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked and got to take a closer look at Samsung’s smart glasses for the first time. After the moderate success of larger headsets, the sleeker smart glasses have seemed to be the way most major manufacturers are going. Inspired by the initial success Meta had with their Ray Ban glasses.
However, Meta’s Ray Ban glasses have also received a lot of criticism. Privacy has become the focus of smart glasses and what used to be smooth photography, interpretation of what you see and intelligent conclusions have now instead been turned into fear of surveillance, harassment and abuse.
Especially for Apple, personal privacy is something the company has set as one of its main strengths. Therefore, now comes information that their smart glasses are delayed. They certainly don’t want to end up in the same bad weather as Meta, even if Meta has now acted and is said to block Instagram users who recorded and posted dubious clips where the glasses are used for hidden or otherwise inappropriate recordings.
This shakes up the entire development of smart glasses and perhaps also lowers expectations of how important the product category can become. Cameras are a prerequisite for AI to be able to interpret the outside world and hopefully give smart answers. Unconfirmed reports now say that Apple is considering having the cameras in its upcoming smart glasses only be used for AI and not for taking photos or videos as an individual user to save or share. This also reasonably applies to Apple’s possibly future Airpods with integrated cameras.
In the current situation, smart glasses are not getting smarter, but on the contrary, less smart. When Google and Samsung first showed off their smart glasses at Google’s 2025 developer conference, they were glasses with both cameras and integrated screens in the glasses. A year later it was only audio-based, without an integrated screen.
I think it’s because they encountered technical obstacles in the development. The obstacles they have now encountered, that users are concerned about restricted personal privacy, are more serious.