Meta Ray-Ban Display: what an early buyer saw coming nine months ago

Tom Krikorian flew from Paris to San Francisco to buy a pair of glasses.

Not as a joke. Meta Ray-Ban Display went on sale in the US on 30 September 2025, US only, in-store only, demo appointment required. He had just flown home from Meta Connect. He booked the first slot he could find, 3 October, in the Bay Area, and got back on a plane.

We recorded three weeks after launch. He had the glasses on his face during the interview, and what he said about them was less enthusiastic than the trip suggests.

Nine months later, most of what he flagged has turned into a headline. The international rollout he had to fly around still has not happened. The developer ecosystem he criticised got rebuilt. The Horizon Worlds numbers he doubted stopped being defended.

This is what he said at the time, and where each thread ended up.

A messy Connect

The failed live demos at Connect 2025 were the story everyone covered. Tom watched them from the floor and had a specific reaction: the demos were embarrassing, and the underlying problem was trust.

He has spent most of the last few years on visionOS, and his reason is stability. When you write code for a platform, you want to know it still works after the next update. His read on Meta’s VR platform is that it gets redesigned or has its building blocks changed roughly every year, which makes long-term planning impossible.

“They’re not afraid to take risks, but sometimes I do think that they shouldn’t do it.”

The move-fast instinct is still in the company, and it reads differently to a consumer than to someone deciding where to spend a year of engineering.

His hope was that AR would be different, because the glasses team is a new team with a chance to start clean.

What it is actually like to wear

Two things about Meta Ray-Ban Display that no spec sheet conveys properly.

The first is that it is not AR. The name is accurate: it is a display. A heads-up display, monocular, in the right lens only. Tom is precise about this because a lot of people arrived at Connect expecting Orion, the full AR prototype Meta showed the year before, which reportedly costs around ten thousand dollars a unit to build. Ray-Ban Display does not place anything in the world. It shows you information.

The second is the eye. After a full day walking around San Francisco with it, mostly using navigation, the thing he could not get past was looking right, constantly, to read.

“I feel like I’m breaking my eye looking on my right side all the time.”

He thought he was adapting, and still concluded that mass adoption needs both eyes. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has said binocular is expensive for now.

What he was impressed by is the price. $799 including the Neural Band, for 69 grams of hardware containing a custom waveguide and light engine. He called it an amazing piece of technology for the money and then, in the same breath, said he would not recommend it to a normal consumer.

The wristband is the better product

The most repeated line from anyone who tried the setup at Connect, and Tom said it too: the Neural Band is more impressive than the glasses.

It is an sEMG wristband. It reads the electrical activity in your forearm and turns small finger movements into input. Pinch to click. It works, immediately, without calibration theatre.

The history is the part worth knowing. Wrist-worn muscle sensing is not new: the Myo armband shipped to developers back in 2013, and Meta bought CTRL-labs in 2019 to bring the technology in-house. What arrived in a box at a Best Buy in 2025 had been about a decade in the making.

Tom’s point was not that the technology is old. It was that this is how long input paradigms actually take.

Do not compare it to Vision Pro

This came up because everyone was doing it, and Tom thinks it is a category error.

A headset is a personal, isolating, indoor device. You use it for a session, like you use a laptop. Glasses are something you already wear, that you leave the house in, that stay on for hours.

His framing: you do not walk around the street carrying your Mac all day, and headsets are closer to the Mac than to the glasses. The two product lines might converge eventually. Right now they sit at opposite ends of the same spectrum.

Which does not mean Ray-Ban Display escapes the comparison entirely. His actual verdict was that buying it felt like buying a Vision Pro at launch. Remarkable device, not ready for most people, years away from the content and comfort that would justify it to a normal buyer. He bought it as a developer kit, and said so.

The Horizon Worlds problem

I asked about the Horizon Worlds metrics Meta shared at Connect, because they were hard to believe.

Tom was blunt. He described Meta’s metaverse strategy as a failure so far, driven by a lack of focus, and the Horizon push as an attempt to become the next Roblox when Roblox already exists. Developers around him at Connect were sceptical of the numbers, and Meta was not publishing anything verifiable.

The detail he found most telling was that some Horizon Worlds titles did not support VR at all and ran only on mobile. If that is where the platform is going, is VR still the focus?

Update, July 2026. In March 2026, Meta announced it would remove Horizon Worlds from Quest entirely and continue as a mobile-only app, then reversed the shutdown within days after backlash, keeping VR access alive while moving product priority to mobile. Reality Labs cumulative operating losses have passed $80 billion, and Meta laid off around 1,500 people from the division in January 2026. The mobile-first direction Tom identified from a spec detail became the official roadmap.

The SDK gap

At the time we spoke, the most concrete complaint was the simplest. Meta had shipped a new category-defining device and there was no way to build for it.

Tom’s read on why this matters: if you want developers, you have to show them a business. Not a demo reel, a path to revenue. He also predicted the shape it would take, which is worth quoting because he called it before the documentation existed. Apps would connect through the Meta AI phone app rather than living on the glasses, so what you would get is less an app store than a connection store, with a middleman in between.

Update, July 2026. The Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit entered developer preview on 4 December 2025, giving access to the camera, microphone array and speakers, with processing on the phone. Display access followed on 14 May 2026, with two paths: native UI components in Swift and Kotlin, or standalone web apps in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Meta’s Oscar Falmer walked through what that toolkit allows in a later episode. General publishing to all users still has no announced date, and the phone app remains the connection point, roughly as Tom described it.

The international pause held too. Meta postponed the UK, France, Italy and Canada rollout in January 2026, citing demand and inventory, and had not restarted it as of spring. Tom’s flight to San Francisco was not an overreaction. It remains, nine months on, one of the few ways to get a pair. Compare that to Even Realities, a much smaller company that got its display glasses into ten countries in the same window.

Why he is bullish on Apple anyway

The most contrarian stretch of the conversation, given that it was recorded at a moment when Meta looked unbeatable in glasses and Apple looked lost.

Tom’s argument is about silicon and where AI runs. Apple designs its own processors and controls the full stack, and his expectation is that a growing share of AI inference moves from the cloud onto the device as chips improve. If that happens, the company with the best power-per-watt silicon and the tightest hardware and software integration has a structural advantage that a good model cannot substitute for.

He is aware of the counterargument. Siri is weak, Apple Intelligence underdelivered. His response is that models are the catchable part. You can improve a model in a year. Building a chip business takes a decade.

Then he pointed at the strange dependency underneath all of it. Meta makes the glasses, but the photos and videos those glasses capture get posted to Instagram, which Meta owns. If Apple ships glasses, Apple’s glasses may not be able to live stream to Instagram, and Meta’s glasses may find themselves locked out of iOS features. Two giants who need each other and would rather not.

The patience argument

Everyone wants an iPhone moment. ChatGPT had one, which made the wait feel worse.

Tom’s position is that XR does not work like that, for a reason that is physical rather than commercial. The hardware needs to become small, and small takes time that cannot be compressed by market enthusiasm. A device that fits on your face today would have filled a room a few decades ago.

So the launch of Ray-Ban Display, in his view, was not a takeoff. It was a step, and expecting acceleration from it is the wrong frame.

He is more optimistic about the ceiling than the slope. Glasses will be a much larger market than VR headsets, for obvious reasons: people already wear glasses. He just does not think it happens fast.

Which leaves the thing he actually did. He listened to a keynote full of failed demos, concluded the product was not ready, said he would not tell a consumer to buy it, and then booked a flight across the Atlantic to get one anyway.

Q&A

Is Meta Ray-Ban Display an AR device? No. It has a monocular heads-up display in the right lens that shows information such as messages, navigation and captions. It does not anchor content to the physical world. Meta’s actual AR prototype is Orion, which is not a consumer product.

How much does Meta Ray-Ban Display cost? $799 in the US, which includes the Meta Neural Band wristband. Prescription lenses cost extra.

How much does Meta Ray-Ban Display weigh? 69 grams for the standard size and 70 grams for the large, compared with 52 grams for Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 and around 45 grams for non-smart Ray-Ban frames.

Can you buy Meta Ray-Ban Display outside the US? Not as of mid-2026. It launched US-only on 30 September 2025, and Meta paused its planned expansion to the UK, France, Italy and Canada in January 2026, citing demand and limited inventory.

What is the Meta Neural Band? An sEMG wristband included with Ray-Ban Display that reads electrical signals from your forearm muscles and converts small finger gestures into input. The underlying technology traces back to the Myo armband in 2013 and Meta’s acquisition of CTRL-labs in 2019.

Can developers build apps for Meta Ray-Ban Display? Yes, in developer preview. The Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit opened in December 2025 for camera and audio, and display access followed in May 2026 via native iOS and Android SDKs or standalone web apps. General publishing to all users has no announced date.

Should you buy Meta Ray-Ban Display? Tom Krikorian’s view, as an XR developer who bought one at launch, is that it is impressive hardware for the price and a reasonable buy for developers and early adopters, but not yet ready to recommend to a general consumer.

Why does Meta Ray-Ban Display only have a display in one eye? Cost. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has indicated that a binocular display would be significantly more expensive at this stage. Single-eye viewing is the most common comfort complaint from early users.

Listen to the full episode

The full conversation with Tom Krikorian is on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts

• 00:00 Intro: who is Tom Krikorian
• 02:01 Meta Connect 2025 and the failed demos
• 08:24 What Meta needs to fix in software
• 11:18 Horizon Worlds and the Roblox problem
• 20:06 Flying to San Francisco to buy Ray-Ban Display
• 25:13 The Neural Band and ten years of sEMG
• 27:09 First impressions: one eye, 69 grams, $799
• 30:50 Why glasses and headsets are not the same category
• 33:05 The first real use cases
• 37:43 Apple silicon, on-device AI, and the Meta dependency
• 46:01 Studio 84 and where to find Tom

You can follow Tom Krikorian on LinkedIn, X, Threads and Bluesky. His collective Studio 84 builds visionOS experiences for brands.

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