Smart glasses may be the fastest-growing tech category in the world today, reaching millions of first-time buyers. Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that 2025 will be “a defining year that determines if we’re on a path towards many hundreds of millions, and eventually billions of AI glasses” suggests that growth will soon explode beyond its enthusiast niche. But is that likely, or is it another ambitious pipe dream like the “Metaverse?”
Meta’s recent earnings call highlighted the company’s massive growth, but the vast majority of its $48 billion quarterly revenue — an $8 billion YoY growth — came from advertising. Reality Labs had a strong $1 billion revenue thanks to the new Meta Quest 3S and strong Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses sales, but the division still loses about $4–5 billion per year on R&D.
Zuckerberg once sold these losses to shareholders as the foundation for a worldwide Metaverse, with Meta profiting from XR hardware and the virtual marketplace. Now, he rarely brings up the concept, pivoting to Meta AI as the company’s future. And smart glasses, or AR glasses, will be the “next computing platform” if they invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” in AI infrastructure.
The Meta CEO’s distaste for phones, a 3rd-party platform that takes a 30% cut of his app profits, is well documented. So when he says, “I think we’ll have both [phones and glasses] for some time” but that AI glasses will supplant phones eventually, it’s a future he’s trying to actualize — even if it’s “a longer grind” that takes a decade or more to happen.
Intentionally or not, Zuckerberg highlighted the biggest problem with this agenda during the earnings call.
“A lot of people in the world have glasses,” he said in answer to a question about Meta Orion. “It’s hard for me to imagine that a decade or more from now, all the glasses aren’t going to basically be AI glasses, as well as a lot of people who don’t wear glasses today finding that to be a useful thing.”
This Ophthalmology journal entry says that about 3 billion people worldwide have myopia, trending toward nearly 4 billion by 2035 and 50% of the world by 2050. Ironically, our global addiction to phones might push more people towards needing glasses, with a larger portion buying smart glasses with AI assistants and holographic tech.
So the opportunity and audience are there, certainly. But Zuckerberg’s quote highlights the two main obstacles to smart glasses becoming commonplace: whether the optometrist offices and Warby Parkers of the world will truly start adding AI to their frames, and whether the other half of the world who don’t need glasses — primarily younger folks — will start to wear them and drive popularity with older users.
On the first subject, Meta has been smart to partner with Ray-Bans and Oakley, using their design expertise to appeal to mainstream users and focusing solely on the software and portability of their platform. Can Meta and its partners turn optometrists into evangelists for this tech? I think they need another generation or two of improvement: smart glasses tend to be expensive, heavy, and short-lived with active use, and adding holographic AR tech will only compound the issue.
As for popularity with the youths, don’t ask a millennial. I do know from The Verge that Meta sold 1 million Ray-Ban smart glasses last year, while IDC reports that 2.56 million smart glasses were sold across brands in 2024. They predict that number will grow to 6.4 million in 2028, without taking AR glasses into account. Compared to 160 million smartwatches sold in 2028, AI glasses aren’t trending toward ubiquity yet, but they’re not irrelevant either.
Though Meta and Zuckerberg may not like it, I wonder if we need Samsung and Apple to enter the market for smart glasses to really take off. Android XR has household name recognition because it’ll give you Google Maps directions and Gmail summaries, and it will directly sync to Google Photos; plus, it will likely have partnerships with apps like Spotify.
Zuckerberg concluded his AI glasses musings by admitting, “I still don’t know what the long-term trajectory for [smart glasses] is going to be, and I think we’re going to learn a lot this year.”
That emphasis on 2025 being a potential turning point for smart glasses is what I’m most curious about. I don’t think Meta is going to passively hope for the best; it may announce more glasses partnerships, push new Meta AI apps on its Ray-Bans, or announce AR glasses at Connect that get the ball rolling.
So whether we see hundreds of millions of smart glasses in the 2030s or not, I’m still enthusiastic about the category’s future prospects.