According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is set to unveil its first pair of smart glasses at next year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

The News

Codenamed ‘N50’, Apple’s smart glasses were reportedly meant for a late 2026 reveal, with launch targeting early 2027. Now Gurman maintains that WWDC, which is set to take place in June 2027, won’t be the device’s actual launch day; consumer release is expected sometime by the end of 2027.

The delay is said to essentially be a two-fold issue, centered on both refining the product from an engineering standpoint, but also a marketing challenge of defining the device’s messaging around privacy.

Like Ray-Ban Meta and the company’s cheaper Meta Glasses, which notably don’t feature any EssilorLuxottica branding, Apple’s smart glasses are said to include two camera sensors; one for photo and video capture and the other for computer vision tasks.

“That’s meant developing features and policies that can address the concerns swirling around competing products from Meta Platforms Inc,” Gurman says, noting the teams developing glasses within Apple’s Vision hardware group and elsewhere in the company see privacy as “priority No. 1.”

And similar to Meta’s audio-only smart glasses, Apple’s N50 hardware isn’t expected to include a display of any kind, instead relying on cameras, speakers and microphones for things such as phone calls, AI queries, listening to music, and capturing images.

My Take

Has the well already been poisoned by creeps? Will fashionable smart glasses with more stringent privacy laws be enough to rehabilitate the segment as a whole? Honestly, I think it’s way too early to frame it that way. Despite some impressive sales figures from Meta and EssilorLuxottica, smart glasses are still very much a niche item; most people own several pairs of sunglasses and likely zero smart glasses at this point.

Some of that might come down to its currently being led by Meta, which has a poor track record on privacy and user surveillance. Some of it may be price sensitivity, although Meta’s $300 no-brand glasses should put a dent in that. In the end, I think most people don’t know why they’d even want a pair in the first place, which Apple will probably vaunt since the company’s top-tier phones and accessories typically start out as status symbols anyway.

Personally, I don’t own a part of audio-only smart glasses because I’m a text-based person living in a very not-text-based world. I don’t talk to AI because I can’t stand the long-winded answers. I can easily skip over the tropey, Silicon Valley-flavored social lubrication and get to the meat of the answer by reading and typing for clarification than I can by having a stilted conversation out loud. The cameras are also basically at the level of mid-range smartphone from a couple of years go, although the speed to snap a life moment is decidedly quicker despite being objectively worse quality than basically any new smartphone today.

Despite this, there’s clearly money in it now, and it’s also a relatively easy way for Apple/Google/Samsung/Meta to gain a foothold in the soon-to-come AR glasses segment of the future.

Apple is however hoping to avoid Meta’s missteps, it seems. Notably, Meta landed in hot water following the revelation that in March the company was accused of sending private smart glasses camera footage to a Kenya-based subcontractor for manual review to train its AI models. The company has also been accused of baking in facial recognition into its smart glasses, although that feature hasn’t been activated.

That said, it’s clear even Meta is looking to tighten up their act as bigger competition comes online, as the company has finally closed the hardware loophole that allowed motivated users to physically drill out the capture LED, which notifies others when a user is actively taking photos or video. Now, Meta Glasses users who have in some way deactivated the capture LED (already in addition to simply covering it) are no longer able to record video or take photos.

Samsung and Google are also set to release a fleet of smart glasses this year from Warby Parker and South Korea’s Gentle Monster, the latter of which is making a large concerted push into the North American and European market with its smart glasses at the forefront. And that cadre, along with Apple and Meta (which admittedly released its prosumer Meta Display Glasses) also ostensibly has multiple consumer display models in the works too, although I’d expect the bulk of those to be at the very least a device generation away, maybe even further.

AR unicorn Magic Leap is again pivoting its core business, this time to serve as a waveguide supplier to other companies making AR glasses, something that we’ve learned comes amid a mass lay off nearly 200 of its core engineering and product development staff.

According to a formal WARN Act notification letter to US government officials last week, the company is set to lay off 193 employees at the company’s Plantation, Florida headquarters.

A wide range of product development and engineering roles are set to be affected come October 1st, the letter reveals, including software, hardware, UX/design, product management, manufacturing engineering, quality, technical program management, and several senior engineering and executive leadership positions.

Although it’s uncertain how many will remain at Magic Leap—estimates point to a few hundred at this point—the mass layoff comes amid a broader shift at Magic Leap, as the company announced earlier this month its was undergoing a “strategic pivot to accelerate the development of AI display glasses.”

The company says it’s now shifting from building first-party AR headsets to taking on the role of “essential AR ecosystems partner, waveguide supplier, and device integration expert for the technology industry.”

“Magic Leap is seizing the moment where our AR innovation and manufacturing expertise create the greatest market impact,” said Scott Carden, SVP of display engineering and manufacturing at Magic Leap. “We’re solving the toughest challenges of scaling waveguide production, from industry-leading waveguide performance to manufacturing and full-device integration. Now, we’re using our unmatched expertise to help partners bring AI display glasses to millions of consumers in the fastest way possible through our waveguide technology.”

Founded in 2010 by Rony Abovitz, Magic Leap is arguably the most well-funded AR startups to date, having massed well over $4 billion in funding from investors including Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, a majority holder at over $1 billion invested, as well as Google, Alibaba, and Qualcomm.

Despite an enviable runway, the company’s first AR headset didn’t exactly live up to the hype. Released in 2018, Magic Leap 1 awkwardly straddled the consumer and enterprise segment at the (then unthinkable) price of $2,300, essentially forcing the company to pivot and drop its consumer ambitions a short two years later. That first pivot away from consumer also marked the departure of CEO and co-founder Rony Abovitz, with its follow-up device Magic Leap 2 released in late 2020 solely targeted at enterprise.

And while Magic Leap has only just announced its waveguide optics pivot, in reality the company was making moves away from first-party devices as early as July 2024, according to a Bloomberg report, which characterized the action as a last ditch effort to make use of the company’s AR optics tech.

Meanwhile, we’ve heard substantially nothing about development of first-party devices, as over the past two years the company has only announced a hardware partnership with Google and manufacturing partnership with Taiwan’s Pegatron, both of which center around licensing and manufacturing waveguides.

Palmer Luckey, the founder of military tech startup Anduril (also the founder of Oculus), quietly teased a pair of unannounced AR glasses that are presumably in development at Anduril. Despite their incredibly compact appearance, Luckey says they are not merely smart glasses, but are indeed built for full AR capability.

Just days after Snap Inc revealed its latest Specs standalone AR glasses, a photo shared on X showed Anduril founder Palmer Luckey wearing what appeared to be some kind of clip-on attachment to his sunglasses. The caption of the photo, shared by Lulu Cheng Meservey, included the quote “Other AR glasses getting literally frame mogged.” This ostensibly referred to Snap’s Specs glasses, which drew significant commentary about whether their design was too bulky to be socially acceptable.

Regardless of where one stands on the size of Specs, the glasses shown in the photo of Luckey appear incredibly compact by comparison. This prompted Road to VR founder Ben Lang to question whether it was actually a fair comparison to make; Lang pointed out that surprisingly compact smart glasses—like the Even Realities G2—are already available on the market today, but they remain compact because they lack the full hardware stack required for true AR glasses.

Luckey responded directly to Lang’s scepticism, saying “[…] these are the real deal! No shortcuts, just really good tech in conjunction with deeply invested partners like Qualcomm, Meta Quest, and [Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, CTO at Meta].”

When asked by Lang if the device pictured is capable of true AR, Luckey added, “correct, [the glasses have] wide-FOV full-color stereo.”

Luckey’s confirmation that the device is capable of proper AR is indeed surprising considering the size. Significant questions, however, remain. Chief among them is whether the device is fully standalone or if it relies on a tethered puck (which would serve to offload battery and/or compute), allowing the device to be much smaller than a pair of standalone AR glasses like Specs.

Given the incredibly compact size of the glasses, a tethered architecture seems like the only possible explanation. However, neither the original photo published by Meservey, nor a follow-up photo published by Luckey, show any clear signs of a tether:

Another major question is whether the device is made as a modular add-on to existing off the shelf glasses. The design of the hardware suggests this as a significant possibility (indeed, the glasses pictured look like a regular pair of Ray-Ban Aviators). But making a simple modular add-on to existing glasses introduces significant complexities for the calibration of optics, displays, and tracking hardware.

Far more is unknown about this device than is known at this stage. But there’s reason to believe it’s legitimate, and possibly connected to Anduril’s EagleEye project, which aims to build an augmented reality helmet to bring superhuman perception to soldiers on the battlefield. In 2025, Anduril announced it had partnered with Meta on XR technology for the military, which aligns with Luckey’s statement that the pictured glasses were thanks, in part, to “deeply invested partners [like Meta].”

Meta is rolling out an update to its line of smart glasses that will disable the camera if the device’s capture LED has been tampered with or destroyed.

Since the rollout of Meta’s second-gen Ray-Ban Glasses in 2024, physically covering the white capture LED on any of the company’s current smart glasses shuts off the onboard camera, something the company did to curb casual misuse.

Before Meta’s mandatory v26 update—which is rolling out now to all Meta Ray-Ban, Meta Oakley and its new $300 Meta Glasses—some users got around the software check by simply drilling out the capture LED hardware itself. Granted, that was already against Meta’s terms of service, which state:

“You may not tamper with the Glasses or otherwise obscure or modify any of the features on the Glasses that signal to others that the Glasses are recording.”

Still, that wasn’t much of a deterrent, since the hardware check failed to notice when the capture LED was physically disabled, and not just covered up by a piece of tape.

Speaking to The Verge, Meta VP of Wearables Alex Himel says the privacy-focused update was meant to follow the release of the company’s cheaper Meta Glasses, which notably lack Ray-Ban or Oakley styling. At the time, Himel told The Verge Meta was aware of increasing misuse amid growing adoption.

Meta doesn’t seem to be outright bricking glasses with drilled-out capture LEDs, however not having the camera severely limits what people can do with them, since they don’t include any sort of display, which ought to be deterrent enough for now.

Lacking a display has essentially forced Meta to invest in use cases beyond the comparatively straight forward expectation of taking photos and video, as the company has released updates that bring camera features such as continuous Live AI capture, which lets Meta AI see what you’re seeing so it can help out with tasks or otherwise identify things directly in your filed-of-view.

And while Meta appears to be distancing itself from one of the least savory consumer segments by putting an end to surreptitious public recording, it’s also seemingly frontrunning increased legislation in a growing number of US states and cities, such as New York state and Philadelphia. Public court houses there have recently banned smart glasses of any type, even those with prescription lenses.

Scrutiny around privacy seems to be coming from all sides though, as a recent Wired report maintains Meta has essentially baked in facial recognition to its smart glasses, which is notably still unreleased at this time.

In March, it was revealed Meta was facing a class action lawsuit in the US over privacy concerns tied to its smart glasses, as the company is accused of sending private camera footage to a Kenya-based subcontractor for manual review to train its AI models.