TL;DR: you now need to pay a $20/month “meta premium” subscription to use a 100% offline feature that runs on your own malware-ridden smartglasses.
If you don’t subscribe, you can use the feature that is already included in the hardware that you already paid for 3 hours each month
The now-paywalled feature boosts the voice of the speaker in front of you, something that even low-end ANC earphones are doing now. 5 minutes of free usage per day is basically nothing.
They’ve sold something like 10 million of these things, probably more.
We can do something about it. The same way we shut down google glass, make them socially unacceptable. Ridicule anyone you know who owns a pair, loudly point them out when you see them in public, etc. Bring back “glasshole”.
Source? It took Apple over a year to sell 1 million iPhones originally and there have been 5 million Steam Decks sold total IIRC. I would doubt they have sold 10 million glasses in a few months.
Be careful with that though, last time people with legitimate vision assisting technologies were attacked along with people wearing Google glass.
It’s been more than a few months. Also I am getting offers for meta glasses if I switch internet or cell carriers and shit, so I suspect some of those numbers are coming from wholesale contracts and not direct to customer purchases.
I originally thought that they were only talking about the Display ones not all models total. You are probably right it goes a long way to explaining how they were able to sell 5 million in one year.
Yeah I haven’t been able to verify this claim. Closest I’ve come is about 7 million units sold and that was a year or more ago.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/878184/meta-sold-7-million-smart-glasses-in-2025-thats-triple-2023-and-2024-combined
It doesn’t look like this was a year ago, it looks like the 7 million claim is total as of this first quarter of this year. Even still I’m not sure I totally believe that they managed to sell 5 million in the last year.
I think I didn’t make it clear but as of 2025 they sold 7 million units. There’s conflicting information about whether they sold 7 million pairs in 2025 and more in 2023/2024 which could equal 10 million pairs though. But I haven’t found anything yet that says they’ve sold 10 million pairs in plain language.
https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-smart-glasses-privacy-crisis-apple-google-snap
Everything I am seeing says 7 million total globally as of the first quarter of this year. Which is still quite a bit more than I thought they would’ve sold.
I’d really like to try these, to see if they could help with visual impairment, but between the social stigma, and Facebook spyware, I’m reluctant.
Depending on your visual impairment they may not help at all. For instance there are zero models that come with an astigmatism correction strong enough for me to use them.
I’m looking for something that could magnify text, or read text and convert it into, well digital text where I can adjust the size, like say from a menu behind the counter at a fast food restaurant. Or identify the walk / don’t walk sign across the street at a stop light intersection cross walk. Most of this can already be done simply by using the camera app and zoom features on any phone. So the next step is just getting the wearable form factor. And ensuring the HUD is actually readable with proper size, color and contrast. (Here “proper” means properly adjustable to accommodate the wearer’s needs. As that will vary.)