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.
Aren’t you supposed to wait for something to be widely adopted before you enshittify it?
I get long-term enshittification in pursuit of short term Line Must Go Up but I feel like this would significantly impede it even in the short term.
Kinda reeks of Meta being in financial trouble.
This is the kind of enshitification thats good for society.
Fuck these privacy invading creep goggles. I hope they continue to make them worse to use and posses
Subscriptions for offline features should be completely illegal. In fact Meta is probably already technically illegal.
If we lived in functional democracies most large multinationals would’ve been split up a long time ago, including Meta.
Instead we live in a grey area of plutocratic corporate dictatorship.
Garbage in - garbage out
Lol.
Meta’s finances must be in the shitter to be enshittifying a premium product.
Pretty sure the author nailed it, but I hit a paywall before I could copy it.
Anyways:
The only plausible explanation is they licensed this feature, expected huge sales to cover the license, and now can’t.
I don’t think they have licensed it per use, it was likely a flat fee and now they’re desperate to recoup it. They can’t do it by sales, so it’s monthly fees.
It might not even be this directly, but some other license and this is just where they can squeeze consumers. They might have even just picked what gets used the most
These things are very clearly just used for data collection for AI training. Making the users offset the cost is just bonus.
When did these come out? Wow, that was a steep enshitification slope.
I could get requiring a subscription for server based AI features, but they say they tested it in airplane mode and it worked because it’s on device, that’s seriously fucked. That should never have a limit.
The fun part is that even if you pay the $20/month subscription you can only use the feature that runs locally on your device up to 30 minutes a day
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.
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.
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.
That means by simply connecting them to the internet you’re generating around $20/month for Meta. Now how would they do that? :)
Anyone dumb enough to buy these is going to have a rough time finding any sympathy for it.
Delete Delete Delete
I can’t wait for open source smart glasses
Even if it’s open source, it’s still just a camera for creeps. An open source torment nexus is still a torment nexus.
It’s a camera, like the millions of cameras that are around us every day.
If you’re a creep then it’s a camera for creeps. If you’re not, then there are plenty of legitimate uses providing that all video is kept locally and not uploaded to Meta/Amazon/Google’s servers.
Technology is not neutral. The cameras you’re talking about all make it pretty obvious when you’re filming. Cameras designed to blend in and not be obvious and creepy.
As someone with prosopagnosia (face blindness) these types of glasses would be an incredible assistive technology for myself and others like me, but even I’m aware of the significant privacy concerns and don’t feel the benefit outweighs the societal risks.
good! why is anyone using these anyway?
The cracks are showing. There’s only so much investor money.
