Meta's tech chief says smart glasses will be the next smartphone — just don't expect it soon
Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth said he doesn't think smart glasses will be able to replace smartphones in the near future.
"That's ways off. Smartphones are incredible and it's not just they are great devices and they are convenient. We are used to them," he said during an interview at the Bloomberg Tech summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Bosworth said that smartphones benefit from having an "incredibly entangled ecosystem of software connected to the rest of the world around us." This makes it slower and harder for people to switch over to smart glasses, he added.
"So I think that will take a longer journey. The good news is they work really well in concerts," he said.
Bosworth praised Apple's Vision Pro headset during his interview with Bloomberg, but said the company made a "rookie mistake" when they made the device too heavy to wear.
"So from an engineering standpoint, it's wonderful and congratulations to that team. From a product standpoint, you can tell it's their first offering in the space," he said.
"First generation products are hard. It's not until the second or third generation that you really figure out and hone the thing, and they made a lot of mistakes in that in terms of weight and where the weight was," he continued.
Bosworth isn't the only Meta executive who thinks smartphones won't be displaced by smart glasses. The social media giant's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said in a podcast with The Verge in September that he didn't think "people are getting rid of phones anytime soon."
"It's not like we're going to throw away our phones, but I think what's going to happen is that, slowly, we're just going to start doing more things with our glasses and leaving our phones in our pockets more," Zuckerberg said.
In January, Zuckerberg said during Meta's earnings that 2025 will be a "defining year" to see whether smart glasses will become "the next computing platform" or if it is "just going to be a longer grind."
"Our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are a real hit, and this will be the year when we understand the trajectory for AI glasses as a category. Many breakout products in the history of consumer electronics have sold 5-10 million units in their third generation," Zuckerberg said.
EssilorLuxottica, which produces the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, said in February that it has sold 2 million pairs of the glasses since 2023. EssilorLuxottica's CEO and chairman, Francesco Milleri said the company is targeting to produce 10 million smart glasses for Meta every year by the end of 2026.
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