The product that drew the most attention at this year’s Meta Connect had no camera at all. Meta used the two-day event on September 23 and 24 to introduce the Ray-Ban Meta Audio, the first set of glasses in its line to leave out the imaging hardware that made earlier versions recognizable.
The Audio model starts at $349, weighs 43 grams and carries six microphones. It ships on October 13. The frame looks like a pair of ordinary glasses, which is the point: Meta has spent years trying to make this category feel less like a gadget and more like an accessory.
The rest of the line moved in the other direction. A third-generation pair, the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3, starts at $449, extends battery life to nine hours from eight, and upgrades the camera to a 12-megapixel sensor capable of 3K video. The Ray-Ban Meta Display, the version with a screen in the lens, went on sale online in the United States at $799.
Meta also showed hardware that is further out. The Meta VR Glasses will sell for $1,299.99 and arrive in the spring of 2027. A smaller device, the Muse Charm, is about the size of a keychain fob; Mark Zuckerberg said the company had packed the entire Muse experience “into something you can hang on a keychain.” No price or release date was given.
Muse is the piece Meta is pushing hardest. The personal agent app has been climbing the app store charts in recent days, and this week the company opened early access to new features. Users who want a place in the queue have to ask Muse itself, a small touch that shows how Meta intends the assistant to sit between the user and the software.
The glasses include a hearing enhancement feature that has been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration. Meta will charge $149 as a one-time payment after a 30-day trial, a pricing choice that puts the feature closer to consumer electronics than to the medical devices it resembles on paper.
The supply chain behind the hardware is split between two partners. Qualcomm supplies the chips, and EssilorLuxottica, the owner of the Ray-Ban brand, makes the frames. The eyewear maker has said it expects to bring more than 100 AI glasses models to market by the end of the year, a signal of how crowded this category is becoming.
Dropping the camera is a calculated concession. The camera was what made the earlier glasses useful and what made them controversial, generating complaints from bystanders who could not tell when they were being recorded. A camera-free model removes that objection and lowers the price, at the cost of the feature that most distinguished the product from headphones.
Meta has spent years funding this category through Reality Labs, the unit that houses its hardware work and has reported cumulative operating losses in the tens of billions of dollars. The glasses strategy is the first version of that spending to produce a device people buy in volume, which raises the stakes on whether Meta can turn a hardware line into a durable platform.
Meta has told investors that glasses are the most plausible path from artificial intelligence inside a phone to artificial intelligence worn on a face. The device is always with the user, sees and hears what the user does, and can answer without anyone reaching for a screen.
Privacy advocates have focused on the camera since the first Ray-Ban Stories shipped in 2021, when some bystanders objected to being recorded by strangers wearing an unremarkable pair of frames. Meta added a capture light and made the indicator more visible in later models. Removing the camera removes the objection entirely.
The price ladder tells its own story. A camera-free pair at $349, a camera pair at $449 and a display pair at $799 let Meta measure how much buyers will pay for capability they may never use. Rival hardware makers have been reported to be developing similar products, which would put pressure on Meta’s early lead.
Meta has not disclosed unit sales for any previous generation. Without that number, the app store position of Muse is the closest thing investors have to a measure of whether the strategy is working.
Whether the audio-only model sells is the question the next two quarters will answer. A cheaper, lighter frame with no camera might reach users who were uncomfortable with the first version, or it might simply be a pair of expensive wireless earbuds without the stems. Meta has not released preorder figures.
The clearer signal is the app store ranking, where Muse is competing for position against consumer assistants from much smaller companies. Hardware generations arrive on a schedule Meta controls. Whether users come back to the assistant after the novelty fades is the part the company cannot schedule.
