Snap’s first consumer AR glasses are coming this fall for $2,195 | The Verge
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Snap’s first consumer AR glasses are coming this fall for $2,195
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Snap is finally launching augmented glasses for the public. Specs, which Snap describes as “a wearable computer built into see-through augmented reality glasses,” will cost
This is a big moment for Snap: The company made a big entry into smart glasses with its original Spectacles in 2016, and the company has been toiling away on nonpublic AR versions of Spectacles over the past few years. CEO Evan Spiegel promised the company would launch consumer AR glasses in 2026 and even turned its smart glasses team into a separate business.
The company says that Specs are “fully standalone, with no puck and no tether.” (Which is perhaps a jab at Apple’s Vision Pro, which is tethered to a separate battery pack.) They’ll be offered in two sizes, a 47mm model weighing 132g and a 52mm model weighing 136g, and will have removable inserts that Snap says will support “a wide range of prescriptions.”
You probably won’t mistake Specs, with their wide, bold frames, for any of Meta’s smart glasses — Snap clearly picked a design that it wants to stand out. (They’re not my style — I don’t think I can pull off the “snow goggles, but fashionable” look — though maybe Jony Ive might like them.) They have visible light and infrared cameras, and while the Specs are recording, a little LED bar will glow in the middle of the glasses.
Both of the lenses will be able to show you content, and Snap says that its display system is powered by a “proprietary liquid crystal on silicon technology” that offers a 51-degree field of view and can show 16 million colors. The lenses can also go from clear to tinted in 10 seconds, Snap says.
The Specs have two Snapdragon processors onboard, and while Snap isn’t specifying exactly which ones they are, the company says that one is focused on “computer vision” while the other is focused on running AR Lenses. “Together, they enable fast hand tracking, low latency, and responsive interactions that help digital content feel anchored in the real world,” Snap says.
You can also expect up to four hours of battery life on a charge, which Snap says accounts for things like “audio and video playback, AI assistance, Bluetooth notifications, and more.” The Specs come with a charging case that Snap says will offer four more charges for a total of 20 hours of battery.
Specs could be interesting, but we haven’t tried them ourselves yet, so we can’t vouch for what it’s like to actually use them day to day. And we don’t know how Specs actually hold up as a product that sits in between something like Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, which have been a hit, and the Vision Pro, which has not.
Nowadays, there are a lot more smart glasses than when Snap first launched Spectacles. The company is actually a year behind Meta in launching consumer AR glasses. And as my colleague Victoria Song recently wrote, most smart glasses still don’t make sense, not to mention the problem that there are growing privacy concerns about smart glasses. Despite all that, Snap is pushing forward with its Specs launch, so we’ll see how they fare when they’re finally available.
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