At $799, is the Meta Ray-Ban Display ‘cheap’?

Meta introduced three new smartglasses at its annual developer event, Connect, yesterday:

• Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2), an updated version of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses that features twice the battery life and offers ultra HD 3K video recording. Price: $379.
• Oakley Meta Vanguard, a sports-oriented update to the Oakley Meta HSTN featuring up to nine hours of battery life. Price: $499.
• Meta Ray-Ban Display, Meta’s first pair of smartglasses to feature a dedicated display. The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses include Meta’s Neural Band, a wristband that “works in harmony with your body using subtle hand gestures to control your digital experiences.” Price: $799.

The Meta Ray-Ban Display (henceforth: Display) was, to my mind, the principal hardware revelation at Connect. Reviews of the device are overwhelmingly positive (The Verge‘s reviewer calls them “the best I’ve ever tried“; Tom’s Guide‘s reviewer says that wearing them “feels like the future”). And the price point is cited as aggressive and accessible: the Display is a bona fide AR device capable of transmitting information directly in the user’s field of vision. And Meta’s Neural Band accessory receives high marks for ease of use and comfort. From the Tom’s Guide review (emphasis mine):

Central to the Ray-Ban Display is the Neural Band, a small wrist strap that monitors your wrist movements and translates that to inputs for the display. The band is made of cloth, and looks kind of like a Whoop strap. It has a slight bulge along the top, but it felt pretty comfortable to wear. There’s a little bit of a learning curve to getting the gesture controls right, but after about five minutes, I was making the correct movements about 80 percent of the time. To navigate the display left and right, you slide your thumb along the top of your index finger, and move it up and down to move the controls vertically. Tapping your index finger to your thumb activates some controls, while tapping your thumb and middle finger hides or reveals the display. You can also pinch and rotate you [sic] fingers to control volume or zoom on the camera. Once I got the hang of it, it seemed almost magical.

Further, the Display is equipped with Meta AI, which allows the user to interact directly with the hardware via voice commands for various tasks.

At $799, the Display is priced at parity with the starting price of the Apple Watch Ultra 3, which was announced earlier this month. Both devices must be paired to a smartphone, although the Apple Watch is exclusively compatible with iPhones. As such, both devices represent incremental costs to a user’s underlying smartphone. Which raises an intriguing question: is the Display cheap?

The Display is more expensive than the Meta Quest 3, with its 512GB version priced at $499. And the Display is significantly cheaper than the Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s VR headset, which starts at $3,499. But the Display serves a fundamentally different purpose than the Quest and the Vision Pro and is thus not competitive with those devices: the Display is designed for everyday, always-on use, which contrasts with the fully-immersive nature of a VR headset.

The Display is also more expensive than Meta’s other smartglasses, although those aren’t equipped with dedicated displays and thus exist in an adjacent, if not entirely separate, product category. So while the form factors of these smartglasses are similar, the Display, with its visual component, delivers a fundamentally different product experience and thus isn’t comparable from a price perspective.

The reality is that the Display currently exists in a product category defined by it. The closest competitor to the Display, given its always-on and partially immersive nature, is arguably the Apple Watch. Both must be paired to a smartphone (though cellular Apple Watch models can operate independently for many tasks), both can be worn throughout the day and in various environmental contexts, and both facilitate visual information delivery (of course, the smartwatch category is diverse and is comprised of far more than merely the Apple Watch, although Apple is the market leader). In this sense, the Display should be compared to the various Apple Watch models: the Apple Watch Series 11 is priced at $399, the Apple Watch SE 3 is priced at $249, and the Apple Watch Ultra 3 is priced at $799 (Apple’s specialty Hermès series of watches start at $1,249).

So while the Display’s price is likely less than what one might expect from a device of its nature, Meta’s pricing power is constrained by the closest competitive devices, given the use case. This could certainly change if adoption of the Display is healthy and the use case becomes more nuanced and culturally ingrained. But currently, it’s not a stretch to view consumer consideration as an either/or between the Apple Watch and the Display.

While the Display’s ability to capture video complicates this, it’s important to note that both the Apple Watch and the Display must be paired with a smartphone, meaning that the user already has the ability to do that. The extent to which users value the hands-free photography capabilities of smartglasses remains to be seen. In fact, the most salient point of distinction between the two devices may simply be that the Display doesn’t require the use of an iPhone, which expands the potential market meaningfully.