The End of Smartphones Is Nigh: Cheaper Replacements Proliferate

Several top executives from technology giants have repeatedly predicted the end of the smartphone’s dominance as an everyday device. Two of them are Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Musk once stated on his social media account that humans in the future will no longer carry phones everywhere, but will instead be directly connected to a chip inside the brain. He has already incubated this concept through the startup Neuralink, which he founded. Unlike Musk, Zuckerberg believes smart glasses will replace the smartphone as the daily device of the future. Many manufacturers have already released smart glasses, such as Apple with the Vision Pro, Snap with Specs, and Meta with Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta. Unfortunately, adoption of smart glasses has so far been limited due to their relatively high prices. However, Meta appears ambitious to bring its smart glasses access to a wider market. According to Reuters, Meta and EssilorLuxottica have just launched AI smart glasses at an affordable price. The device is priced starting at US$299 (Rp5.3 million), far cheaper than the Ray-Ban Display which is priced at US$800 (Rp14.3 million). Meta has invested billions of US dollars to realise ‘personal intelligence’, a super-sophisticated gadget aimed at bringing various AI benefits to personal users. Although developed together with Luxottica, Meta’s latest affordable smart glasses series is the first released without collaboration with established fashion brands like Ray-Ban. Meta’s cheap smart glasses come in a variety of colours and shapes, including round frame designs and thin oval frames resulting from a collaboration with Kylie Jenner. This smart glasses series is also the first AI glasses from Meta launched with Meta AI powered by Muse Spark. For context, Muse Spark is the first model produced by Superintelligence Labs. Global smart glasses shipments reached 9.6 million units last year. Meta leads this market with a 76.1% market share, according to research firm IDC. The Meta Glasses announcement came a week after Snap’s owner launched augmented reality (AR) glasses with a fairly expensive price of US$2,195 (Rp39 million). However, Snap’s glasses overlay digital content onto the user’s real-world view, while Meta’s glasses enable text display and AI interaction.