I have two pairs of Ray-Ban sunglasses that I wear on the regular. One is well-documented here — the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. They’re still pretty new in the scheme of things, and still a heck of a lot of fun to wear. They’re a great addition to my glasses lineup.
The others are old-school Wayfarer frames. No smarts. I’ve replaced the lenses. And they look like they’ve seen a thing or two, having traveled to multiple continents multiple times. My Amazon order history dates them back almost a decade now — I bought them in January 2015.
And that highlights my biggest concern about the Ray-Ban Meta frames. By all accounts they’ve been great. The speakers are surprisingly good. The camera is a lot of fun. I don’t care about any of the Meta UI stuff, but that’s a user problem, not necessarily a product problem. And they’re getting regular updates.
But when I look down at the two pairs, I can’t help worry that the more technologically advanced of the two isn’t going to be in my gear bag come 2034. And that’s not just true for the glasses but for just about any of the personal tech I use on a daily basis. I’ll probably be two or three more computers deep by then. Certainly a few more phones. Probably new headphones or earbuds. Maybe my trusty Canon mirrorless cameras will still be in the rotation, seeing as how that sort of product tends to have a pretty long life. (Barring breakage and assuming I haven’t upgraded just on principle.)
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are excellent — but it’s unlikely their hardware will last as long as my analog Ray-Bans have.
But the Ray-Ban Meta glasses are different. They’re basically a little computer mounted inside a pair of glasses frames, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 platform, and that means they do far more than my trusty Wayfarers. Sure, both shield my eyes. But the Ray-Ban Metas (that remains such a clunky name) also serve as better-than-good open-ear headphones. They serve as a pretty interesting point-of-view camera. They allow for all sorts of hands-free fun.
I don’t know if there’s an answer to that. (And if you’re about to shout “modular design!” just stop. That’s a dream not based in reality.) I think we just need to keep in mind that these sorts of smart glasses are going to find themselves obsolete at some point. Not entirely — they’ll still serve just fine as sunglasses for as long as any other pair.
But the tech that’s built inside — the parts that truly make the Ray-Ban Meta glasses special — aren’t likely to be as timeless as their analog counterparts.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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