Meta's New $349 Ray-Bans Can't Take a Single Photo

The camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses run about 12 hours a charge, while the camera model jumps to $449.

Meta took the camera out of its newest Ray-Bans. The Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses start at $349 and weigh 43 grams, The Verge reported from Meta Connect 2026, the company's product event on its own campus.

The pair that still has a camera got more expensive. The new Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 starts at $449, up from $379 for last year's second generation, the outlet reported. So the cheapest way into a Ray-Ban-branded pair of Meta's AI glasses is now the one that can't photograph the person across the table.

Meta says that isn't the point. Alex Himel, the company's vice president of wearables, told The Verge that audio-only glasses have been in development for years, and that audio turned out to be the biggest thing people did with the originals. Taking the camera out let the company rebuild the front of the frame, he said, which is where the electronics used to live.

What's left is thinner arms and a longer charge. The audio glasses come in two styles, the Clubmaster and the Burbank, with 23 color and lens combinations, adjustable temple arms and nose pads, and hinges that extend for wider faces. Battery life is estimated at 12 hours, against nine on the Gen 3. At 43 grams they undercut the roughly 50-gram Gen 2 and the 69-gram Meta Ray-Ban Display.

They do three things: talk to Meta AI, take calls, play audio.

The microphones don't go away, though, and that's the part worth reading twice. “They don't record,” Himel told The Verge, comparing the glasses to a smart speaker sitting in a living room — listening for a wake word, then processing what follows.

Two privacy changes are coming with the lineup, per The Verge. Meta is extending the “private processing” system it uses on WhatsApp to wearables, a server-side setup the company says keeps a user's data out of reach of Meta and third parties when on-device work isn't powerful enough. And users will be able to opt out of having their visual data used to train Meta's AI. Audio-only queries will still be used for training.

Himel acknowledged to the outlet that private processing mostly protects the person wearing the glasses — not the person standing in front of them, which is the complaint that got the category nicknamed “pervert glasses” in the first place.

Muse, Meta's personal AI agent, is going into the glasses too. “Muse is gonna be everywhere,” Himel said. In a demo, the outlet reported, a Muse agent handled a request to shop for high-protein snacks and then couldn't add a second item to the cart.

One add-on has a regulator behind it. A hearing assistance feature cleared by the Food and Drug Administration costs an extra $149, billed as a one-time charge rather than a subscription, and Meta told The Verge it's eligible for FSA and HSA spending.

The rest of the lineup keeps multiplying. The lower-cost Meta Glasses start at $249, with a Kylie Jenner edition and a pair tied to Blackpink's Lisa at $399 each. Meta expects to have more than 100 versions of its glasses on sale by the end of the year.

Source: theverge.com, retrieved September 24, 2026.