Snap makes its case for a $2,195 wearable computer

TL;DR: At the Specs launch event yesterday, Snap showed off its new AR glasses (which were the butt of many jokes when first revealed). The glasses are a beefy, do-it-all device for your face—but in a much smaller form factor than their competitors. Though they still cost an eye-searing $2,195.

What happened: The event opened with a disembodied voice reading a trippy poem. “This 3D simulation is designed to break up the monotony of eternity by giving you a fully immersive experience as a distinct ego identity,” the voice intoned.

It’s the kind of psychedelic opener you might use for a product you hope people see as revolutionary. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel spent about an hour showing off Specs, which ship “this fall” and can do much of what other AR glasses do: play games, stream media, and help you navigate the world.

Specs also come with a new AI agent, Specs Intelligence, which Snap calls “anticipatory AI” meant to proactively handle your busywork. And the company is even pitching Specs to companies as a hands-free tool for workers who don’t work desk jobs, with enterprise AI features from partners like Amazon, Salesforce, and Nvidia. None of these features are exactly brand new, but Snap’s hope might be that together they make one jack-of-all-trades super gadget. Here’s a sample of the features Snap demonstrated.

For play:

• You can play dominoes, Battleship, or AR basketball and golf. One app even lets you pretend you’re Harry Potter (“a guy who really knows how to pull off a pair of glasses,” Spiegel noted onstage).
• For all the aspiring artists out there, the glasses have a tracing feature that shows an outline of a drawing on an actual page so you can copy it.

For work and life:

• Before a meeting, Specs Intelligence can surface questions or prep tasks for you without prompting.
• Another very specific use case: It can cancel your subscriptions (useful if you’re sick of clicking through a million “are you sure” screens).

For businesses:

• A technician can pull up Salesforce’s AI agent while making repairs in the field.
• A retail worker, meanwhile, can quickly check a product’s stock or sales numbers through Amazon’s AI system.

We’re not Meta, we swear: Beyond these features, Snap emphasizes that the glasses won’t continuously record in the background or use facial recognition (both features that Meta has reportedly been toying with). But, realistically, Specs aren’t so much a Meta competitor as a rival to AR/VR devices like the Apple Vision Pro.

Bottom line: Snap is pushing Specs as a $2,000-plus computer that will make “computing more human.” We’ll find out in a few months whether these glasses actually manage to achieve that—and whether everyday people even want to buy them. —WK