Meta prices the camera-free Ray-Bans $100 under the Gen 3 pair that still records

From three feet away, the audio pair is a pair of glasses. The Verge wrote that "Even more so than the standard Meta Ray-Bans, these look and wear like normal glasses" ^[7]. The camera line got broader at the same time: 27 color and lens combinations plus three seasonal options, including a new aviator and a geometric cat-eye called Zena ^[13].

The audio glasses start at $349 ^[2]. The Gen 3 camera model starts at $449, up from $379 for the second generation ^[11]. So the pair that cannot record costs $100 less than the pair that can ^[18], and the camera model went up $70 in a year ^[21]. For a wearer who cares how the glasses look to other people, the cheaper option is the discreet one. What that costs is capability: the audio pair does Meta AI, phone calls, podcasts and music, and that is the whole list ^[5].

The microphones stay. "They don't record," Alex Himel, Meta's vice president of wearables, said of the audio glasses ^[14][17]. The only thing they do, Himel said, is the same thing an Alexa device in your house or some other devices do: listen for a specific wake word. They send nothing, and if they hear the wake word, they start listening to what you are saying ^[15]. The part Meta took out of the frame is the camera, and Himel said that removal is what let the company "take a lot of electronics out of the front frame and have a lot more design flexibility" ^[16].

Meta's account is that none of this is a response to anything. "Three years ago, it wasn't clear if AI glasses were going to be a thing. Back then, every other company was backing out of the space," Himel said ^[22]. "Then two years ago, we saw that audio was the top use case, the biggest potential for AI, and that it should work well in a pair of audio glasses" ^[23]. The Verge called the timing "incredibly curious" given a public backlash against wearable surveillance tech that it says is gaining steam, and reported that the camera-equipped models arrived without privacy controls addressing it ^[9][10][8].

Which tier a team should hand out depends on whether the task needs capture, and on whether the people nearby can tell what they are facing. If the task needs capture, the $449 model is the only option, and the disclosure is a rule someone writes and enforces, because the wearer saying so is the only signal available. If the task does not need capture, the $349 pair takes footage off the table, though not the wake word. The configuration that generates a complaint is the camera model bought because it was the flagship and worn by someone who never takes a photo. The people nearby carry the discomfort of a camera that never gets used. The audio pair also wins on comfort and uptime, at 43 grams against roughly 50g for Gen 2 and 69g for the Meta Ray-Ban Display ^[3], with about 12 hours of battery against nine ^[4][12].