Meta Connect Keynote 2026

Meta’s annual keynote yesterday was a tight 55-minute live event held on their campus in Menlo Park. I watched the whole thing this morning, before recording tomorrow’s episode of Dithering. (Which you should subscribe to.)

It was a good keynote. Consumer products announced:

  • Third-generation Meta Glasses with cameras.

  • A new glasses product: Ray-Ban Meta Audio. These are audio-only smart glasses, with microphones and speakers, but no camera. Zuckerberg pitched them as being less expensive, having longer battery life, and looking much more like regular glasses. All of those things are true, but he deftly avoided the privacy backlash against glasses with cameras. They’re not that much less expensive than the camera models, starting at $350.

  • Meta VR Glasses. Slogan: “The weight is over.” Some similarities to Vision Pro: use cases include immersive movies and sports, virtual displays for computing, and gaming; the computer is a thick phone-sized puck connected to the glasses via a cable. Some significant differences from Vision Pro: Meta VR Glasses only weigh 100g; Vision Pro weighs 750–800g. It’s almost an order of magnitude difference by weight. Also: these are only going to cost $1,300. Not out yet, coming in “spring”. I used to think I’d at least use my Vision Pro when I fly, but I haven’t taken it with me on a flight in two years. It’s too big and too heavy — a small piece of carry-on luggage unto itself. By dint of their weight alone, Meta VR Glasses seem far more comfortable, and also far more portable. They look a lot more like regular sunglasses than Vision Pro (or Meta’s own Quest goggles) — but they definitely don’t look like regular sunglasses.

  • Meta Charm. A pendant/stopwatch-sized thing with a screen and fingerprint reader, that serves as a dedicated device for interacting with Muse. Will supposedly have 5G cellular connectivity in addition to Wi-Fi, but it’s not a phone. Vaporware at the moment but supposedly shipping by December. No price given. My daily “World in Brief” newsletter from The Economist described Charm thus: “Imagine a tiny smartphone that can’t do 95% of the things that the one in your pocket can.”

The star of the show wasn’t any of the hardware products but Meta Muse. Muse is the through line for Meta this year. If there’s one thing I think Zuckerberg did wrong in the keynote, it’s that he didn’t explain where Muse stands compared to Meta AI. I’m pretty sure that the answer is that Muse, as an AI agent, is a superset of Meta AI, a mere chatbot. If you use Muse, you should have no reason to use Meta AI; if you use Meta AI, Zuckerberg should have encouraged you to upgrade to Muse. I think that’s the gist. But it would have been good for Zuckerberg to explain it.

★ Thursday, 24 September 2026