I'm a Snap Specs sceptic, after a big reveal of glasses I would never want to wear
They just don't look all that great
There's nothing quite like seeing the fruits of your labour, and that sort of big cathartic moment was probably what Snap was hoping for when it finally unveiled its full-on augmented reality glasses this week – Specs. While those who've seen them in person seem impressed by the build quality, I have to admit that my first thought on checking out the reveal is to remain extremely sceptical.
By all accounts, and according to T3's own impressions of earlier prototypes of the AR glasses tech that Snap has been working on for years now, the usability and UI of the Specs are likely to both be big hits. Snap's taken the time to do the groundwork and ensure that its underlying tech is really impressive, and it sounds responsive and slick.
Having the option of a virtual 115-inch display wherever you go is indeed a nice pitch in theory, and I'm not deaf to the argument that they could be amazing on a plane journey when you want a big screen all to yourself.
However, while there are clearly technical parts of the Specs that are really impressive, there's a hurdle I simply can't get over, which is that they look like the goofiest glasses since Google Glass, and outstrip by far the size of the Meta Ray-Ban Display, a far more mainstream-looking product.
That's before we even get to the insane price tag attached – $2,195 / £1,995! That's wild money to be an early adopter of some glasses that are highly likely to make you look ridiculous unless you have the sort of chiselled face that could get away with almost anything fashion-wise.
Let's loop back to the wearable's design, though, because it's really the biggest factor causing me to doubt things. Snap's promotional images lean heavily on models to make the Specs look good, and do a solid enough job with carefully-selected angles.
Sunglasses are indeed more forgiving than spectacles in terms of frame size, and chunky oversized ones aren't unheard of, so I can see how these pictures make people think the Specs could be workable. It's the images from Snap's press event that undermine things, sadly – with CEO Evan Spiegel wearing them in the room and giving people a more realistic sense of what they look like.
You can get a really good look at him in them thanks to this report from our sister site Tom's Guide, and I can't help but feel he looks faintly ridiculous in them. He's literally tethered to these as the big bet he's making to save Snap from a slide into irrelevance, and the early shareholder response seems to have been fairly worrying, which won't leave him sleeping too easily.
The biggest red flag is the way the Specs' chunky arms seem to be crushing his ears, which looks anything but comfortable – while that might be down to his head shape, if they're not adjustable enough for the CEO, what hope for the rest of us? Weighing in at 132g, after all, these are not insignificant in terms of weight.
A battery life of four hours admittedly means you won't wear them for a whole day at a time, most likely, but that's not the greatest outlook either way. The combination of a sky-high price and divisive looks makes me strongly suspect that this will be a generation of glasses that very, very few people actually buy.
Their specs might be impressive, but the actual Specs are going to be a super interesting case study in whether a smaller company than Apple can afford to launch a similarly niche product to the Vision Pro, for all its hope that they could end up being more mainstream, somehow.
