Are Ray-Ban Meta glasses really a hit?

At this week’s Meta Connect conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced new Ray-Ban Meta Display glasses with the “Meta Neural Band” (that you wear on your wrist), wraparound Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses, and the second iteration of Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

During a glitch-filled keynote presentation, Zuckerberg gave an update on the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which the company does not disclose sales figures for:

“This is now our third year shipping AI glasses with our great partner, EssilorLuxottica. And the sales trajectory that we’ve seen is similar to some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time.”

This got us wondering about how the sales for Meta’s chunky-framed face computers stack up to “some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time.”

As we noted, Meta hasn’t released hard numbers for the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, but in January The Verge reported that Zuckerberg told Meta employees that over 1 million Ray-Ban Meta glasses were sold in 2024. Assuming that sales pace was the same when Meta started selling the glasses a few months earlier in October 2023, it took the company roughly a year to sell 1 million glasses.

For comparison, we picked a few of the bestselling consumer electronics of all time that also helped define a new category of leisure or entertainment gadget. Yes, Apple is in here a lot, but the company has defined a bunch of new categories over the years.

Looking back at iconic gadgets like Sony’s Walkman portable cassette player, the sales trajectories of hit products is not always steady. Released in 1979, the first generation of the Walkman (which sold for about $120 in 1979 dollars) was a hit in Japan, and the company could not produce enough to keep up with demand.

It took two years for the first-gen Walkman to reach 1.5 million in sales. Its follow-up, 1981’s Walkman WM-2, became an international hit, selling 1 million units in nine months. In the first decade of their existence, Sony sold 50 million Walkmans.

Apple’s iPod dominated consumer electronics for a decade, heralding the transition to digital music. The company sold an estimated 450 million of the devices during its more than 20-year lifespan, but the first soap-bar-sized iteration took more than a year and a half to move a million units.

While Meta definitely beat out the original iPod to 1 million units, it isn’t even close to Apple’s other category-defining gadgets’ time to get to 1 million sold.

“Billions of AI glasses” and billions in losses

By all accounts, Zuckerberg seems extremely dedicated to the success of Reality Labs’ virtual/augmented/mixed reality glasses and headsets. After all, he did rename the company in an audacious bet that its future would be defined by the “metaverse” (but now is also all in on “superintelligence.”)

“This will be a defining year that determines if we’re on a path toward many hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of AI glasses, and glasses being the next computing platform, like we’ve been talking about for some time — or if this is just going to be a longer grind,” the Meta CEO said during his company’s earnings call earlier this year.

Indeed, the company has been grinding away for more than four years on the metaverse, despite a lack of consumer interest and users who don’t come back. The early cartoonish graphics and weird legless avatars of “Horizon Worlds” may be a thing of the past, but six years after its introduction, Zuckerberg is still showing off a vision of people hanging out with their friends in their virtual bachelor pads. At this week’s event, after showing off new metaverse products for creators like Meta Horizon Studio and Meta Horizon Engine, Zuckerberg said:

“I am really excited about what these new technologies are going to unlock for artists and entertainment. I think that the shift toward more immersive storytelling and 3D storytelling, it’s going to be one of the more exciting developments in the coming years, and I think that it’s going to drive a new wave of adoption of virtual reality and glasses.”

The losses that Reality Labs has posted are staggering. Since Q4 2020, when the company first disclosed such numbers, the R&D-heavy division has racked up nearly $70 billion in losses. At the same time, revenue has been largely flat. But with $47 billion in revenue last quarter, the company is able to sustain half a decade’s worth of losses, though it is also spending huge sums on AI infrastructure and talent.

Early reviews of Meta’s new Ray-Ban Meta Display glasses were largely positive, despite the awkward launch event. It remains to be seen whether Reality Labs products like Ray-Ban Meta glasses are on a slow burn to success like Apple’s iPod, but until millions more consumers start putting Meta’s products on their faces, the losses will keep piling up.

Meta didn’t respond to a request for comment.