Over 1 million units of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses were sold in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told staff today.
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses start at $300, with polarized models offered for $330 and transition lens models for $380. That means 1 million units represents over $300 million in revenue. But what's still not publicly known is how much of this goes to Meta versus how much goes to EssilorLuxottica, the company behind the Ray-Ban brand.
The revelation comes from an all-hands Meta meeting leaked to The Verge.
For comparison, the previous generation, called Ray-Ban Stories, sold less than 300,000 units in 16 months, a memo leaked to The Wall Street Journal revealed. As another point of comparison, the achievement unlocked when completing the mixed reality demo experience First Encounters suggests that Meta has sold at minimum 2 million Quest 3 and Quest 3S headsets. Note that playing the demo requires permitting the headset to 3D scan your room.
According to the leaked meeting transcript, Zuckerberg went on to muse as to whether the next generation of the glasses might achieve two times or five times the sales volume:
“A lot of the big hit products in their third generation reached 5 to 10 million units”
“So I think one of the questions for us is, are we going to go from 1 million this year to 2 million? Are we going to go from 1 million to 5 million?”
Following this, Zuckerberg apparently pointed out that other tech giants will launch competitors, telling staff that until then Meta should take the opportunity to grow its smart glasses as fast as possible.
“We basically invented the category and our competitors haven’t really shown up yet and they will”
“I think we’ll probably start seeing some of that maybe a little later this year, maybe next year. But we just have this wide open field right now to run and basically introduce as many people as possible to Meta AI glasses and we should take that opportunity.”
Samsung reportedly plans to launch a competitor with Google's Gemini AI, later this year or early next year, while Apple is reportedly exploring releasing its own in 2027. Meanwhile, around a dozen startups and smaller companies showed off similar smart glasses at CES 2025.
David Heaney
David Heaney
For this year, Meta plans to aggressively market the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, starting with Super Bowl ads featuring Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth next week.
Near the end of this year, Meta and EssilorLuxottica reportedly plan to launch Oakley Meta glasses, and Meta plans to launch more advanced smart glasses with a heads-up display (HUD), a higher end product that could reportedly be priced around $1000 and come with the company's long-in-development neural wristband.
Meta's CFO Susan Li indicated to investors yesterday that these plans will result in notably increased costs for its Reality Labs division, as it tries to push smart glasses into the mainstream. With this, Meta will soon find out whether displayless camera glasses with AI truly have mass market appeal, or whether at least some augmented reality functionality will be required to make glasses a meaningful part of its business.
