Snap has announced the consumer version of Specs its AR glasses that it believes can eventually replace the smartphone – but the wearable device will carry a seriously hefty price tag.
The wearable will ship to the public later this year for an eye-watering $2,195 (around $1,635) and will be available in the UK, USA and France. They can be pre-ordered with a refundable $200 (around £149) deposit and will likely beat expected offerings from offerings from Apple and Google to market.
Previously, Snap had offered Specs to developers, but the new consumer devices will be slimmer, will carry a wider field of view (from 46-degrees to 51) and, at four-hours in mixed use circumstances, will boast better battery life than the dev-kit. Snap is offering the new, fully-standalone Specs in two sizes 47mm (weighing 132 grams) and 52mm (weighting 136g).
The hefty price comes via the Qualcomm Snapdragon chip that does the heavy lifting and the lens technology that have been primed for displaying augmented reality content. Snap says that the displays offer the equivalent of a 24-inch display while working, and a 115-inch home cinema screen placed ten feet away when relaxing. The UI will be controlled by hand gestures like pinching in virtual space.
“We redesigned our waveguide technology to create a clearer and more seamless view of the world around you,” Snap says of the display technology in a press release. “Our new waveguide uses billions of invisibly small nanostructures, so small that more than 10,000 can fit on the tip of a single hair.” Impressive.
Naturally, agentic AI content is front and centre with Snap offering integration with Anthropic and OpenAI models. Indeed, rather than just a pair of glasses with a camera designed for posting video and photographs to social media, the company believes this computing device could replace the smartphone as people’s primary communications device.
“Almost 20 years since the launch of the iPhone, people are ready to think about computing differently,” Spiegel said in an interview with CNBC. “Specs really represents a way to use computing together in shared experiences in the real world, looking up through see-through lenses rather than at an opaque screen.”
The social media company’s new Specs are certainly a big step up from its Spectacles that launched in 2016 for $130. Indeed it was the Snap Spectacles that did much of the groundwork for the smart specs sector that was eventually popularised by the Meta Ray-Ban specs.
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