Snap Finally Unveils Specs, Its $2,195 Smart Glasses, After More Than a Decade of Development
Joy Ale
June 17, 2026
Picture Credit: SPECS Smart Glasses
Snap has unveiled Specs, its long-awaited consumer smart glasses, at a spatial AI convention in Long Beach this week, ending more than a decade of development with a device that carries a price tag of $2,195, well above most of its direct competitors.
Specs will be available for preorder starting 16 June with a $200 refundable deposit, and are expected to ship this autumn in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The price sits well above Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, which start as low as $350, though it remains far below Apple’s Vision Pro, which starts at $3,500. Even with that comparison, the price is steep enough to put Specs out of reach for most everyday consumers.
Snap has been working on smart glasses for more than a decade, but the company’s last consumer-facing release came in 2019, with subsequent iterations limited to developer use only. Earlier this year, Snap spun off a separate company focused exclusively on bringing the product to market, a structural change that appears to have finally produced a launch-ready device.
Visually, Specs resembles a fairly standard pair of glasses, though slightly bulkier and more goggle-like than typical eyewear. That additional bulk stems from a deliberate design choice: all computing happens directly on the device itself, with no separate puck or tether required. The glasses run on two Snapdragon processors and offer up to four hours of continuous battery life, extending to 20 hours total with the included charging case.
Representative Image
Functionally, Specs supports gaming, including shared multiplayer sessions activated when two wearers make eye contact with each other, a feature Snap calls EyeConnect. Users can also watch video through a display offering a 51-degree field of view and 16 million colors, record point-of-view footage, browse the internet, and connect to productivity apps and email. A standout feature is contextual AI, which allows wearers to look at an object and ask questions about it, with the glasses pulling up relevant information in real time, a capability that is becoming a key competitive battleground across the smart glasses category.
The glasses come in two sizes, a 47 millimetre model weighing 132 grams and a 52 millimetre model weighing 136 grams, making them noticeably heavier than Meta’s first-generation Ray-Ban Wayfarers, which weigh under an ounce, but far lighter than the Vision Pro. Privacy protections include an LED light that illuminates while recording, mirroring Meta’s approach, alongside user control over what data is stored, synced, or deleted.
The bigger question facing Snap is whether more than a decade of investment in this category will translate into a viable business. Specs enters a market that has grown increasingly crowded, with Meta’s Ray-Ban line leading current sales and Google recently announcing its own line of AI-powered glasses. Snap says it is initially targeting tech enthusiasts, developers, and studios, an audience that will need significant disposable income to match its enthusiasm at this price point.
The smart glasses category as a whole remains unprofitable across the industry, including for Meta, the current market leader, which continues to lose substantial money on its AR development division. Snap has faced its own struggles in recent years, including a volatile stock price, declining North American user engagement, and a round of layoffs in April. Whether Specs becomes the product that reverses that trajectory remains to be seen.
