Smartphones Are So Over

Today, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, one of the most popular social-media apps for teenage users, is announcing a new computer that you wear directly on your face. The latest in its Spectacles line of smart glasses, which the company has been working on for about a decade, shows you interactive imagery through its lenses, placing plants or imaginary pets or even a golf-putting range into the real world around you.

So-called augmented reality (or AR) is nothing new, and neither is wearable tech. Meta makes a pair of smart glasses in partnership with Ray-Ban, and claims they’re so popular that the company can’t make them fast enough. Amazon sells an Alexa-infused version of the famous Carrera frames, which make you look like a mob boss with access to an AI assistant (Alexa, where’s the best place to hide a body?). Apple launched its Vision Pro headset—which includes an AR mode, along with a fully immersive virtual-reality one—last year. And who could forget Google Glass? Consumers have sometimes been cool on the face computers, if not outright hostile toward them, but tech companies just can’t seem to quit the idea. From that perspective, it makes sense that Snap’s new Spectacles are more a demonstration of intent than an actual product: They’re targeted to developers who will apply and pay $99 a month to use them.

But this is also, arguably, what makes them interesting. In an interview last week, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told me that he sees smart glasses as an opportunity to “reshape what a computer is, to make it something that actually keeps us grounded in the real world rather than behind a screen.” The company hasn’t accomplished this so far, of course, but the new Spectacles—and all those other smart glasses and AR headsets—are not being released into a void. They’re arriving at a moment when people are feeling pretty turned off by phones. People are angsty about how much time they spend looking down at small screens rather than engaging with the world around them. Parents are concerned that phones are driving a teen mental-health crisis. Smartphone sales have slowed, and even the latest iPhone isn’t doing great. Companies are trying to get people excited about technology again, by pitching all sorts of new hardware ideas that break the bounds of that rectangular screen, such as lapel pins or glorified walkie-talkies that work with AI assistants. I had this moment in mind as I wore the new Spectacles earlier this month, batting colorful digital blobs away while Paramore’s “Misery Business” played in the background.