I have been following Snap’s journey with smart glasses since its first pair of Spectacles launched in late 2016, and the company led the smart glasses market until it hit a snag related to display technology after the third generation launched in 2019. Since then, Snap has delivered multiple AR glasses developer kits (2021 and 2024) but hasn’t produced anything that resembles a consumer product.
Along the way, Snap acquired WaveOptics, whose technology it uses to deliver light from displays to your eyes via waveguides. It also doesn’t help that the company has laid off one-third of its staff since its headcount peaked in 2022. I believe that Snap’s layoffs have forced the company to focus its efforts but also impeded its roadmap execution and slowed its timelines. Today, the SPECS division of the company is a wholly owned subsidiary, suggesting that it could become a separate entity soon.
After all the delays, Snap committed to delivering the next generation of Spectacles/Specs this year. At the recent AWE 2026 trade show in Long Beach, California, the company finally unveiled the new AR glasses, with a launch window scheduled for this fall.
The New SPECS’ Technical Specs
This sixth generation of Snap’s glasses offers a 51-degree diagonal FoV, an upgrade from 46 degrees in the previous model. The glasses now also have a motion-to-photon latency of 7ms, a huge reduction from 13ms. Motion-to-photon latency is extremely important because it helps the glasses refresh before even the most sensitive user can perceive any changes. 10ms is the industry-accepted threshold for a good user experience in mixed reality, and it’s even lower in AR.
The new glasses ship in two sizes, 47mm and 52mm, and users can choose the size that best fits their head to achieve the most comfortable fit. The different sizes have different weights, naturally, with the heavier model being 136g. At first, I thought this was quite heavy compared to the 70g of Meta’s Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, but then I considered the differences between the two makers’ products. Snap says that SPECS are made of a next-generation TR90 polymer, but what’s more important to know is that these glasses have two displays and enough battery to last for four hours.
While I didn’t get a chance to try on the new SPECS, I do believe that most of these glasses’ additional weight comes from the integrated battery — which, by the way, is likely to counterbalance the front weight of the displays and their optics. Too many people compare SPECS — inaccurately — with smart glasses or headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, Samsung Galaxy XR, or XREAL Aura, but all of those have external batteries that sit either on a strap at the back of your head or at the end of a cable you carry in your pocket. Simply put, there isn’t a single commercial full-AR device on the market today like the SPECS, and that’s part of the problem with all these comparisons. Snap has effectively beaten the whole industry in delivering standalone, tether-free full AR glasses.
Speaking of tethers, I was surprised to find out that Snap also includes a magnetic USB-C cable for connecting the glasses to your PC or smartphone to use as an external display. I think this really improves the device’s utility, even given its fairly high price. SPECS also include hand tracking and an option for prescription lenses, although I wish they also included eye tracking for calibration, authentication, and UI purposes.
Criticism Aplenty for the SPECS Launch
Snap launched the SPECS glasses as the opening keynote of the Augmented World Expo 2026 at the start of June. While I think Snap did a really good job of explaining how these glasses are different from competing products, the company didn’t do as well at explaining the new use cases SPECS are supposed to enable. Frankly, I don’t think enough third-party developers were impressed with the last-generation Spectacles to make them eager to develop for those, let alone with the expectation that whatever experiences they built would easily port to SPECS. This is despite praise from developers that Snap is one of the best platforms to develop for. But the biggest miss at AWE for me was that Evan Spiegel, the company’s CEO, didn’t wear the new glasses on stage. When he did put them on, it was off-stage during a CNBC appearance, after which the company got skewered for how large and thick the glasses looked on his face. The glasses looked much better on someone with a bigger head, for example NBA star Jimmy Butler (who stands nearly 6’8″), who is one of the company’s celebrity brand influencers.
People across the XR space and the tech industry as a whole dunked on Snap about the SPECS for one reason or another, but most of those criticisms missed a crucial point: Snap needs to build these glasses — even if they are a little too clunky in their current iteration — to push the industry towards greater miniaturization and a more mature supply chain. That is what is needed to enable continued reductions in size, improved battery life, and better performance to get the product to where people expect it to be.
Want an example of this in action? Think back to when each subsequent release of the iPod was even smaller and even sleeker than its predecessor. More broadly, PCs and smartphones followed a similar path from clunky and ugly to sleek and compact over time. In the current case, someone must build these glasses, even if they are a bit too big right now, and developers need to experiment with them because there’s no saying what exactly they’ll be like in the next generation. Heck, even looking at SPECS compared to the previous generation, they’re actually a huge improvement in so many ways.
There’s also the matter of the SPECS’ $2,195 price, which makes things even more difficult for the company. At that price, SPECS can’t really be advertised as a consumer product; they’re more of a prosumer or development device like the Vision Pro. I imagine that the ongoing chip and memory crunch driven by the AI boom only adds to the cost. I think that if Snap could get the price closer to $1,500, it would be a different story. Then again, the glasses still need far more apps. Without them, even a $1,500 pair of glasses is effectively a paperweight.
That said, the most loyal members of Snap’s developer community apparently really believe in what the company is doing, and I have heard lots of high praise from them about working with Snap. I believe that the changes Snap has made to Snap OS, aimed at improving the development environment and experience, should work in its favor, as developers currently don’t have much praise for competing platforms. In fact, I believe that what Snap has built with the open-source operating system may, in the end, become more valuable than the hardware it has built. The fall launch will help to answer many questions, and hopefully by then more developers will have had time with SPECS to help launch more applications and demonstrate more use cases.
Related Moor Insights & Strategy Research
- AWE 2026 — Spatial Computing Meets Agentic and Personal AI Compute — June 17, 2026
- The State Of XR In 2024, Part 2: Tier-Two XR Platform Players — December 17, 2024
- Snap Spectacles AR Glasses: The Embodiment Of AR Making AI Fun — November 7, 2004
