Why Big Tech can't quit smart glasses

David Pierce· Host0:00

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Nosepads. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're gonna talk about smart glasses, specifically why smart glasses are such a pervasive idea in the tech industry right now. We've talked a lot about them. We've been covering smart glasses since the days of Google Glass, and there are so many problems and challenges with smart glasses. There was the whole glass hole problem. There are huge technological problems d- with actually making this stuff real. There are supply chain issues. There are display things no one has invented yet. Smart glasses are going to be very hard to do correctly, and even if they're done correctly, it's still very much in the air whether people want them and what they want them for. And yet, all of that aside, a huge portion of the tech industry, including most of the biggest hardware manufacturers, are absolutely convinced that smart glasses are the future. So The Verge's Vi Song is gonna come on. She has used all the smart glasses. She has reviewed all the smart glasses, and she and I are gonna try to figure out why the tech industry can't quit smart glasses. It's gonna be great. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026. Meta is turning off, at least for now, a program that it created to log everything employees do on their computers, and I mean everything, including mouse clicks and keystrokes, all to use as AI training data. Turns out, a lot of the data being collected was very private and made