Apple’s first smart glasses are now targeting a late 2027 launch, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported in his Power On newsletter, pushing back from the earlier timeline of early 2027. The delay, he claims, is due to ongoing development challenges, including the continued struggles with Siri’s AI capabilities, which the glasses are expected to rely on heavily. Despite the setback, the project has strong backing from the top of the company. Outgoing CEO Tim Cook reportedly considers the glasses his top priority before he hands over to John Ternus on 1 September and Ternus himself has been driving the project through the Vision Products Group which has operated under his leadership for the past two years.
The glasses will enter a price band of roughly $200 to $500, putting them in direct competition with mainstream eyewear brands rather than just tech rivals. Gurman’s reporting suggests Apple is not simply going after Meta in the nascent smart glasses category. It is going after the far larger global eyewear industry, likely following the same strategy it used with the Apple Watch a decade ago.
According to Gurman, Apple is testing at least four frame designs: a larger rectangular style similar to the Ray-Ban Wayfarer, a slimmer rectangular design closer to what Tim Cook himself wears and larger and smaller oval or circular options. Colour options under consideration include black, blue and light brown. The cameras are expected to be vertically oriented and oval in shape with multiple frame styles planned from launch.
Like the Meta Ray-Bans, Apple’s glasses will have built-in cameras for photos and video, microphones and speakers for calls, music and Siri notifications, and are expected to support turn-by-turn walking directions. There will be no in-lens augmented reality display in the first version and Gurman does not expect that capability to arrive for several years yet.
When Apple entered the smartwatch market in 2015, the smart glasses category barely existed. Apple’s real target was the broader sub-$1,000 wristwatch market, dominated by Swatch, Fossil, Casio, Seiko and others. This resulted in Swatch’s revenue plummeting to 28% compared to the year before the Apple Watch launched and Fossil’s sales falling roughly 70% over the same period.
Apple is now applying the same logic to smart glasses. The global eyewear market is valued at around $200 billion annually and the World Health Organisation estimates that 2.2 billion people worldwide have some form of vision impairment. The addressable market is significantly larger than the watch industry was and Apple’s brand, retail footprint and two billion-plus active device ecosystem give it a starting position no smart glasses competitor currently has.
In all of this, Meta has had a meaningful head start. It has already gone through multiple generations of Ray-Ban smart glasses, has retail partnerships and has built a sort of consumer familiarity with the category. More importantly, Meta’s glasses work with Android, which accounts for the larger share of the global smartphone market. Apple’s historical refusal to support Android means it cannot compete on that side at all, giving Meta an effectively uncontested audience there.
The late 2027 timeline means Apple has roughly 18 months to close those gaps. Whether it does will determine whether this becomes the next Apple Watch story or something considerably more complicated.