Your phone is at 12 percent. Your smartwatch hasn’t been charged since Thursday. Your wireless earbuds have been flashing that little red light for so long you’re not even sure what day of the week it is.
Now Meta wants to draw your attention to another device—your glasses.
The company’s newest $249 Adventurer smart glasses went on sale October 23, offering its lowest-priced entry point yet into the increasingly crowded world of AI-powered eyewear. They’re designed to make technology feel less intrusive, an admirable goal when most of us now spend our days looking down at a rectangle.
The glasses can take photos, record video, play music, handle calls, and summon Meta AI to answer questions about whatever you’re looking at. They also look reasonably like ordinary sunglasses, rather than something you’d wear to audition for a science-fiction movie set in 2004.
For that price, that’s a respectable amount of technology to put on someone’s face.
The compromise comes when it’s time to recharge.
Unlike the $299 Adventurer configuration, which includes a portable charging case with its own battery, the cheaper version comes with a simpler plug-in case, so you can’t recharge your glasses from the case when you’re away from an outlet. The more expensive case can provide up to 40 additional hours of power.
The glasses themselves still offer more than eight hours of battery life, according to Meta. Nobody is asking you to walk around with a charging cable dangling from your ear.
Still, it’s a curious compromise for a product whose central appeal is convenience.
Imagine taking these on vacation. You can record the sights without reaching for your phone, ask AI about a landmark, or listen to directions through the built-in speakers. But if the battery dies halfway through a long day, your options are far less futuristic. You have to hike to the closest outlet, connect the case, and wait.
Now, whether that inconvenience is worth an additional $50 depends on how you intend to use them. Someone wearing the glasses for short walks or occasional photos may never miss the portable charger. A traveler like me, hoping to document an entire day without stopping, might feel differently and need to level up.
Related: 46,000 Popular Power Stations Recalled After Reports of Fire and Smoke
There within lies the small irony of Meta’s latest wearable experiment. Smart glasses are supposed to free us from the habits we’ve developed around our phones, especially the constant need to ask your rideshare driver, “Do you have a charger I can borrow?”
At least when the Adventurer runs out of juice, you can still see through them. Silicon Valley hasn’t figured out how to charge us for that.
Yet.
