Meta released the second generation of its Ray-Ban glasses in October. I’ve been testing them over the last couple of weeks and I really like them, even after factoring in the premium you pay in comparison to regular Ray-Bans.
The $299 Headliner model I have feels identical to traditional Ray-Bans but with more smarts. Similar to the first model, they allow you to capture video, snap pictures, place calls through your phone and listen to music. The speakers also are 50% louder, according to Meta. There’s also a better camera that takes photos in portrait mode instead of landscape, which makes them better suited for social media posts.
Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which includes its wearable products such as the smart glasses and the Meta Quest, contributes less than 1% to the company’s revenue. Even so, its wearables represent Meta’s attempt at making headway in the devices space in addition to its massive advertising and social media presence.
Here’s what you should know about the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
What’s good
The Ray-Ban Meta Headliner smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are marketed to show that they can be worn every day just like a regular pair of sunglasses. To do that, they need to be as comfortable, stylish and useful as your regular pair. Meta and Ray-Ban nailed that aspect.
They’re comfortable to wear and aren’t clunky. They weigh just a few grams more than regular Ray-Ban glasses. And, while I was testing out the glasses in the office, I was asked several times why I was wearing sunglasses indoors, so that gives you a gauge of how similar they look to classic Ray-Bans. They don’t look weird.
I wore my smart sunglasses without using any of the tech features, and they work just as well as a normal pair of polarized Ray-Ban sunglasses.For people who want to replace their corrective lenses, you can get prescription lenses just like you would with the pair you already use.
The Ray-Ban Meta Headliner smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
They’re convenient if you want to take pictures in the moment without having to reach for your phone. You just press a button on the right side of your glasses or say, “Hey Meta, take a photo.” I liked using them to snap pictures walking around New York City. Just check out this side by side of the same tree. The one on the left is taken with my iPhone and the one on the right is taken with my glasses.
The photo on the left was taken with an iPhone 14. The photo on the right was taken with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
It’s easy to import the pictures or videos to the Meta View app on a phone, and then you can save them to your camera roll.
It’s obvious to others when you’re taking a photo or video. The circle on the right side of the glasses flashes when you take a photo and it pulses when you’re filming, so it would be difficult to take a photo or video without someone noticing.
That’s an important feature for Ray-Ban Meta glasses to become engrained into mainstream society. People around you know when you’re recording. You can’t even block the light and take a photo. The glasses will refuse to snap the picture if you try.
An LED flash goes off when you take a photo with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
The audio and calling capabilities are my favorite part, though.
You can use the glasses in place of your earbuds. I walked around New York’s Central Park with them while listening to music and prefer the audio experience over earbuds in a setting like this. The sound is still full, but I was more attune to my surroundings, which was helpful when an unleashed dog ran up to me and when a biker sped through a red light.
Listening to music is sort of like having a soundtrack playing in the background, as opposed to an immersive experience that many new headphones provide.I’ll admit, I don’t have AirPods with the noise transparency option so it’s worth comparing that feature if you have the AirPods Pro or AirPods Max.
There is definitely more audio leakage with these than I found in my 3rd Generation AirPods, so I’d probably still go with earbuds on the train if you don’t want to bug your fellow passengers. But the glasses were quiet enough that they didn’t bother my roommate while I listened to music at home.
I liked that I could tap once on the right side of the glasses to pause and resume my music and could slide my finger to adjust the volume.
The Ray-Ban Meta Headliner smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
The glasses also work well for phone calls. I made calls with them, both in my room and in noisy areas, and the recipients had no complaints about the audio quality. The conversation on my end was clear and I liked that I could accept incoming calls by double-tapping on the right side.
They’re easy to charge. The glasses come in a hard shell case that charges the glasses when they are stored. You use a USB-C — which does not come with the glasses — to recharge the case, but you get roughly eight charges before you need to do that, which is a big step up from the three additional charges in the previous model.
What’s bad
The Ray-Ban Meta Headliner smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
My biggest knock on these glasses is that it’s difficult to take pictures if you’re wearing a ball cap. This isn’t an issue for someone who doesn’t wear hats, but it was annoying to have to push my bill slightly up whenever I wanted to snap a photo without the camera getting my hat in it, too.
Brims of hats get in the way when trying to take photos with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
While the glasses let you use voice commands to send messages or ask questions such as “What’s the weather?” it felt more like a novelty to me and I can’t see myself consistently using them. I’m also a big sports fan, and this voice assistant can’t tell you the score of the game from last night like other assistants.
If you use Siri or Google Assistant on a watch or phone often, then you may find some of the voice commands useful. I just don’t use them often.
The Ray-Ban Meta Headliner smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
The battery life isn’t great if you want to use these as your all-day, every day glasses. They get roughly four hours of battery life for mixed use, which is a combination of all the features the glasses offer, but that can vary depending on how sparingly or not you use them.My review unit charged from 7% to full in about 50 minutes, which is fast.
But if you need to wear them all day with prescription lenses, then you might run into some issues, at least with the full functionality, since you don’t really have the option to just take them off and let the glasses charge in the middle of your day.
Finally, the glasses are water resistant, but not waterproof, so you have to be cautious in rainy weather in a way that you don’t have to be with regular glasses.
Should you buy them?
The Ray-Ban Meta Headliner smart glasses.
Jake Piazza | CNBC
I’d buy them. I really enjoyed the music, headset and photo features of these glasses, and because they still retain the comfort and style of classic Ray-Bans.
Normal black Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses cost $171. The Meta version of those costs $299. Is the ability to snap pictures and videos of your surroundings and use them in place of earbuds and a headset worth the additional money to you? It is for me.
Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba on Friday beat profit expectations in its September quarter, but sales fell short as sluggishness in the world’s second-largest economy hit consumer spending.
Alibaba said net income rose 58% year on year to 43.9 billion yuan ($6.07 billion) in the company’s quarter ended Sept. 30, on the back of the performance of its equity investments. This compares with an LSEG forecast of 25.83 billion yuan.
“The year-over-year increases were primarily attributable to the mark-to-market changes from our equity investments, decrease in impairment of our investments and increase in income from operations,” the company said of the annual profit jump in its earnings statement.
Revenue, meanwhile, came in at 236.5 billion yuan, 5% higher year on year but below an analyst forecast of 238.9 billion yuan, according to LSEG data.
The company’s New York-listed shares have gained ground this year to date, up more than 13%. The stock fell more than 2% in morning trading on Friday, after the release of the quarterly earnings.
Sales sentiment
Investors are closely watching the performance of Alibaba’s main business units, Taobao and Tmall Group, which reported a 1% annual uptick in revenue to 98.99 billion yuan in the September quarter.
The results come at a tricky time for Chinese commerce businesses, given a tepid retail environment in the country. Chinese e-commerce group JD.com also missed revenue expectations on Thursday, according to Reuters.
Markets are now watching whether a slew of recent stimulus measures from Beijing, including a five-year 1.4 trillion yuan package announced last week, will help resuscitate the country’s growth and curtail a long-lived real estate market slump.
The impact on the retail space looks promising so far, with sales rising by a better-than-expected 4.8% year on year in October, while China’s recent Singles’ Day shopping holiday — widely seen as a barometer for national consumer sentiment — regained some of its luster.
Alibaba touted “robust growth” in gross merchandise volume — an industry measure of sales over time that does not equate to the company’s revenue — for its Taobao and Tmall Group businesses during the festival, along with a “record number of active buyers.”
“Alibaba’s outlook remains closely aligned with the trajectory of the Chinese economy and evolving regulatory policies,” ING analysts said Thursday, noting that the company’s Friday report will shed light on the Chinese economy’s growth momentum.
The e-commerce giant’s overseas online shopping businesses, such as Lazada and Aliexpress, meanwhile posted a 29% year-on-year hike in sales to 31.67 billion yuan.
Cloud business accelerates
Alibaba’s Cloud Intelligence Group reported year-on-year sales growth of 7% to 29.6 billion yuan in the September quarter, compared with a 6% annual hike in the three-month period ended in June. The slight acceleration comes amid ongoing efforts by the company to leverage its cloud infrastructure and reposition itself as a leader in the booming artificial intelligence space.
“Growth in our Cloud business accelerated from prior quarters, with revenues from public cloud products growing in double digits and AI-related product revenue delivering triple-digit growth. We are more confident in our core businesses than ever and will continue to invest in supporting long-term growth,” Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said in a statement Friday.
Stymied by Beijing’s sweeping 2022 crackdown on large internet and tech companies, Alibaba last year overhauled the division’s leadership and has been shaping it as a future growth driver, stepping up competition with rivals including Baidu and Huawei domestically, and Microsoft and OpenAI in the U.S.
Alibaba, which rolled out its own ChatGPT-style product Tongyi Qianwen last year, this week unveiled its own AI-powered search tool for small businesses in Europe and the Americas, and clinched a key five-year partnership to supply cloud services to Indonesian tech giant GoTo in September.
Speaking at the Apsara Conference in September, Alibaba’s Wu said the company’s cloud unit is investing “with unprecedented intensity, in the research and development of AI technology and the building of its global infrastructure,” noting that the future of AI is “only beginning.”
Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Alibaba’s Cloud Intelligence Group reported quarterly revenue of 29.6 billion yuan in the September quarter.
Elon Musk listens as US President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a House Republicans Conference meeting at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on November 13, 2024 in Washington, DC.
Allison Robbert | Getty Images
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is raising up to $6 billion at a $50 billion valuation, according to CNBC’s David Faber.
Sources told Faber that the funding, which should close early next week, is a combination of $5 billion expected from sovereign funds in the Middle East and $1 billion from other investors, some of whom may want to re-up their investments.
The money will be used to acquire 100,000 Nvidia chips, per sources familiar with the situation. Tesla‘s Full Self Driving is expected to rely on the new Memphis supercomputer.
Musk’s AI startup, which he announced in July 2023, seeks to “understand the true nature of the universe,” according to its website. Last November, X.AI released a chatbot called Grok, which the company said was modeled after “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The chatbot debuted with two months of training and had real-time knowledge of the internet, the company claimed at the time.
With Grok, X.AI aims to directly compete with companies including ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which Musk helped start before a conflict with co-founder Sam Altman led him to depart the project in 2018. It will also be vying with Google’s Bard technology and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot.
Now that Donald Trump is President-elect, Elon Musk is beginning to actively work with the new administration on its approach to AI and tech more broadly, as part of Trump’s inner circle in recent weeks.
Trump plans to repeal President Biden’s executive order on AI, according to his campaign platform, stating that it “hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology” and that “in its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”
Amazon logo on a brick building exterior, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2024.
Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Amazon representatives met with the House China committee in recent months to discuss lawmaker concerns over the company’s partnership with TikTok, CNBC confirmed.
A spokesperson for the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party confirmed the meeting, which centered on a shopping deal between Amazon and TikTok announced in August. The agreement allows users of TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, to link their account with Amazon and make purchases from the site without leaving TikTok.
“The Select Committee conveyed to Amazon that it is dangerous and unwise for Amazon to partner with TikTok given the grave national security threat the app poses,” the spokesperson said. The parties met in September, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news.
Representatives from Amazon and TikTok did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s future viability in the U.S. is uncertain. In April, President Joe Biden signed a law that requires ByteDance to sell TikTok by Jan. 19. If TikTok fails to cut ties with its parent company, app stores and internet hosting services would be prohibited from offering the app.
President-elect Donald Trump could rescue TikTok from a potential U.S. ban. He promised on the campaign trail that he would “save” TikTok, and said in a March interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” with the app.
In his first administration, Trump had tried to implement a TikTok ban. He changed his stance around the time he met with billionaire Jeff Yass. The Republican megadonor’s trading firm, Susquehanna International Group, owns a 15% stake in ByteDance, while Yass has a 7% stake in the company, NBC and CNBC reported in March.
— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
