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The Ray-Ban Meta Headliner smart glasses.

Jake Piazza | CNBC

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.

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

This is breaking news. Check back for updates

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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