Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stands behind his company’s products. The 42-year-old CEO recently vouched for Meta’s $800 smart glasses, insisting that the glasses allowed him to take calls in loud places with crystal-clear audio for both him and the call recipient. 

“I’ve taken business calls on a jet ski,” he said in an interview published earlier this week with Complex. “The other person could not tell that I was on it.” 

Zuckerberg said that the Meta glasses have a microphone placed in the nose pad, which only picks up necessary noise and allows for clear audio. He claimed that the audio clarity of the glasses is good enough that “you could literally be in a wind tunnel and it would sound completely clear to the person on the other side.” 

This means that it is easier than ever to work while on the go — even on a jet ski. “You don’t necessarily want to tell the other person that you’re on a jet ski,” Zuckerberg joked. 

Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in the world, is the face of Meta’s lineup of smart glasses. The products range from the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) at $379 to the $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses, which are Meta’s first glasses with a built-in display that Zuckerberg revealed in September. The Display glasses come with a wristband that picks up electrical signals in the arm so wearers can use subtle hand gestures to control the display. The screen shows alerts, texts, photos and live translations. 

Zuckerberg is confident that glasses are the future 

Zuckerberg is betting that smart glasses will grow in popularity. He pointed out in the interview with Complex that Meta has a built-in market with the nearly two billion people globally who already wear glasses to correct their vision problems. 

He also said that smart glasses have the advantage of allowing users to stay “present” with the people around them in a way that phones cannot match. The AI assistant on the glasses has the powerful capability to “see what you see, hear what you hear, talk to you throughout the day,” he said.  

He additionally compared the switch from smartphones to smart glasses to the shift from flip phones to smartphones. 

“It felt pretty clear that in five years or whatever, all of the flip phones were going to be smartphones, and that’s basically how I feel about glasses today,” he said.

Zuckerberg said in the interview with Complex that Meta has been working on the foundational technology for smart glasses since 2014. The company isn’t just looking back; it’s also planning ahead. Meta has a solid long-term vision for the category and is already preparing its 2028 smart glasses offerings. 

Smart glasses are one part of Zuckerberg’s effort to build “personal superintelligence,” or AI that surpasses human intelligence. In a public letter last year, Zuckerberg wrote that Meta’s goal is not to automate or change the workforce with AI, but to “bring personal intelligence to everyone” first and allow individuals to change their lives with it. 

“I am extremely optimistic that superintelligence will help humanity accelerate our pace of progress,” Zuckerberg wrote in the letter.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stands behind his company’s products. The 42-year-old CEO recently vouched for Meta’s $800 smart glasses, insisting that the glasses allowed him to take calls in loud places with crystal-clear audio for both him and the call recipient. 

“I’ve taken business calls on a jet ski,” he said in an interview published earlier this week with Complex. “The other person could not tell that I was on it.” 

Zuckerberg said that the Meta glasses have a microphone placed in the nose pad, which only picks up necessary noise and allows for clear audio. He claimed that the audio clarity of the glasses is good enough that “you could literally be in a wind tunnel and it would sound completely clear to the person on the other side.”