Phones don't have lights

What It Covers

The Vergecast crew — Neil Abatella, Jake Hashrakis, and David Amel — covers Meta Connect 2025, analyzing Meta AI agent Muse, new Ray-Ban audio glasses, Meta's VR headset, Google Books laptops, and FCC broadband policy. The episode centers on whether Meta can overcome deep-seated privacy distrust to establish Muse as the dominant post-smartphone computing platform.

Key Questions Answered

• •Meta Muse privacy calculus: Muse requires Gmail, text message, and app access to function as an agent, yet its privacy architecture relies on a secure virtual machine framework built by Signal's Moxie Marlinspike. The practical workaround for cautious users: connect only a dedicated spam email account. This limits Muse's utility but protects sensitive data while still allowing testing of core agent capabilities like parsing receipts and handling returns.
• •Consumer AI agent design: Muse succeeds where Humane and Rabbit failed by combining hard-coded starter prompts — such as "find returnable receipts" — with a polished onboarding flow and an ideas feed. Meta's consumer product design experience, not frontier-model AI, drives adoption. The lesson for evaluating AI agents: execution and UX matter more than underlying model capability. Muse reportedly does not run a frontier-level model yet still outpaced early ChatGPT download numbers.
• •App Store rankings as vanity metrics: Being number one on the App Store carries limited signal about long-term product success. Meta Threads reached 100 million users rapidly yet is widely perceived as a failure despite now surpassing X in size. Early Muse download comparisons to ChatGPT also ignore that ChatGPT launched as a slow-burn research preview before accelerating. Evaluate AI product success by sustained engagement and revenue contribution, not launch-week rankings.
• •Ray-Ban audio glasses market positioning: Meta's $349 Ray-Ban Audio glasses — camera-free, open-ear headphones with a microphone — include a hearing enhancement feature that qualifies for FSA and HSA reimbursement. This insurance eligibility creates a meaningful purchase justification for users who would otherwise resist a $349 lifestyle device. The glasses' long-term value depends entirely on Muse's utility, since without a capable AI backend, they function only as standard open-ear headphones.
• •Meta VR glasses hardware leap: Meta's new VR glasses weigh approximately 100 grams — roughly one-sixth the weight of Apple Vision Pro — and retail at approximately half the price, arriving roughly two and a half years after Vision Pro launched. The device uses camera-only finger tracking without physical controllers and runs as a fully standalone computer via an attached puck. Hardware development cycles, not software breakthroughs, explain most of the improvement over Vision Pro's specs.
• •Google Books Android lock-in risk: Google Books laptops start at $900 introductory pricing and offer deep Android phone integration — shared file systems, phone app mirroring, and seamless task handoff — but this integration becomes largely irrelevant without an Android phone. iPhone users gain little beyond a Chromebook-equivalent experience. Half of the top 100 Android apps are optimized for the laptop form factor at launch, and the Play Store now explicitly directs users to mobile websites when apps are inadequate for desktop use.
• •FCC broadband permit policy: The FCC under Brendan Carr proposed rules preempting local government authority to hold ISPs accountable for unbuilt broadband networks. Local governments counter that ISPs routinely obtain permits, sit on them until authorization windows expire, then blame municipalities for slow deployment. Cities propose a 180-day mandatory build requirement after permit issuance. The rule effectively removes municipal leverage without imposing any corresponding ISP deployment obligation.