Why Big Tech can't quit smart glasses

Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of nose pads. I'm your friend David Pierce. And today on the show, we're gonna talk about smart glasses. Specifically, why smart glasses are such a pervasive idea in the tech industry right now. We've talked a lot about them. We've been covering smart glasses since the days of Google Glass, and there are so many problems and challenges with smart glasses. There was the whole glass hole problem. There are huge technological problems with actually making this stuff real. There are supply chain issues. There are display things no one has invented yet. Smart glasses are going to be very hard to do correctly and even if they're done correctly, it's still very much in the air whether people want them and what they want them for. And yet, all of that aside, a huge portion of the tech industry, including most of the biggest hardware manufacturers, are absolutely convinced that smart glasses are the future. So The Verge's v song is gonna come on. She has used all the smart glasses. She has reviewed all the smart glasses, and she and I are gonna try to figure out why the tech industry can't quit smart glasses. It's gonna be great. But first, here's everything else happening on the verge today. This is Ninety Seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, 06/23/2026. Meta is turning off, at least for now, a program that it created to log everything employees do on their computers. And I mean everything, including mouse clicks and keystrokes, all to use as AI training data. Turns out, a lot of the data being collected was very private and made accessible across the entire company. Seems bad. More broadly, there's been a lot of reporting recently about a huge morale problem at Meta, where everything and everyone is being pivoted toward AI, whether they like it or not. Meanwhile, obviously, privacy and regulatory issues just abound at Meta. In a lot of ways, the Meta brand right now is just not great in general, which makes this next thing, frankly, very funny. Meta launched a new pair of smart glasses today, just called the Meta glasses. They're cheaper than the Ray Ban models, which might be the big reason for dropping the partnership with such an expensive brand, and they come in several new fits, including one made with Kylie Jenner. Meta also told The Verge's Victoria Song that the company is working on better privacy systems for the glasses and on making it harder to tamper with the smart glasses in order to record without people knowing. Of course, Meta is also reportedly working on a facial recognition system for those very same smart glasses. So, you know, big grain of salt on all of that. And finally, some very important gadget news. The HP 16 c, an iconic old school calculator that was once a big hit among nineteen eighties era programmers, is back. There's only …