Are Meta Ray-Bans the next iPhone — or the next Google Glass? Meta Platforms has sold more than 2 million of their smart glasses — a collaboration with Franco-Italian eye-wear company EssilorLuxottica — since hitting the market in late 2023. Sales of the product, which users can ask questions about the world in front of them, are accelerating, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors during his post-earnings call on Jan. 29. “Our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are a real hit,” he added. “We still don’t know what the long-term trajectory for this is going to be. And I think we’re going to learn a lot this year.” Meta is no stranger to wearables. It purchased virtual reality goggles company Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion and folded the renamed Quest headsets into its money-losing Reality Labs division. The collaboration with Ray-Ban, however, is Meta’s first stab at bringing a connected experience to regular glasses that people might actually wear in their everyday lives. The glasses cost between $299 and $379 each depending on prescriptions or customizations. Meta is also working on Oakley-branded smart glasses, according to Bloomberg . Meta did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Of course, smart glasses have been tried before — without much success. Alphabet failed miserably shortly after Google Glass was launched in 2014. Snap , the parent company behind Snapchat, introduced the first iteration of its Spectacles in 2016. While in their fifth generation, the Spectacles haven’t caught on. To be sure, the Ray-Ban smart glasses are still far from mass adoption. Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, said at a Morgan Stanley conference this week that Ray-Bans are “still in the zone of just getting to like, making sure this is available everywhere and everybody who wants it can get it … you’re starting to see a lot of love for the product.” The financial impact, at this point, is likely minimal, too. For Meta, even a hit hardware product is just a whimper compared to its massive social media ad business. Company revenue totaled $160.6 billion last year and is projected to grow to more than $183 billion in 2025, according to FactSet. It’s hard to say for sure how much Meta makes on each pair of the glasses and how much goes to partner EssilorLuxottica, but even some optimistic back-of-the-envelope math shows how minuscule the impact on its financials has been so far. For this exercise, let’s use the rough starting price of $300 a pair. If Meta collected all $300 of revenue on 2 million pairs, the result is $600 million since the fall of 2023. Last year alone, Meta’s ad business on average generated an incredible $439 million in revenue per day. Still, the demand for smart glasses is growing, and that counts for something. Market research firm Counterpoint reports that worldwide smart glasses shipments surged 210% year over year in 2024, up from 156% in 2023, driven largely by demand for the Meta Ray-Bans. Their success has attracted new competition with major global tech players, including Xiaomi, Samsung, Baidu and ByteDance, preparing to enter the space. Counterpoint predicts the market will grow another 60% in 2025 and have a sustained compound annual growth rate of over 60% through 2029 as new use cases, pricing segments and competitors emerge. Zuckerberg said he believes the Meta Ray-Bans, which allows users to talk to the glasses and ask questions about the real world around them, has staying power. The company ramped up marketing for the Super Bowl, with two 30-second ads that featured A-list actors Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth, and reality star Kris Jenner. Thirty-second spots in the big game went for as much as $8 million each — not to mention the production costs for the actual commercials. Meta’s last Super Bowl ad was in 2022 when it was touting its Quest 2 headset. On the earnings call, Zuckerberg said 2025 will be a “defining year” when it comes to AI glasses as a category, citing that “many breakout products in the history of consumer electronics have sold 5 million to 10 million units in their third generation.” Meta and EssilorLuxottica started collaborating in 2019 and have released two generations of Ray-Ban smart glasses since then. In 2024, the companies extended their partnership into a long-term agreement under which they’ll develop multi-generational smart eyewear products over the next decade. EssilorLuxottica plans to make 10 million units annually by 2026. Zuckerberg said that smart glasses have the potential to become a “very important computing platform in the future,” much as the smartphone did a generation ago. He called glasses the “ideal form factor for an AI device because you can let an AI assistant on your glasses see what you see and hear what you hear, which gives it the context to be able to understand everything that’s going on in your life that you would want to talk to it about and get context on.” Meta’s Cox noted that retention, a measure of a product’s usefulness, is high for the smart glasses. “We see with Ray-Bans, really healthy retention not just for the glasses themselves, but for the use cases, like making phone calls,” Cox added that another popular use is listening to music. It’s still too early to tell if glasses can be the next smartphone — or even the next smartwatch. Andrew Boone, an analyst at JMP Securities, said that “monetization potential is still years away” because the technology is still developing and its utility isn’t fully yet realized. However, Boone said the glasses “create optional pathways for AI distribution,” positioning them as both a consumer product and a long-term platform for deploying AI services that could eventually be monetized. “Meta is a data factory – they take in data and then figure out how to monetize it,” Boone explained, adding, Meta is following a similar playbook: building engagement first, then introducing ads, just as it did with Facebook and Threads. Brad Erickson, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, sees Meta’s smart glasses as part of the company’s broader strategy to expand its role beyond social media. “Meta wants to provide you and I with more utility during our day versus just being a social media platform,” he said, which ultimately allows the company to “serve us more ads and drive more revenue.” Erickson also said Meta’s smart glasses are a way for the company to reduce its independence on Apple’s dominant iOS ecosystem through its own hardware-software integration. ” Apple is the primary distribution point for all of this” due to its control over iOS and the App Store, he points out, but smart glasses give Meta an opportunity to have more control over their customers. Still, he remains skeptical about whether Meta can achieve “critical mass distribution that would be disruptive to Apple.” Meta is not content to stand still. Last week, the company revealed the latest version of its experimental smart glasses intended to help bolster research into AI, robotics, and machine perception. Called Aria Gen 2 , they are a step forward in Zuckerberg’s vision of what the next major computing platform could be following the smartphone. At the company’s September product and developer conference, Zuckerberg showcased an augmented reality glasses prototype dubbed Orion. As we wrote at the time, the shades represented a convergence of the company’s Quest headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long META, AAPL. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. 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