SAN FRANCISCO – Reality Labs has lost $4.03 billion in a single quarter, and Meta’s answer, buried in an internal memo that leaked to The Information last week, is a necklace.
The device, described in the memo written by Alex Himel, Meta’s vice president of wearables, would listen throughout the day, capture conversations, generate summaries and reminders, and keep a searchable record of what a user has said and heard. No screen. No keyboard. Just a pendant worn around the neck, microphones running, AI waiting. Meta has not confirmed the project publicly, and Himel’s timeline puts formal testing at least a year out – but the roadmap surrounding it makes clear the company is betting its hardware future on the premise that the next platform people carry isn’t in their pocket. It’s on their body.
The pendant is not entirely a surprise. Meta acquired Limitless, an AI-wearables startup, at the end of 2025. Limitless had built exactly this kind of device – a clip-on Bluetooth microphone that transcribed conversations, generated meeting recaps, and turned a user’s day into a searchable database. The startup had raised more than $33 million from investors including Sam Altman and Andreessen Horowitz before Meta bought it. What looked like a talent acquisition at the time now reads as a product decision. Dan Siroker, Limitless’s chief executive, framed it plainly when the deal closed: Meta, he said, was trying to bring personal superintelligence to everyone, and wearables were a key part of that vision.
What Himel’s memo adds is the scale of the ambition around that pendant. Meta wants to sell 10 million wearable devices in the second half of 2026 alone. Not for the full year – the second half. That target, reported by Engadget, comes against the backdrop of a hardware division that has never turned a profit and lost $19 billion in 2025 across the year. The pendant is one piece of that push. The larger piece is glasses.
Meta is reportedly preparing four new smart glasses models before December. A pair codenamed “Modelo” is expected to debut as early as this month. “Luna” and “RBM2 Refresh” – the latter suggesting another iteration of the existing Ray-Ban hardware – are set to follow in the fall. The premium model, “Mojito VIP,” is slated for December and is expected to include a full waveguide display, a significant step beyond anything the company has shipped to consumers under the Ray-Ban label. All of the new models will run Meta’s AI systems, including an unreleased consumer AI agent called “Hatch” that the company has been developing internally.
Beyond those four, Meta’s engineers are testing two more speculative prototypes. One, codenamed “Artemis,” and one officially described as SSG – short for SuperSensing Glasses – would keep cameras and sensors running for hours at a stretch, building what the memo describes as persistent environmental awareness. The AI assistant would know, over time, where you left your keys. It would recognize objects in front of you, understand the space you’re in, and offer contextual suggestions without being asked. Meta’s current Ray-Ban glasses can respond to questions and take photos. The supersensing concept would make the glasses something closer to a passive observer that is always on and always building a model of your world.
That last part is where the privacy question enters, and it enters hard. The privacy risks of always-on AI wearables are not hypothetical. Meta’s existing Ray-Ban glasses already attracted significant scrutiny after researchers demonstrated that the cameras could be used to identify strangers in real time, without consent. Always-on supersensing glasses would extend that capacity dramatically – from a device that captures a moment to one that maintains a continuous record. The memo does not address how Meta plans to handle that tension, and Meta has not commented publicly on the SSG prototypes.
What the memo does address is the business logic. Himel’s framing, as reported by The Decoder, is explicit: hardware margins alone will not sustain the division. The real revenue has to come from software. Meta is rolling out a two-tier subscription for its AI chatbot – Meta One Plus at $7.99 per month and Meta One Premium at $19.99 – that will eventually extend to the glasses. The memo also describes a business-facing subscription called “Wearables for Work,” aimed at corporate customers willing to pay for features like meeting transcription and workplace platform integration. Himel’s stated goal is to secure pilot programs with at least 10 companies and deployments within at least two large organizations of more than 100 devices each.
The market Meta is entering is crowded in ways that reward incumbents and punish newcomers. EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear conglomerate that makes Ray-Ban and Oakley – both current Meta partners – reported that more than seven million Meta-powered smart glasses sold in 2025. Mark Zuckerberg has called it one of the fastest-growing categories in consumer electronics, noting that daily use of AI-powered smart glasses tripled year over year. That existing installed base is what separates Meta’s pendant gambit from the AI wearables that came before it. Humane’s AI Pin burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and shut down. The Rabbit R1 faded before its second quarter on sale. Meta drops its pendant into an ecosystem where people are already wearing its hardware, already using its AI models, and already paying for subscriptions.
The competitive pressure is accelerating from multiple directions. At Google I/O in May, Google unveiled its Android XR smart glasses platform with designs from Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, anchored on Gemini AI. Apple is separately developing glasses intended to compete directly with Ray-Ban Meta, reportedly incorporating cameras, microphones, Siri integration, and navigation tools. Samsung is expected to reveal its own AI glasses at its July Unpacked event. The category that Meta spent years building largely alone has become the most contested hardware segment in the industry. Apple’s pivot is particularly sharp: having abandoned the Vision Pro roadmap, the company is now betting its wearable future on glasses rather than headsets – the exact product category Meta has spent two years establishing.
What remains unresolved is whether the pendant concept can find a mainstream audience where the AI Pin could not. The Limitless device had a dedicated following but never crossed into mass adoption. Meta’s version has a distribution network, a brand, and a subscriber base that Limitless never approached. It also has a harder question to answer: at a moment when consumers are increasingly aware of what always-on microphones collect, who decides what the pendant keeps, what it forgets, and who else gets to see it.
Himel’s memo does not say. The product is still in development, and the timeline is still a year away. But the direction is set: Meta is no longer building hardware to sell hardware. It is building devices to put its AI models closer to your body than a phone ever could.
