Evan Spiegel took the stage at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach this morning and did what the industry has been waiting three years to see: he showed the world Snap Specs.
The price is $2,195. Pre-orders are open now. They ship this fall in the US, UK, and France.
Spiegel opened by invoking Steve Jobs and the iPhone launch, framing the moment as a generational platform shift. "The next leap is from phone to face," he said. Snap is positioning Specs not as a gadget but as the next computing platform, beating Meta, Apple, and Google to the consumer AR punch after nearly a decade and more than $3 billion in development.
What's inside
Specs run on two unspecified Qualcomm Snapdragon chips: one handling the OS and applications, a second dedicated to computer vision tasks including head tracking, hand tracking, environment meshing, and spatial anchoring. Motion-to-photon latency is 7 milliseconds, the lowest publicly stated figure for any 6DoF XR product ever, and half the 13ms of Snap's own developer Spectacles 5. (Translation: That's the gap between moving your head and seeing the image move with it. At 7ms, it's fast enough that your brain never notices the delay.)
Snap is prioritizing on-device processing throughout, which matters both for performance and for privacy.
The display
The display is what brings the Specs to life. Snap built proprietary LCoS displays (A tiny high-brightness projector built into the lens) in-house, likely a result of its 2022 acquisition of Compound Photonics, capable of showing 16 million colors. The waveguide uses billions of nanostructures to deliver a 51-degree diagonal field of view, equivalent to sitting in front of a 24-inch desktop display. That's a step up from the 46-degree FOV on the developer Spectacles 5, and comparable to Microsoft's HoloLens 2. Resolution has not been disclosed.
The lenses use electrochromic technology borrowed from Boeing 787 Dreamliner windows, shifting from clear to tinted in 10 seconds, far faster than photochromic lenses like those in Meta Ray-Ban Display, which can take around a minute. It also works through car windshields, which block UV light and prevent traditional photochromic lenses from activating.
The hardware
The frame is Swiss TR90 polymer -- flexible, tough, and light. Two sizes: 47mm weighing 132 grams, 52mm weighing 136 grams. That's down from 226 grams on the developer kit, though still heavier than displayless smart glasses like Ray-Ban Meta at around 50 grams. Prescription support is handled via inserts covering a wide range of corrections. Lenses are removable and shareable.
Battery life is 4 hours of mixed use. The included charging case extends that to 20 hours total on the go. Charging is magnetic; USB-C video streaming is also built in.
Privacy as a feature
The center LED grows visibly when someone is recording. Spiegel was direct: "Trust is just as important as capability." Meta spent the last month removing facial recognition code from Ray-Ban after a public backlash. Snap is betting that a visible, hardware-level recording indicator changes the conversation about smart glasses in public spaces. On-device processing reinforces the pitch that your data stays on the glasses.
The platform
Snap is launching a Commerce Kit alongside the hardware, giving developers tools to build real businesses on Specs, not just apps. Four million Lenses built for the developer Spectacles will run at launch. Backed by 7,000 patents. Major OS updates are planned for later this fall.
Spiegel described pricing as "a difficult challenge." The goal was to be accessible, wearable, and more capable than any AR glasses before it. At $2,195, Specs comes in below the $2,500 figure that had been widely reported, and well below every previous true AR device: HoloLens 2 launched at $3,500, Magic Leap at $2,300. Spiegel compared the cost to the original 1984 Macintosh, which would cost around $8,000 in today's money. Specs, at $2,195, costs less than a third of that. The first Mac changed computing. He's betting Specs does the same for the face.
Pre-orders are open now at snap.com. US, UK, and France at launch.