The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are at their best-ever price for Black Friday
- The original Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are on sale for an all-time low of $238.99 ($60 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target for Black Friday.
- The glasses offer a similar experience to their Gen 2 successor, with features like music playback, photo snapping, video recording, and hands-free calling.
- They support AI-powered features, including voice-activated photo taking, landmark history, language translation, and more.
- The biggest upgrade in the new Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) model is twice the battery life, with up to eight hours of continuous use and an additional two days from the charging case.
- Despite some minor software upgrades, including improved live translation and slo-mo video modes, the original Ray-Ban Meta remains a great buy for those looking for a smart glasses experience at a lower price point.
Meta may have just released the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) at the end of October, but they’re not significantly different from the last-gen model introduced in 2021. The overall experience is very similar, which is why the original Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses remain a great buy, especially now that they’re on sale for an all-time low of around $238.99 ($60 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target for Black Friday.
Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 1) smart glasses
Where to Buy:
Like their successor, the first-gen Ray-Ban Meta let you listen to music, snap photos, record 1080p video, and make hands-free calls thanks to a five-microphone array. You can upload the resulting photos and videos — and even livestream— to Facebook or Instagram via the companion app. The glasses also support a host of AI-powered features, letting you use your voice to take photos, pull up the history of a landmark, ask questions, or get recipes based on what’s in your fridge. They can even translate multiple languages in real time, helping you with Spanish, Italian, French, and other languages you may be less familiar with.
Additionally, many of the same software upgrades currently slated to roll out to the Gen 2 model — including the new slo-mo and hyperlapse video modes, as well as the new “conversation focus” feature that boosts the audio of whoever you’re talking to — will also roll out to the original pair. The forthcoming software update, which is scheduled for the fall, will also improve the live translation feature by expanding it to support additional languages, including German and Portuguese.
The biggest upgrade with the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 is that they have twice as much battery life: they offer up to eight hours of continuous use and a charging case that adds an additional two days of runtime, compared to 32 additional hours with the first-gen model. You’ll also get slightly sharper 3K video at 30fps, but since both models use the same 12-megapixel sensor, the difference isn’t all that significant.