{"id":291234,"date":"2025-10-10T06:13:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T06:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/291234\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T06:13:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T06:13:11","slug":"meta-ray-ban-display-repairablity-is-predictably-bad-but-less-than-you-might-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/291234\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta Ray-Ban Display Repairablity is Predictably Bad, But Less Than You Might Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

iFixit got their hands on a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, so we finally get to see what\u2019s inside. Is it repairable? Not really. But if you can somehow find replacement parts, you could at least potentially swap out the battery.<\/p>\n

The News<\/p>\n

Meta launched the $800 smart glasses in the US late last month, marking the company\u2019s first pair with a heads-up display.<\/p>\n

Serving up a monocular display, Meta Ray-Ban allows for basic app interaction beyond the standard stuff seen (or rather \u2018heard\u2019) in its audio-only Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta <\/a>glasses. It can do things like let you view and respond to messages, get turn-by-turn walking directions, and even use the display as a viewfinder for photos and video.<\/p>\n

And iFixit shows off in their latest video that cracking into the glasses and attempting repairs is pretty fiddly, but not entirely impossible.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Meta Ray-Ban Display\u2019s internal battery | Image courtesy iFixit<\/p>\n

The first thing you\u2019d probably eventually want to do is replace the battery, which requires splitting the right arm down a glued seam\u2014a common theme with the entire device. Getting to the 960 mWh internal battery, which is slightly larger than the one seen in the Oakley Meta HSTN,\u00a0you\u2019ll be sacrificing the device\u2019s IPX4 splash resistance rating.<\/p>\n

And the work is fiddly, but iFixit manages to go all the way down to the dual speakers, motherboard, Snapdragon AR1 chipset, and liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) light engine, the latter of which was captured with a CT scanner to show off just how micro Meta has managed to get its most delicate part.<\/p>\n

Granted, this is a teardown and not a repair guide as such. All of the components are custom, and replacement parts aren\u2019t available yet. You would also need a few specialized tools and an appetite for risk of destroying a pretty hard-to-come-by device<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For more, make sure to check out iFixit\u2019s full article<\/a>, which includes images and detailed info on each component. You can also see the teardown in action in the full nine-minute video below.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

My Take<\/p>\n

Meta isn\u2019t really thinking deeply about reparability when it comes to smart glasses right now, which isn\u2019t exactly shocking. Like earbuds, smart glasses are all about miniaturization to hit an all-day wearable form factor, making its plastic and glue-coated exterior a pretty clear necessity in the near term.<\/p>\n

Another big factor: the company is probably banking on the fact that prosumers willing to shell out $800 bucks this year will likely be happy to so the same when Gen 2 eventually arrives. That could be in two years, but I\u2019m betting less if the device performs well enough in the market. After all, Meta sold Quest 2 in 2020 just one year after releasing the original Quest, so I don\u2019t see why they wouldn\u2019t do the same here.<\/p>\n

That said, I don\u2019t think we\u2019ll see any\u00a0real degree of reparability in smart glasses until we get to the sort of sales volumes currently seen in smartphones. And that\u2019s just for a baseline of readily available replacement parts, third-party or otherwise.<\/p>\n

So while I definitely want a pair of smart glasses (and eventually AR glasses) that look indistinguishable from standard frames, that also kind of means I have to be okay with eventually throwing away a perfectly cromulent pair of specs just because I don\u2019t have the courage to open it up, or know anyone who does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"iFixit got their hands on a pair of Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, so we finally get to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":291235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[158,67,132,68,729,730],"class_list":{"0":"post-291234","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-virtual-reality","8":"tag-technology","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-virtual-reality","13":"tag-vr"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115348400409044530","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}