Meta’s annual developer and hardware conference, Connect, wrapped up last week with a new wave of glasses, headsets and AI products. This year’s conference began with Mark Zuckerberg’s keynot
Meta’s annual developer and hardware conference, Connect, wrapped up last week with a new wave of glasses, headsets and AI products. This year’s conference began with Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters on September 23 and it ended with the unveiling of a pocket-sized gadget built for the sole purpose of talking to Meta’s new AI agent. We asked our newsletter readers their thoughts on the new line up. The results came back split almost evenly between enthusiasm and a flat no, and the reasons behind that split point more towards trust rather than the hardware itself.
Over the past few years, Meta Connect has been a conference to display its glasses. This year, however, was different with its focus shifting around Muse, the personal AI agent Meta launched only two weeks before the event. Nearly every device unveiled on stage was presented as another way for users to interact with Muse. Meta’s own recap of the event leads with bringing Muse to its AI glasses before it gets to any of the hardware.
Muse is an agent and this is very different from a regular chatbot. It books things, fills in forms, sends emails and makes purchases on your behalf once you connect your accounts. It launched on September 8 with a free tier plan and monthly subscription costing $20 or $100 based on usage. According to Sensor Tower data cited by Dezeen, Muse AI has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times in its first few weeks.
After this were the hardware announcements. This included the Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 3) which included thinner frames and around one hour of extra battery life. These went on sale the same day at $449. Next were the Ray-Ban Meta Audio which is the first glasses introduced by the company with no camera and goes for $349. This launch reads as a direct response to the criticism centered around privacy and Meta’s camera-equipped glasses. The most advanced glasses in the lineup was the Meta VR glasses, which is a slim headset tethered to a pocket “puck” that handles the computing and battery. They are priced at $1,299 and available next spring.
Zuckerberg saved the Charm for the end. It’s a small handheld, roughly the size of an Apple Watch face with a lanyard instead of a strap. You tap a fingerprint sensor in the corner and start talking. A two-inch screen shows an animated avatar called Jolly, there’s a built-in 5G modem so it doesn’t need your phone, and there appears to be a small camera so the agent can see what you’re pointing it at. It came out of Meta’s new design group, led by former Apple design chief Alan Dye.
Zuckerberg’s own pitch was that Meta had “packed the whole Muse experience, including the whole real-time voice and avatar stack into something that fits on a keychain”. He also admitted some details still need finalising.
That admission is bigger than it sounds. Meta hasn’t announced a price. It says only a small number of prototypes exist and components aren’t locked. The target is December, in time for the holidays.
Anyone who followed AI hardware in 2024 will feel a twinge of déjà vu here. Humane’s AI Pin launched at $699 with a monthly subscription, struggled through brutal reviews, and was shut down in February 2025 when HP bought the company’s remains for $116 million. The Rabbit R1 had a similar arc at a lower price point. Both tried to do what a phone already does. Meta is betting it can avoid that trap by keeping Charm as a companion to an agent people already use, rather than a replacement for the phone in their pocket.
Muse’s first three weeks have been bumpy, and that matters for how people view the hardware wrapped around it.
Privacy questions arrived on day one. ABC News reported experts raising concerns about an agent with access to people’s apps, financial details and personal data, while Zuckerberg pointed to a secure credential store designed so Muse can’t read stored passwords or card numbers. Dezeen noted the agent has already faced accusations from users about how it handles private messages and sensitive account details. On September 21, Amazon started blocking Muse from shopping on its site, saying it had not authorized the agent’s access.
Then there’s the business model. Muse carries no advertising. Meta’s stated plan is to take a small fee on transactions the agent completes. That’s cleaner than ads in some ways. It also means the company earns more the more you let the agent spend.
Now put a camera and a 5G connection on that agent, hang it from a keychain, and you can see why some people hesitate.
This poll went out the evening after the keynote, with the Charm in the headline. Most respondents were reacting to that device first and the rest of the lineup second.
The context worth adding is how this audience has answered similar questions before. Across several polls this year, readers have shown a pattern that’s easy to miss: they follow AI closely and keep it at a cautious distance personally. Back in May, 38% told us they had never used an AI agent. When we asked about handing an agent control of a crypto wallet, “Nope” won again, though most respondents were open to it with conditions attached. Meta is now asking people to carry an agent around with them. You’d expect resistance from this crowd, and it showed up.
Nope, not for me (37.27%): The top answer, though narrowly. The phrasing matters. Readers weren’t asked whether the products were bad, and “not for me” is a personal verdict rather than a review. Some of this group likely has nothing against the tech itself. They just don’t want a Meta agent with a camera, a data connection and a transaction fee model living in their pocket, especially after the first few weeks of Muse headlines. With Meta, the brand carries its history into every launch, and a product whose whole job is to know more about you gets judged on that history first.
Yes, they are innovative (~35.5%): Almost as large, and worth reading carefully. The option said “innovative,” which isn’t the same as “I’d buy one.” Plenty of people can admire a $1,299 VR headset that streams IMAX films and still have no plans to own it. Still, a third of an audience this sceptical giving Meta credit is meaningful. The glasses business is genuinely working for Meta, and the Charm is at least a more honest attempt at an AI gadget than what came before it.
Maybe, I like a few (~27.3%): The most practical answer in the set. Meta showed four devices at four very different price points aimed at four different users. Liking the $349 camera-free audio glasses while shrugging at the Charm is a perfectly coherent position. So is wanting the hearing feature and nothing else. This group judged the lineup product by product rather than as a single verdict on Meta, and that’s probably the fairest way to read it.
The real split isn’t between people who like gadgets and people who don’t. It’s between people judging the devices and people judging the company behind them. Those two groups end up only a couple of points apart.
Three things decide whether the Charm becomes Meta’s version of the AI Pin or something that actually sticks.
Price comes first. Meta hasn’t said a number, and the Humane experience showed how quickly a premium price plus a subscription kills curiosity. If Charm needs its own data plan on top of a Muse subscription, a lot of the “maybe” crowd will drift to “no.”
Second is whether Muse itself earns trust over the next couple of months. The device is only as useful as the services the agent is allowed to reach. The Amazon dispute shows how fragile that is. An agent that can’t shop at the largest online retailer in the US has a gap no hardware can fill.
The third is quieter. Meta released camera-free glasses at the same event where it launched a camera-equipped keychain. That suggests the company knows exactly where the objection sits and is hedging both ways. Watch which one sells.
Our readers were split nearly evenly on the day of the announcement. They’ll have a price, reviews and a few months of Muse behaviour to judge by the time the Charm reaches shelves. That second reading will tell us far more than the first.
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