There is an unwritten rule in tech: every time giants announce a product with a trendy eyewear brand, it’s because they need to be given the impression of desirability.
Google and Samsung confirmed this at Google I/O 2026 by unveiling their first smart glasses, co-developed with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. All wrapped up in a story about ambient AI and fashion as a vector of adoption.
It’s beautiful. It’s attractive. And that’s probably the wrong direction.
The team is serious. The problem is no.
It would be tempting to brush the announcement aside. That would be a mistake. The teaming up is serious: Google brings AI and the Android ecosystem, Samsung brings industrial power and global distribution, Warby Parker brings direct access to Western consumers and an accessible price culture. And Gentle Monster brings something that Ray-Ban couldn’t: Asian high-end credibility. The Korean brand, whose stores function as art installations and whose collaborations with icons like BLACKPINK’s Jennie have made every frame an object of desire, weighs precisely where the wearables market plays out in the next ten years – in Southeast Asia, China, Korea. It’s a coordinated attempt to solve the three historic problems of smart glasses: desire, price and scale in one fell swoop.
But Meta and Ray-Ban have already tried this equation, with one of the most universally recognized eyewear brands. The product exists, it works, it is improving. And yet, it has not established itself in daily use. Not because Ray-Ban lacked desirability. Because the problem wasn’t the mount.
Half of humanity does not wear glasses
This is the figure that no one cites: around 4 billion people wear glasses – corrective or solar – and another 4 billion do not wear them. For this second group, adopting smart glasses means firstly adopting glasses – a strong act of identity, linked to vision, style, and the face. This is not trivial. It’s not a simple app download.
The wearables that have really made a breakthrough – headphones, watches – are those that are grafted onto objects already worn by the majority. Not those that ask the user to change their bodily habits.
Google is stacking it. Apple is waiting. It’s not the same strategy.
Google and Samsung are exactly reproducing the pattern they master best: stacking technical capabilities in the service of a product narrative, without asking what people really want to do with their bodies. Gemini Intelligence integrated into Gentle Monster frames is perfect storytelling for a keynote. It’s much less obvious in the supermarket queue, or at dinner with people who don’t know if your camera is filming.
We were given the trick with AirPods, the Apple Watch, contactless payment. Each time, the press noted Apple’s delay on the pioneers. And each time, Apple came up with the version that the mass market ultimately adopted. Not because Apple invents, but because Apple waits until the problem is real.
Apple plays a different score. The arrival of Jon Ternus at the head of the company is not a biographical detail: it is a strategic signal. For the first time since Jobs, Apple has a CEO whose DNA is hardware – not software, not services. And its real strength is not betting on the right device. It’s about not needing to do it. iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro: the ecosystem is already in place for AI to circulate between objects rather than residing in one of them. Complementarity as a strategy – where Google and Samsung are looking for the device that will change everything, Apple is building the network that will survive any change.
Fashion will not save tech that does not meet a real need
Putting Gentle Monster on the nose of a pair of Google Glasses is clever. But fashion is not a vector of technological adoption: it is a vector of social reassurance. It can make an object accepted in a specific context, for the duration of a season. It does not create use. It does not resolve the fundamental friction.
The history of Google Glass is there to remind us of this. The product was fascinating, expensive, technically impressive. And it was rejected – not because it was poorly designed, but because it made visible all the unresolved questions about privacy, consent and surveillance. Putting the same questions in a Warby Parker framework doesn’t erase them. This delays them.
The forgotten sense: the ear
Hearing is the last sense to die before death – a fact that medicine has long known and tech systematically ignores. In the grand narrative of ambient AI, audio remains presented as the substitute channel: the one we use when we don’t have our hands free, when we drive. Never like the main channel.
Apple AirPods with integrated camera – rumors of which are confirmed for 2026 – perhaps change this equation more profoundly than we think. Not because they see the world for you. But because they hear for you, filter for you and restore a layer of information in the only sensory channel that you cannot turn off without completely isolating yourself.
Speaking to your AI from your ears – without looking up, without showing anything on your face, without signaling to your interlocutor that you are being assisted – is a form of human-machine fusion that is infinitely less performative, and probably much more adoptable.
What Google I/O Really Tells Us
What we saw this week is a company which knows that it must redefine its relationship with users – because the Gemini generation has redistributed the cards of access to information, and therefore of its advertising model. Smart glasses, the Google Book, the Gemini cursor: these are all attempts to reinject the Google logo into moments of life that escape it.
It is a strategy of presence, not a strategy of use.
My bet remains on the most discreet, least visible and most humanly fundamental channel. The one we don’t see. The one we hear.
