(Image credit: Future)
Snap Specs are a very ambitious pair of AR glasses. They transcend that idea of AI glasses like the Ray-Ban Metas, and actually give you an Apple Vision Pro-esque experience in something much more wearable than a bulky headset with a battery pack wired to it.But I could only imagine how much of a challenge designing something like this actually is, given the fact it’s got 2x Snapdragon chips, a battery and a ton of sensors built in (and no compute puck to offload that).It’s a massive undertaking, so I got to chat to Russell Patton, product manager for Specs at Snap, about the past decade that has led to this moment — the challenges faced, what the Specs are, and how he sees these as a new paradigm of computing.Who are the Snap Specs for?
(Image credit: Snap)So as I watched Evan’s keynote at AWE 2026, it’s clear he’s a fan of the Steve Jobs showmanship, and aimed for this to be Snap’s own personal iPhone moment — defining a new category of product and doing so with flair. I spoke to Russell about the idea of glasses as the next category and he provided a little more detail.“We’ve seen these different shifts in computing happen, and we see a shift is coming,” Patton stated. “Going forward, it’s going to be that shift from phones to glasses, and I think it’s not just taking the apps that are on our phones and putting them into glasses.”
