Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses Receive $120 Price Drop

Meta’s new Ray-Ban Stories Display smart glasses are seeing their first significant discount, available for a limited time with $120 off the combo’s list price of $799. If you’ve been waiting for a good reason to give the most ambitious mainstream smart glasses yet a shot, this is it—especially if you care about privacy, captions, and an interface that’s slicker than most rivals.

Why These Glasses Are Geekier Yet Stay Surprisingly Discreet

The Display version overlays a private microdisplay into traditional Ray-Ban frames, transforming your line of sight into a discreet HUD. Meta tells me the waveguide reduces light leakage to around 2%, but in practice that seems to mean bystanders can’t see there’s any content on the screen. That’s a small but very important jump for social comfort and real-world applicability.

In showbiz terms, the screen opens up practical benefits. You can frame photos and videos with an in-glasses viewfinder, skim notifications without reaching for your phone, and peek at prompts or scripts while recording video. The live captioning for in-person conversations—a standout on Meta’s previous model—is even more of a winner when the text floats in your line of sight, which can be handy at noisy venues or for accessibility.

The audio hardware is also much better than you might expect. Open-ear speakers disperse sound more naturally than most micro-speaker frames, and the design takes it to the next level, projecting audio relatively clearly while others may barely hear more than a low whisper. Beamforming mics work at a distance or under tough conditions, so callers can still hear you against noise. (Not suitable for cafes, restaurants, or warehouses.) In testing across the smart glasses category, it’s often a make-or-break experience based on audio delivery for daily use; Meta’s tuning falls on the side of making it work.

Style and lenses that intuitively fit into your life

The design DNA of Ray-Ban does a great job at making these feel less conspicuous than most frames with foreign objects attached to them. The waveguide is hidden discreetly within the right lens, and the frames don’t have that clunky sci-fi look typical of early AR gear. Transition lenses are now standard and go from clear to tinted outdoors so you can wear them as your regular glasses and sunglasses. For those who wear prescription lenses, options are expected to align with Ray-Ban’s optical network under EssilorLuxottica (which has covered RX offerings for past models).

You usually want weight and balance in a piece of wearable tech. Meta hasn’t pursued featherweight extremes, but the balance feels good and the glasses are comfortable for long-term wear. The trade-off is battery life: you’ll get a few hours of mixed use, with additional top-ups from the case. That’s par for this category and compares similarly to other camera-first smart glasses.

A new form of wearable control with the Neural Band

The optional Neural Band is the sneaky twist. Worn on the wrist, it tracks slight finger movements for pinch-and-swipe commands and lets you guide the interface without reaching up to the frames. It’s akin to a missing link between voice and touch, and helps reduce those “I clearly have technology on my face” moments that smart glasses can sometimes be afflicted by. Meta’s executives have said this input method could grow into something more expansive with time, an insight reflected in interviews mentioned by CNET.

Voice remains central, too. Meta’s on-device assistant is able to capture clips, place calls, and handle quick queries hands-free. In reality, the optimal experience is an amalgam of all three: voice for speed, gestures for precision, and the display for affirmation. It’s that three-part loop that makes them feel more like a tool than a toy.

Price, availability, and the catch for early adopters

The headline price here is $799, with a time-limited $120 discount dropping it to $679. Some units are back-ordered for a few days, but overall there’s workable availability. Industry scuttlebutt suggests production will continue to be conservative as Meta pours resources into this and tries to gauge uptake in the real world—smart glasses are still an emergent market, and tiptoeing is par for the course with any device that marries optics, audio, and compute in such a small package.

Analyst groups including IDC and CCS Insight have highlighted rising interest in head-worn gadgets, but shipments are only a small portion of the wider wearables market. That context is important: the Display model here is for early adopters and creators who appreciate what it can do today—hands-free capture, glanceable info, private captions—more than whatever eventual fully immersive AR future awaits a few years over the horizon.

How these smart glasses stack up against rivals

Contrasted with display-forward competitors from the likes of Rokid or Xreal, Meta’s bet is on everyday wearability and social acceptability as well as a closer hybrid of camera, audio, and assistant capabilities. Competing glasses can afford broader fields of view or greater in-your-face imagery, but they tend to be bulkier or more obtrusive. Premium headsets provide more depth of immersion, but they are not something you wear to a cafe. The Display model is where capability meets discretion.

Who should buy these glasses while this deal is on

If you’re capturing life on the fly, in need of non-obtrusive captioning, or a heads-up prompt system for filmmaking, travel, or live events, these are compelling—and the discount makes it that much easier of a decision.

Just be prepared to accept that you will also need the bleeding-edge tech. The battery will run out, features will change, and etiquette still counts when cameras are in the picture.

For the rest of us, the smart glasses category is evolving so quickly that a cautious wait makes sense. But if you’ve been wondering where everyday AR is headed, here’s the most put-together peek at it that you can actually wear in public—and for now, a better price than usual.