Meta is shipping two new Ray-Ban smart glasses built specifically for people who already wear prescription lenses every day. The frames, named Blayzer (rectangular, two sizes) and Scriber (rounded), start at $499 and arrive at optical retailers across the U.S. and select international markets on April 14, 2026.
The announcement, made via Meta's newsroom and reported by TechCrunch, frames a strategic shift: Meta wants Ray-Ban smart glasses to replace your daily eyewear, not augment it.
Why it matters
The first generation of Ray-Ban Meta sold well — over a million units, by most third-party estimates — but mostly to people who don't wear prescription glasses. That market is small. The far larger market is the four-out-of-ten adults who do, and who today have to choose between their corrective lenses and their smart glasses.
By engineering Blayzer and Scriber around prescription compatibility (the frames support nearly all prescriptions, per Meta's spec sheet), Meta makes the buying decision cleaner: this is your daily glasses, with AI and a camera. That's a different proposition from "fun secondary device."
Pricing is the other lever. $499 is roughly 30% above the original Ray-Ban Meta but lands inside the realistic upper bound for prescription Ray-Bans. With the lens add-on, total cost-of-ownership lines up with what a glasses wearer would already spend at LensCrafters.
What's next
The next move is the screen. Meta confirmed at Connect 2025 that the third-generation Ray-Ban with a built-in display is coming, possibly in 2026, possibly slipping to 2027. Today's announcement is positioning: by the time the screen-equipped model arrives, Meta wants the prescription-glasses customer already inside the ecosystem and ready to upgrade.
Snap and Apple are watching closely. Both have hardware that, on paper, can compete with Meta's screen-equipped follow-up. Neither has Meta's distribution through EssilorLuxottica's 18,000 optical stores. That distribution moat — not the hardware — is the part Meta is now compounding.