Apple is planning to launch smart glasses by late 2027, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, with incoming CEO John Ternus identified as a driving force behind the initiative. The target is not just Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses — it is the broader $200 billion eyewear industry, the same way the Apple Watch did not just compete with fitness trackers but effectively ended the mechanical watch market’s dominance among younger consumers. Apple’s entry would bring its distribution network, brand loyalty, health data infrastructure, and design capability into a category that has existed largely outside its ecosystem.
The risk is the window. Meta already has a foothold in the smart glasses market and has been iterating aggressively. A late 2027 launch date means Meta has at minimum 18 more months to deepen consumer habits, expand its hardware platform, and lock in the social layer that makes wearable technology sticky. Apple’s brand is a structural advantage — but timing in consumer hardware is unforgiving, and delays in development, which Bloomberg notes are already a factor, compress that advantage further. For the eyewear industry itself, the signal is clear: the category is about to be redefined around health monitoring, ambient computing, and platform integration rather than vision correction and fashion. The incumbents who do not have a technology strategy are watching their market from the outside.