A company doesn’t get many “proof of concept” moments on a stage built for “legendary status.” Meta just used up two of them in minutes. At Meta Connect this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to show the future of computing: his long-held (and somewhat maligned) idea that you won’t look down at a phone so much as glance up through an invisible interface — and the future glitched out in real time .
First, a cooking assistant in the latest Ray-Ban glasses got confused in the middle of a recipe ; then a marquee WhatsApp video call from Zuckerberg to chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth refused to surface on the new in-lens display . “Uh oh,” a clearly uncomfortable Zuckerberg said on stage. “That’s too bad. I don’t know what happened.” The company blamed the conference’s Wi-Fi. The internet blamed Meta. Bosworth, for his part, delivered what was perhaps the most honest line of Meta Connect : The company “missed an opportunity for legendary status.”
The stumble stung because the pitch is audacious and, on paper, coherent. The Ray-Ban Meta Display glasses — starting at $799 and shipping in the U.S. on Sept. 30 — theoretically put a high-resolution panel in one lens and pair it with a neural wristband that reads any tiny electrical signals in your hand to control what you see. The demo reel is seductive: live subtitles; text and call notifications floating where people are looking; glanceable directions; translations on the fly. You can squint and see the outlines of an everyday habit, not just a gamer or cosplay headset.
Well, that’s the idea, anyway. When the calls the company planned as the “aha” moment don’t appear on the heads-up display (HUD), it turns its inevitability narrative into a Rorschach test. Fans see a fixable glitch; skeptics see an expensive question mark.
The connect demonstration was a “comedy of errors,” one person wrote on X . Mashable wrote on X that the AI glasses failures were “SO awkward” and encouraged people to watch Zuckerberg’s “painful live demo.” Another social media user called the demo-day downfall “abysmal” and said the whole thing felt “rushed and scattered.” A Redditor in the r/OculusQuest thread called the on-stage failure “solid comedy gold,” while another in r/news said this “absolute disaster” was “possibly the worst technology demonstration I’ve ever seen.”
Meta insists the products work — the bugs were “demo-gods” specials, the company said. Bosworth, in a series of Instagram stories, later offered specifics: The cooking bit triggered a DDoS-like overload — “We DDoSed ourselves,” he said — when the assistant inadvertently woke many attendees’ glasses at once; later, a rare sleep-state bug sent the display to nap precisely when the call arrived.
“I know the product works, I know it has the goods,” Bosworth said on social media. “It really was a demo fail and not a product failure.” Engineers reportedly killed the hiccups after the fact, he said, but the meme had already minted itself. There’s a narrow window when a company can convince people that a new device belongs in their lives. Blowing the shot on a global stage doesn’t close the window — but it sure fogs it up.
This is the awkward part of Meta’s (Next) Big Swing Era. The company doesn’t lack conviction; it’s printing it — and printing money faster than the bill can come due. In the second quarter , Meta tightened its 2025 capital-expenditure outlook to a mind-boggling $66–$72 billion (from $64–$72 billion), mostly to feed AI infrastructure. Zuckerberg has been explicit about pouring “hundreds of billions” over time into the AI race to build more capable systems (and, of course, “win” the AI race, whatever that means). The strategy is to own the compute and own the assistant — and now own the interface glued to your face. That’s a clean story on a slide presentation, but it’s a much messier one when depreciation schedules arrive even before consumer behavior does.
Wall Street has been here with Meta before. “Trust us, this will be a thing” was also the argument for the Metaverse . Reality Labs has drained the company of staggering sums — $17.7 billion in operating losses in 2024, after $16.1 billion in 2023 — without producing any sort of breakout mass-market habit.
And yet — because with Meta there’s often an “and yet” — the glasses business isn’t vapor . Meta owns the biggest chunk of the smart glasses market. The non-display Ray-Ban line is a bona fide success by smart-accessory standards: more than three-and-a-half million pairs since late 2023, with H1 2025 sales up more than 200% at Ray-Ban owner EssilorLuxottica . Those aren’t iPhone numbers, but that does represent traction, the kind you can build from if the experience hardens into a habit. If Display’s panel and the neural wristband make messaging, recording, and translation feel instant rather than fussy, the category has a shot at going from “toy” to “tool.” And “everyday inevitability” is the path Meta keeps pointing at: not a VR escape pod, but something so entirely and completely boringly useful that you forget it’s there.
The hard part is that “boringly useful” demands… boring reliability. A demo is supposed to be something close to rigged — scripted to show the device at its best, with all the duct tape and people running around with headsets hidden backstage. If Meta can’t stage-manage reliability under the best-case, written-well-in-advance conditions, it might be fair for audiences to assume everyday life will be worse. And that’s why the video-call connecting failure and the chef bit (standing over an empty bowl, with the AI telling him that he had already combined the base ingredients) could metastasize into something like: If this is the future, why does it trip over the present tense?
Meta also faces an optics tax. The company is trying to sell a product in a world that still remembers the “glassholes,” a not-so-flattering nickname people gave early Google Glass adopters (around 2013-14) who would speak loudly to their $1,500 frames.
Meta has more privacy tooling now, but the trust gap is still wide. The Ray-Ban Display models have a forward-facing camera and, now, a heads-up panel. Critics worry that this makes it even harder for bystanders to know when they’re being recorded or analyzed. The company added LED indicators to signal when the camera is on, but watchdogs have noted that tiny lights don’t resolve the core concern: that people don’t want to feel (even more) surveilled in daily life. One New York woman posted on TikTok recently that her waxer was wearing the Meta glasses, although the beautician reassured her client that “they’re not charged, they’re not on, like, I promise.” The experience, the woman on TikTok said, has been “haunting her ever since.” For Meta, the baggage is heavy: Its history of data-harvesting scandals leaves skeptics less likely to believe any corporate assurances about “responsible AI.”
For all the talk of AI and infrastructure, first impressions are still visual. If the device announces itself as experimental hardware, people will recoil. If it can pass as something ordinary — sunglasses, not science fiction — the glasses can earn a chance to be worn in public. The Ray-Ban styling is that clever form factor hack — it looks like eyewear, not a dev kit.
The most generous read on this week is that Meta chose to do the risky thing live, and the risk showed up in 60-point font on the screen. The less generous read is that Meta, a decade after buying Oculus, still hasn’t learned how much credibility it burns every time the future asks for just one more — We promise! — do-over.
The failed Display, well, display leads to a bit of an uncomfortable spreadsheet question on Wall Street: Can Meta monetize its AI glasses ambition before the depreciation bill shows up? Analysts have started to warn that across Big Tech, the D&A (depreciation and amortization) curve that’s tied to AI infrastructure can outrun revenue if consumer and enterprise use cases lag, squeezing margins — even at ad-supported behemoths .
Meta’s answer here seems to be to go faster: lean into capex, reroute the model road map, and deploy fresh surfaces where AI can live as a constant companion. In that ever-optimistic worldview, Display isn’t just a gadget; it’s a way for the company to make the AI people are paying for visible, valuable, and daily. And… Display is a way to diversify where ad engines could eventually show up — on faces, not just phones. Meta has pitched the glasses in the same breath as it talks nonstop about “superintelligence.” A company probably doesn’t say that part out loud unless it intends to be graded at least a little bit like a platform owner.
The irony with the disastrous showcase is that the closest thing to a bull case here might just be hidden in the flop. Live-demo disasters are, historically, survivable when the underlying product is ready — or, ready enough. Apple had the iPhone radio stack juggling act; Microsoft has had its fair share of onstage blue screens of death. What wins out, eventually (and for the most part), is the mundane — the feeling that you can trust the thing… when you need it.
For better or worse, Meta’s glasses are closer to that threshold than the failed-demo jokes suggest. The industrial design is credible. The software, outside the glare of a keynote stream, increasingly is, too. The question is whether Meta, a company with a multibillionaire’s tolerance for embarrassment and a sovereign fund’s appetite for capex, can focus long enough on the dull work of making a feature never fail, rather than inventing three shiny distractions.
So sure, the Wi-Fi was allegedly brutal. The clips were brutal, too. But the more useful frame is the credibility meter. Right now, Meta is asking consumers to accept a computer on their face and investors to underwrite a spend that would have seemed like satire 20 — or maybe even 10 — years ago.
The first ask demands that trust be built in tiny, uneventful wins. The second ask demands proof that the money machine on Facebook and Instagram can subsidize that trust long enough to flip a culture; for now, it is. Meta has the cash and the stubbornness for both. What it doesn’t have — again: yet — is a moment where the glasses disappear and the experience doesn’t. Until it does, the company’s biggest swings will keep landing as punchlines. Meta Connect promised the future of AI glasses. What connected most were the WiFi jokes. The fix here isn’t another sizzle reel or expensively made, glossy, high-resolution commercial. The fix is a dull one: Zuckerberg says, “Let’s try that call again,” and, this time, the heads-up display just appears — every single time. Then, the company can claim its product is something kind of close to “legendary.”
Until then, Meta’s future will keep buffering.
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