China Has Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Smart Glasses Beat in One Key Way

The smart glasses wars are in full swing, and Meta looks like it’s slated to have some major competition, not just from the usual suspects like Apple and Samsung, but from major players overseas such as Alibaba. The Chinese e-commerce giant officially announced its Quark AI glasses in July and has now shared pricing that undercuts the Meta Ray-Ban Display by a pretty big margin.

As reported by CNBC, Alibaba’s Quark AI smart glasses are launching at $660, which is notably well below the Meta Ray-Ban Display at $800. Preorders for the Quark AI glasses start on Oct. 24, and the smart glasses are expected to ship in December. Like the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the Quark AI glasses take all of the capabilities and features of non-display smart eyewear like the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2, including cameras, a voice assistant, and computer vision, and augment them with an in-lens screen. In the case of Quark AI, there’s a display in each lens, though this screen is where that price difference starts to make more sense.

While the Meta Ray-Ban Display have a full-color display that I can say from personal experience is much nicer, brighter, and sharper than you’d think, the Quark AI glasses come equipped with what appears to be a monochrome display that only comes in a Matrix-like green. I can’t speak to the sharpness or brightness without using the Quark AI smart glasses myself, but the lack of color is definitely a bummer. It may not seem major, but having support for different colors definitely makes features like turn-by-turn navigation feel a heck of a lot more seamless—contrast is important when you’re scanning a map with your eyes.

Still, for lots of people interested in dipping their toes into smart glasses, price will be one of the biggest (if not the biggest) factors, and right now, Alibaba has the edge. Whether companies like Alibaba or Rokid, another Chinese purveyor of display smart glasses, can actually hold onto any advantage they may be able to gain is another question entirely. Having briefly used smart glasses from Rokid, for example, I can say firsthand that the experience is nowhere near as polished as the Meta Ray-Ban Display, both in terms of the display, the voice assistant, and the UI. Yes, $800 is a decent amount of money for a pair of smart glasses, but in that price, you’re also getting Meta’s Neural Band, a wearable that lets you control the smart glasses with finger pinches, taps, and turns of your wrist, which is an experience that pretty much no other comparable pair offers.

Still, the field is clearly getting more crowded by the minute, and even if Alibaba doesn’t knock Meta off its throne, anyone interested in smart glasses may have a lot more options at more price ranges sooner rather than later.