TL;DR: After teasing the idea for over a decade, Snap unveiled Specs yesterday, a $2,195 pair of AR glasses it hopes will eventually replace the smartphone. But the reception has been frosty, with criticism of their price and bulky look—and they come right as rivals like Meta and Apple race for the same space on your face.

What happened: The standalone glasses come with a full AR display that, per Snap, feels like a 24-inch monitor. Under the hood they run two Qualcomm Snapdragon chips and offer (only) about four hours of battery life.

That makes Specs more like a portable version of the Apple Vision Pro than the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which only has a small HUD-like screen. Snap says Specs can stream video, run games, throw up walking directions, and answer questions about whatever you’re looking at. The aim, according to CEO Evan Spiegel, was to “build a totally new type of computer.” Pre-orders are open now in the US, UK, and France, and the glasses are expected to ship this fall.

The post-phone pitch: Spiegel’s wager is that we’re all sick of staring down at screens. “Almost 20 years since the launch of the iPhone, people are ready to think about computing differently,” he told CNBC. Specs might also be a timely play: The smart glasses field is filling up fast, with a waitlist for Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, Google’s Warby Parker collab also coming this fall, and Apple’s rumored display-free glasses that could land as soon as 2027.

Not a good look: Unsurprisingly, analysts have zeroed in on the eye-watering price that will “likely keep adoption limited." (For comparison, Meta’s AR glasses are $799.) Snap’s stock fell about 9.6% as of this morning, a sign of investor skepticism as the company continues to lose cash.

And beyond the sticker shock, there’s also been plenty of cringing at the clunky design. Snap rolled out a sleek ad campaign featuring celebs like Jack Harlow, Kaia Gerber, and Jimmy Butler donning the frames—but here’s how they actually look in the real world.

Bottom line: Snap has thrown its hat in the ring of the smart glasses race with some high-spec hardware. But the winner may not be whoever ships the best device—just whoever makes something useful that the average person actually wants to be seen wearing. —WK

• A brain-computer interface gave an ALS patient his voice back. In a UC Davis clinical trial, a 47-year-old man whose ALS had left his speech unintelligible has used a BCI system at home, without researcher support, for around three years. In that span, the system went from decoding a 50-word vocabulary to a 125,000-word one at 97.5% accuracy. Combining speech decoding and cursor control, the system lets him talk to loved ones, send emails, browse the internet, and stay employed on his own terms. The trial is still enrolling participants, and the researchers said the man’s 3,800-plus hours of neural data could help build better systems for people with ALS, spinal cord injuries, and beyond.
• A new CRISPR technique can kill the cancers drugs can’t touch. Researchers engineered a new system that detects and destroys cells carrying a mutation found in nearly half of all cancers and up to 70%–90% of some of the hardest-to-treat cancers like ovarian, pancreatic, and non-small cell lung cancer. So far, it’s been shown only in lab cells, but unlike methods like chemotherapy, the shredding technique leaves healthy cells alone. Now, getting the enzyme to all the right cells remains the main hurdle before this moves toward the clinic. —LC

Sam Bankman-Fried’s prison memoir contains a thought experiment about training AI on nothing but SpongeBob—“terabyte after terabyte of pictures of Patrick the Star and hours upon hours of audio from Squidward’s clarinet,” he recently told New York Magazine. (It’s apparently an allegory for how prison has narrowed his mind.)

That’s just one of a trove of colorful details from his life in federal prison, which also includes winning a team pickleball tournament and plowing through 10 to 15 PB&J sandwiches a day. The disgraced FTX founder, currently serving 25 years for fraud, even gets some screen time on a $135 commissary tablet—loaded with a discordant grab bag of media (like, inexplicably, the second Divergent movie and one season of Chicago Fire). There’s also a roguelike dungeon-crawler game he says he’s played about 6,000 times.

Bankman-Fried also still posts on X with the help of his dad—mostly reposting takes about what a genius investor he is, offering Drake a loaner bean bag chair, and, occasionally, praising how well the market is doing under President Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, Bankman-Fried officially filed for a presidential pardon earlier this year—but Polymarket gives him single-digit odds of walking free before 2027. —WK

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