Phones don’t have lights

On The Vergecast: Meta Connect, Muse, Googlebooks, and more.

Mark Zuckerberg has a new defense of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses: They’re actually doing more to signal they’re taking a photo than phones do. He’s brought this up in at least two recent interviews, noting that the glasses have a light that comes on to signal when a photo is being taken, while phones do not. In one of the interviews, Joanna Stern notes that, while phones do not always emit a light, someone does have to hold a phone up in the air, which is itself pretty noticeable.

On today’s Vergecast , we’re talking about Meta Connect, the Muse AI assistant, all the new smart glasses hardware, and Zuckerberg’s response to the privacy uproar around wearable cameras. First, we spend time diving into Muse, which has quickly turned the vibes around on Meta’s progress in AI by making agentic features vastly more accessible than others have in the past. That ties right into Meta’s glasses problem and the question of whether people will trust Meta enough with their privacy to link all their services up to Muse.

There’s also a ton of hardware to discuss. We have thoughts on the new audio-only Ray-Ban Meta glasses and the new Meta VR Glasses. Then it’s onto Googlebooks, which arrived this week with surprisingly refined hardware and compelling integrations between desktop and mobile. It’s going to be a big hurdle to convince people to switch from Windows, but the laptops are full of interesting enough ideas that we’re excited to check them out.

Finally, everyone’s favorite podcast within a podcast returns after a brief hiatus. And then it’s on to the Lightning Round, where we’re discussing the Paramount settlement, YouTube’s embrace of AI tools, the state of Xbox, and Rode hooking its users up with 4K.

If you want to learn more about the stories we discussed, you can check out the links below: