Apple has reportedly been developing AI glasses since at least 2023, pouring serious resources into the project.
Samsung announced a July 22 launch date. Apple is not expected to ship anything until 2027 at the earliest.
That is a gap of roughly two full years between a company that talked about this first and a company that is actually putting it in stores.
Samsung did not go it alone on the design side. The glasses are being built with Gentle Monster, a South Korean eyewear label that has spent years cultivating a genuinely fashionable reputation.
That choice is not accidental. One of the biggest reasons Meta Ray-Bans caught on, where Google Glass never did, was that Ray-Ban already had credibility with people who care about how they look. Samsung is borrowing that same playbook, just with a different partner.
The Galaxy Glasses will run Android XR with Google Gemini built in. There is a camera, speakers, and a microphone.
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There is no display, which matters because it’s still the thing that makes glasses feel heavy, weird, and battery-hungry.
Gemini will be able to watch what you see through the camera and answer questions about it in real time.
The glasses will also connect to Samsung’s Galaxy phones and its SmartThings home ecosystem, so in theory, your glasses could tell your washing machine you just walked in the door.
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Everything rumored for Apple’s glasses, cameras feeding visual data to Siri, speakers, microphones, no display on the first version, reads almost identically to what Samsung is announcing now.
Apple will almost certainly execute it differently. But Samsung gets to spend a year or more learning what real users actually want from AI glasses before Apple ships a single unit.
Samsung is also bringing two new foldables to the same July event, including a wider-format phone with roughly the same screen proportions as Apple’s planned foldable iPhone.
