Fall 2028 Apple special event

(Steve Jobs voice)

… oh, and one more thing. We know that iPhone is the best way to take pictures. Apple ships the world’s best phone camera. By a mile.

With iPhone 16 we added camera control, to make it even easier and faster to get that shot. But there’s still some friction: you’ve gotta dig the phone out of your pocket and get it oriented right. What if it could be faster? What if there was a camera always ready to capture that shot of your kids doing something cute? Something that captures the moment as you remember it, through your eyes?

Now, there are products on the market that do this already. You could tie a GoPro to your hat, but you might need to duck under doorways. Snap’s Spectacles take good pictures, but they will make you yearn for the weight and fashion of a GoPro.

(laughter)

And then there’s Meta Glasses, the camera for creeps.

(pause)

When I was growing up, home video cameras were enormous. They were so big and heavy that you wore them on your shoulder. Everyone knew when they were recording.

Because the red light blinked. It’s called a tally light. You’ll find them on every video camera today, from the ones you buy in a store to the professional rigs carried on steadicams. Even on GoPros.

You know where you won’t find one? On Meta Glasses.

(pause)

In order to make a camera you can wear, you need a breakthrough in privacy. We designed a beautiful, dynamic way to let others know if you’re taking pictures or video. It’s that kind of disclosure that builds trust.

And with that trust, we set out to create something extraordinary.

We call it Vision Air. It’s light as a feather. You barely feel it on your head. That line along the top is the “tally bar.” It’s a strip of light that lets people know what you’re doing.

Tap the left temple twice to take a photo and it flashes white, then slowly fades. Tap and hold to record video and it gently pulses red. And this rainbow swirl happens when you activate Siri AI.

Built into the Vision Air is our most powerful assistant to help make sense of the world around you. Just hold two fingers to the right temple and Siri AI activates. She can turn a concert poster into a calendar event, read menus in other languages, even decipher this cryptic parking sign.

(laughter)

Any photo that Siri takes is sent to our Apple Private Cloud Compute. It’s encrypted, processed, then deleted forever. No one, not even Apple, can view the photo during this process. And we can’t recover it afterwards. Your data stays private with Apple.

Siri can talk to you through speakers in the back of the temples. It connects automatically to any AirPods you’re wearing. And it’s great for music. You can effortlessly take calls with it, and the tally bar will glow green to let people know you aren’t talking to yourself.

(laughter)

Inside the Vision Air is our incredible R2 chip. Made specifically for wearable intelligence, it performs more than four trillion operations every second while using less power than an Apple Watch. That’s what lets Vision Air disappear into a regular pair of glasses.

One of the hardest challenges in building Vision Air was power. Nobody wants to charge their glasses in the middle of the day. So our engineers ensured Vision Air lasts all day. Put them on in the morning. Take them off after dinner. The USB-C charging case will keep your glasses charged and usable for a week.

There’s so much you can do with the Vision Air. Here’s a video we made to showcase them.

(A video plays with cheery music while various people use their Vision Air)

• A man parks his car at the airport, tells Siri to remember its location. He gets back from his flight looking haggard and asks the glasses where his car is. It tells him which floor to take the elevator to, which way to turn when he gets out, which aisle to go down and how far to walk.
• A woman is cooking and tells Siri she’s making this recipe in a book. As she cooks, she keeps asking for the next step. Occasionally she asks Siri if what she’s making looks right.
• A man takes a handsfree video of his kids playing in the backyard through the glasses.
• A woman is in a foreign country at a restaurant and asks Siri what options from the menu don’t have dairy. Then she asks how to pronounce the one she’s pointing at and Siri responds in the native language, which the woman mimics when talking to the waiter.
• A man looks at an app-based parking sign and asks Siri to pay for two hours of parking. He then quickly joins his friends inside the building.
• A older woman is at a toy store and asks Siri to send a picture of the wall of action figures to her daughter and say “which one does my grandson want again?”

Now, millions of people wear prescription glasses every day.

So we worked closely with the world’s leading lens manufacturers to make sure Vision Air could become your everyday glasses. Whether you wear single-vision lenses, progressives, or just sunglasses, Vision Air can be customized to fit your prescription.

Vision Air starts at just $599. It comes in your choice of space black or mocha. It begins shipping this October, and you can order yours starting next Friday.

You know, at Apple, we believe the best technology disappears when you use it. We want you looking at the world, looking at the people you love, and capturing those moments without ever sacrificing the simple act of being present. This is our technology, built with the deep respect for privacy you expect from Apple.

And we can’t wait to see the world through your eyes.

Thank you.

The limitations become the defining feature of the product.

— Nilay Patel, The Vergecast: Jony Ive’s funky Ferrari, May 29, 2026

How do you make society comfortable with glasses that have cameras in them? You have to let them know when it’s recording. That’s all.

The solution is a tally light, but it’s small and inelegant. A blinking red dot on your face is a zit. What if it was much bigger? What if the product was designed around its biggest constraint? I don’t know how eager consumers are to wear a pair of glasses that glow, but it’s the only solution that makes sense.

In earlier drafts of this speech I wrote “You can customize the red recording light to move back and forth, in case you wanted to look like you were driving a certain Trans Am from the 1980’s or a robot from the 70’s.” But no, that kind of cheeky easter egg wouldn’t be in an Apple product, let alone a keynote speech. It’d be in Google’s version.

I also wrote about a “Recording Blocker,” a Bluetooth LE signal similar to how the AirTag protocol works. It would prevent the Vision Air from recording or taking pictures if it detected the signal. The idea is that you would have to get the consent of the people around you to take a picture. If that was too inconvenient, just use your phone.

But that ended up causing too many usability problems. Are people entitled to a software method to stop nearby camera glasses from taking pictures, or is having the prominent tally bar enough? You could be taking a picture of a building, and somebody walks by with an iPhone in their pocket, and your camera turns off. That’s a terrible experience. Since a Vision Air implies an iPhone is nearby, a device that already has a camera, it didn’t make sense to disable one and not the other.

I removed that section. It takes a lot to dig smart glasses out of the “glasshole,” but I think the tally bar is the right step.

Meta’s smart glasses have not earned a positive reputation on The Vergecast. People like using the face-mounted camera! But other people don’t appreciate being stalked by creeps wearing them. I wanted to solve the problem, to square the squircle. Yes, I know the Meta glasses have a white light on them, but I don’t consider that a tally light and don’t think Meta wants it there at all.

I knew right away that this had to be presented as an Apple keynote speech. I wrote it myself, in Apple Notes, and had multiple LLMs review it and give feedback. I asked those LLMs for advice on sections I wanted to write. While I used some of their ideas, I didn’t copy any sentences verbatim. ChatGPT created the image of the Vision Air and its charging case.

I know that’s Tim Cook in my photos, yet I wrote it in Steve Jobs’ voice. I could have done some AI image manipulation, but that felt gross. Instead I just took screenshots of some recent Apple events. Hopefully it doesn’t feel too jarring.

Don’t ask me why I went with space black and mocha for the colors. I’m not a fashion person. I think the Ferrari Luce looks great in blue. Don’t rely on me for industrial design.

$599 felt right as an Apple pricetag. The idea was to give this device a bit of an AirPods Max vibe, and let the price stand for many years as the technology improves.

Keeping a display out of the Vision Air was the only sensible choice after seeing the Snap Spectacles. While I suspect Apple could make one lighter and thinner, physics is inescapable, and we don’t have the technology to make something good enough for their standards. This device is for cameras, music, and Siri. That might be enough.

Would I buy the device I described? Absolutely. Just maybe not in that color.