I watched the Meta Connect keynote a day late. Honestly, that's the right way to watch it. No live-blog hype, no hot takes flying past. You just see what the room saw. And the room was pretty quiet.

Zuck walked out with four pieces of hardware, a hearing feature, a K-pop collab and a little AI companion for your keychain. The production was flawless. The applause was polite. Both of those things matter, and they point at the same thing.

The avatars didn't land for me

Meta spent a lot of stage time on Muse's face. Animated avatars on the Charm. Photorealistic holograms for video calls. Boz made a joke about finally solving legs in VR. Gizmodo's live blog summed up the hologram calls in one line: "if you want that, for some reason." I was in the same spot.

Here's my read. In the age of AI, Meta is trying to give its devices a face and a feeling. I get why. But the people who'd actually pay for an agent, and definitely anyone running a business, aren't looking for a feeling. They want a powerful model that does the work and gets it right. Less time on avatars. More time on compute and accuracy. People want innovation more than they want a mascot.

And the thing is, Muse itself is interesting. It launched September 8, hit number one on the App Store, and at Connect it got connectors that let it run your Mac in the background, read your email and buy stuff through Walmart, Best Buy, Gap and Sephora. That's the story. The avatar is the wrapping paper.

The Charm: cool product, open question

Then there's the Charm. Keychain-sized, two-inch screen, 5G, fingerprint sensor, little animated Muse avatar. Engadget called it a Tamagotchi. No price yet. No firm date. Meta was upfront that it has only built a few units and hasn't finalized the components.

Let me be clear. The product is cool. Cramming a real-time voice model into something that fits on a keychain is a legit engineering feat. And the part I'm actually interested in is the privacy angle. Meta pitched Muse Space, a walled-off environment for your AI, and Zuck said nobody, Meta included, can access your data. If that holds up, a private AI you carry in your pocket is a real idea. I'd try it.

What I'm still waiting on is the use case. When do you grab the Charm instead of your phone? Your glasses? Your watch? Meta showed a tap on the fingerprint sensor and a cute avatar. It didn't show a morning, a commute, a workday. Right now it's a very good demo. Whether it's a product depends on what they show us next.

Watch the whole keynote and you notice a lot of accessories. Charms. Pet charms that come with the LISA glasses. A new ivory colour for the Kylie Jenner frames. A Mix and Match program for frame, lens and case colours. Over 100 styles of glasses by the end of the year. I don't have Meta's product research and I could be wrong, but it felt like a lot of merch for a company whose real story is an AI agent. Tech is at its best when it feels like magic. I'd rather see more of that.

Where they got it right

Credit where it's due. Two calls I really liked.

First, the camera-free glasses. Ray-Ban Meta Audio, $349, 43 grams, 12 hours of battery, ships October 13. This is the smarter move. Camera glasses have an awkwardness problem that no little green recording light fully fixes. Nobody at the gym wants to wonder if the person on the next bench is filming. Pull the camera and you've got a pair of glasses that happen to have audio and an AI in them. I wouldn't be shocked if audio quietly outsells video. And the Aviator on the Gen 3 line is badass. Pure style call, and a good one.

Second, and this is the one that matters most: hearing enhancement. It's an FDA-cleared, over-the-counter hearing aid built into the glasses. You run a hearing test in the app at home, the six-mic array tunes the amplification to your results. No clinic, no prescription. Zuck said one in six American adults has some form of hearing loss. It's $149.99, or included with a Meta One subscription, and it's HSA and FSA eligible.

This is what tech should be doing more of. Shoot for the moon on stuff that actually helps people. Good on them. We still need to see it work in the real world, and it would have been nice to hear the price on stage. But the ambition is in the right place. I'd trade every avatar in that keynote for more of this.

The VR glasses

Meta VR Glasses. About 100 grams, five times lighter than a Quest 3, all the compute in a puck in your pocket, 5K micro-OLED, hand and eye tracking. $1,299, spring 2027.

The form factor is impressive, no question. And I'm glad Meta is still betting on XR when most of the industry has gone quiet on it. But the question I kept asking was: what do they actually do? The answer on stage was Marvel movies in 3D, live UFC, a few virtual monitors and Beat Saber. That's a very good entertainment headset in a very good body. It's not yet a reason to put a computer on your face at work. And the hologram calls didn't do it for me.

We need to see it in action. A normal room, a normal person, a normal Tuesday. Until then nobody should have a strong opinion, me included. Spring 2027 is a long time to keep a story alive.

Bad at marketing or too good?

Too good. Meta got the entire internet talking about a keychain with no price. The set design was top tier. The production value is always top tier. They clearly work hard to show the work, and from a marketing perspective it's a masterclass in making a launch feel like a moment.

That's also the risk. Meta is brilliant at making big bets look inevitable. It did it with the metaverse, and that one didn't pan out. Now it's making another big bet on a pendant, a hundred frame styles and full-body holograms. The room seemed to feel it. The claps were quieter during the celebrity collabs. Maybe it was the wrong crowd. Or maybe developers and press can tell the difference between an accessory launch and a technology launch.

The good news is the real product is in there. An agent that does work in the background. Glasses people will actually wear. A hearing aid on your face. Build on that. The avatars can wait.