A few months ago, I was looking through old vacation photos with my son when he turned to me and asked, “Why weren’t you there?”

My heart sank.

I was there. I was just behind the camera, taking all the photos.

I have always loved trying to capture the soul of a moment. But in the past decade, I’ve also quietly mourned how few photos exist of me with my children, or even of me at all. My son’s question jolted me. This wasn’t just about not being in pictures. My absence was shaping how he would remember these moments, and me, over time.

So for Father’s Day, I bought my husband a pair of Meta RayBans. We were going on a big family trip this summer, and I hoped he’d take more photos.

He did. But the Meta glasses also completely shifted how I thought about photography. They made capturing moments so effortless and opened up a whole new world of candid, documentary‑style shots of bike rides, kayaking, and playing in the surf — life as it actually happened, without interruption.

I also noticed something else: I stopped pulling out my phone. Rummaging through my purse, extracting my phone, ignoring notifications, and opening the camera app suddenly felt clumsy, disruptive, and outdated.

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What makes the The Meta RayBans so great?

Meta’s AI glasses feel as revolutionary as the iPhone once did. With a tap of a button or a simple voice command, they record exactly what you’re seeing — effortlessly. You can take photos while biking, paddling a kayak, or holding your child’s hand — all without pulling yourself out of the moment.

When the iPhone launched, it put a high‑quality camera in everyone’s pocket and completely changed how we take photos. Photographer Chase Jarvis captured this shift with the iconic phrase: “The best camera is the one that’s with you.” It implied that accessibility mattered more than perfection and the iPhone was better than a DSLR because it was always in your pocket.

But now, Meta’s AI glasses are rewriting that old adage to be: “The best camera is the one that sees what you see” And it turns out a camera on your face does that far better than one in your pocket.

The Meta glasses remove so much friction around capturing moments that it now feels absurd to pull out my phone for a photo or short video.

Is the iPhone the wrong tool for photos?

The Meta glasses don’t just make photography easier, they also expose how overstuffed the iPhone has become, and why it might not be a great tool for photos anymore.

The first iPhone was a novel, all‑in‑one replacement for many physical products — a phone, camera, calendar, calculator, etc. But over time, it also absorbed my wallet, car keys, TV remote, medical records, and became my portal to all things digital. It’s indispensable. But it’s also bloated, distracting, and increasingly bad at letting us live in the very moments we’re trying to capture.

On vacation, every time I pulled out my phone for a photo, I had to ignore notifications, resist checking other apps, and deal with my kids clamoring for my phone like moths to a flame. I found myself having to choose between enjoying the moment or documenting it.

This struggle isn’t new. But the Meta glasses make this a non-issue. Perhaps the new adage should be: “The best camera is that one that sees what you see and keeps you in the moment.”

Meta’s AI glasses don’t just make the iPhone feel clumsy, they make the phone feel like the wrong tool for capturing memories. Meta’s glasses may be the first product to break off a core feature from the iPhone and do it profoundly better.

The iPhone created a magical moment by putting a small camera and computer in your pocket. But today, with with connected and intelligent tech all around us, maybe it’s time to unbundle some of these tools and build specialized ones that do their jobs even better.

How can Meta’s RayBans improve?

Now Meta’s RayBans are far from perfect. The features my husband and I have explored the most are image/video capture and AI and I have plenty of thoughts about both.

Image capture is amazing all in all, but these are the parts that don’t yet have an edge on alternative cameras:

• Delay — There is a notable delay before the glasses take a photo or start filming. This is particularly long when responding to voice commands. This needs to speed up to capture the moment.

• Composition — The idea of image composition is still pretty primitive. You just kind of look at what you want in the frame and hope for the best. There are enough third party image editing tools that it is passable. But it would be awesome for the lenses to follow where my eyes are tracking and be able to zoom.

• Interference — Things like hat brims show up in the images, even though they aren’t visible in one’s line of sight while wearing the glasses. By contrast, when taking a photo with your phone, it’s pretty clear when you’ve got your finger over the lens.

AI tools could be the second set of killer features. These are still in their infancy, but hint at a potential future.

• Translation — In theory, this seems like a killer feature. But it’s still nascent. While we were having dinner at a restaurant in Mallorca, my husband asked Meta to translate the menu into English. The Meta glasses did translate the menu, but they did it like an old screen reader — top to bottom, one word at a time. This could be much more interactive, like listing major categories and then, on command, diving in to read all the appetizers. I am sure there are plenty of best-practices from accessibility design. But a decent starting place would be mimicking a live conversation with a waiter without a printed menu.

• Information retrieval — This was pretty poor. I understand that without direct connectivity, the available corpus of content is much smaller. But we are all so accustomed to being able to ask our devices anything, so this feature feels incompetent and substantially worse than any other alternative.

• Identification — I expected (because of camera + AI) that the glasses would be able to answer questions like: What is that building over there? Or what kind of plant is this? But it’s really hard to verbally pin point an object in your field of view. That, combined with the limited corpus issues makes it feel like the AI features are in their infancy. It would be awesome to be able to hone in on an object by pointing my finger at it.

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While I have been blown away by my husband’s Meta RayBans, I am not in a hurry to get myself a pair. For now, I’m happy for my husband to wear them (and occasionally swap so he makes it into the photos too).

But I’ll admit: I love being able to leave my phone in my purse, stay in the moment, and finally be in the memories we’re capturing. 😎

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