The early reviews are landing for the new Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses. At $800 and still requiring a smartphone to function properly, MNOs do not have to grapple with existential post-smartphone questions yet. What they provide is a glimpse of a way out of the Apple-Google duopoly – it is just such a shame that Meta is the company behind them, forging a new frontier in the surveillance economy. We explored Meta’s frustration with the current smartphone paradigm when Meta unveiled the Orion hardware platform in 2024. Meta said these would have to be priced at around $10,000 to make sense as a commercial proposition, and given development timelines, it is unclear how much of Orion can be found…