Mark Gurman’s latest Bloomberg scoop dropped three Apple AI wearables at once: smart glasses, AirPods with a camera, and a tabletop home display that reads room context. I read the piece twice and kept waiting for the part where any of this would help me get through a Wednesday.

A camera on your face doesn’t file your expense reports

Your email lives in the browser. So does your CRM, your project management tool, LinkedIn, Google Docs, Slack. And all the tedious stuff that devours a workday happens in Chrome, across fourteen tabs, while you copy-paste data between apps that refuse to talk to each other. Smart glasses cannot fill out a procurement form any more than a pair of binoculars can help you read Mandarin. Or summarize a 47-message email thread and draft a reply matching the weird passive-aggressive tone your VP prefers.

I keep coming back to the Apple Watch. It is the one wearable that actually stuck, and it stuck because it latched onto something people already wanted to measure about themselves rather than introducing some new category of ambient computing nobody had requested. So there is a pattern Apple already knows: find the thing people are already doing and make it frictionless, rather than inventing a new surface and hoping the behavior follows. The glasses ignore that pattern entirely.

Jason Snell on “new surfaces for computation”

Jason Snell wrote on Six Colors that Apple’s instinct is to create “new surfaces for computation” before anyone knows what the computation should be. Same instinct as Vision Pro, lower price.

Where the actual work happens

I’ve been using browser agents for about six months, and what strikes me is how little any wearable would change the shape of my actual working day, because the work itself consists of reading tabs, filling forms, copying data between apps, and drafting messages inside a browser window that no pair of glasses can reach into. And the most useful AI I’ve encountered does not need charging or wearing. It sits in a side panel reading the same page I’m reading and acting on it directly. No separate chat window. No copy-paste relay between a model and the app where the work happens.

A recruiter I know spends her mornings bouncing between LinkedIn and ChatGPT, copying profile text back and forth like a human API middleware layer shuttling JSON between two endpoints that someone forgot to connect. What she needs is software that can see her browser and operate inside it. Because the AI productivity paradox lives at the seam between capable models and the interfaces that keep them caged. So bolting a camera onto your ear changes none of that.

I’ve been using dassi for this, a Chrome extension that sits in your side panel and reads pages, drafts emails, fills forms, does research. You bring your own API key and your data stays in your browser.

Meta’s Ray-Bans and the category error

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses sold reasonably well, and I think that is exactly what tipped Apple into this whole wearable AI cluster, because Apple has always treated competitor traction as a map to follow with better taste applied on top. But the tech press keeps conflating “reasonably well for a camera you can wear on your face” with “solving how knowledge workers spend their days,” which are completely different propositions. And conflating a novelty gadget’s sell-through numbers with workplace productivity gains is the kind of category error that makes it harder for everyone to evaluate what AI tools are actually worth paying attention to.

What ships by 2027

Apple will ship at least one of these devices. And people will buy them the way people bought the Kindle Fire and the Facebook Portal, and some will find uses that stick.

But most of us will keep spending our working hours inside a browser, shoveling data between tabs. The 7 tasks you’re still doing manually are a decent inventory of that shoveling. Apple’s smartest move would be building a browser agent into Safari, but I doubt anyone in Cupertino is even thinking about it, which is a strange thing to say about a company that makes the second most popular browser in the world.