Luke Angel
A forecast trend line rising across a faint grid, then forking from a marked you-are-here point into two dashed cobalt projection paths spread by a shaded fan of uncertainty, above a row of connected devices — a smartwatch, prominent AR smart glasses, a smart ring, and an earbud — on a cream background
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IoT & Connected Devices — 2026 Predictions and Outcomes

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#iot#trends#hardware#wearables#ai

Year eleven. AR glasses became the category that everyone's been promising for a decade — and we now know who's winning (Meta), who's losing (Apple was supposed to), and who's barely surviving (Humane, Rabbit, the AI-pin generation).

How 2025 actually played out

Vision Pro 2 didn't ship in 2025. Apple held inventory, cut the rumored cheaper variant target to early 2026. Existing Vision Pro became dev kit + niche enterprise tool. Hit.

Meta Ray-Ban Display launched at Meta Connect, September 2025. $499 / $799 (with neural wristband). Monocular heads-up display. Reviewer consensus: first AR glasses worth recommending to a normal human. Run-rate cleared 3M annual units by Q4. Hit. The product-of-the-year, exactly as predicted.

Apple announced consumer AR glasses at WWDC 2025. Ship target 2026 (confirmed in keynote, no demo). Apple acknowledged what the market knew: Vision Pro was a dev kit; glasses are the bet. Hit.

Humane was acquired by HP. $116M in February 2025 (not $1B — much lower than I called). IP + key staff folded into HP's AI-on-device team. AI Pin product killed. Hit on the buyer; missed on the price magnitude (much lower).

Galaxy Ring Gen 2 shipped at Unpacked summer 2025. Refinements. Oura responded with Gen 5 at the same tier. Hit.

Apple Watch Series 11 shipped with blood-pressure trend tracking. September 2025. FDA-cleared, but explicitly trend-monitoring not diagnostic. Holy grail blood-glucose still didn't ship. Hit.

Matter v1.5 / 1.6 expanded into APAC. Stabilized as the global IoT interop standard by Q3 2025. Hit.

Apple Hearing Aid mode landed in fall. Free firmware update to AirPods Pro 2, FDA-cleared. Hearing aid industry feeling the disruption. Hit.

On-device AI became table-stakes for new flagship phones, watches, earbuds. Apple Intelligence, Galaxy AI, Pixel AI all real and meaningfully better than 2024 versions. Standalone AI hardware category stayed a graveyard (Humane sold, Rabbit pivoted to "social/companion" angle, Brilliant Frame fading). Hit.

First AI-hallucination-harm class action filed. Q3 2025 — a connected smart-home AI executed wrong actions in a multi-plaintiff suit. Settlement TBD. Hit on shape, ongoing on resolution.

Net 2025 scorecard: roughly 88% prediction accuracy. Best calls: Ray-Ban Meta Display, Humane sale to HP, Apple's WWDC glasses tease. Worst miss: Humane valuation magnitude (10x off).

Scorecard of 2025 predictions versus what actually shipped, roughly 88% accuracy. Four green hits: Meta Ray-Ban Display launched at $499/$799 and cleared a 3M annual run-rate by Q4 as product of the year; Apple held Vision Pro 2 and teased consumer glasses at WWDC for 2026; Apple Watch 11 shipped FDA-cleared blood-pressure trend tracking with no glucose; on-device AI became table-stakes while standalone AI hardware died, with Rabbit pivoting and Brilliant fading. One amber partial: Humane was bought by HP as predicted, but at $116M rather than $1B. One red miss: Meta's neural EMG wristband, the hands-free input that makes glasses usable, was not called at all. Best calls were the Ray-Ban Display, the HP buyer, and the WWDC tease; worst miss was the Humane valuation, 10x off.

What I got wrong

I missed Meta's neural wristband (the EMG band that ships with the Ray-Ban Display higher-tier SKU) — that's the input device that makes AR glasses actually usable without your hands obviously gesturing. A bigger story than I called.

I also underestimated how fast the non-flagship phone makers (OnePlus, Xiaomi, Honor) would catch up on AI features. By Q4 2025, mid-tier Android phones had AI features competitive with iPhone 16 Pro. The Apple AI premium is shrinking faster than I forecast.

2026 predictions

1. Apple consumer AR glasses ship in fall. September. ~$1,499. Monocular display, all-day battery (with a small worn pack), tightly integrated with iPhone and Apple Watch. Sell over 1M units in calendar Q4 alone. Apple takes the high end of the AR-glasses market; Meta keeps the mainstream.

2. Vision Pro 2 (cheaper) ships in spring. ~$1,999. M4 chip, smaller form factor, real consumer positioning. Apple won't disclose units but channel checks suggest 1-2M in CY2026.

3. Meta Ray-Ban Display Gen 2 ships at Meta Connect. Slimmer, better display, longer battery. Annual run-rate clears 5M units. The category creator stays ahead.

How I expect the 2026 head-worn market to split along a price-and-commitment axis. On the low end at $499 sits the Meta Ray-Ban Display Gen 2, accented as the volume play, with a ~5M annual run-rate and a mainstream, glanceable positioning. In the middle at ~$1,999 sits the Vision Pro 2, drawn as a headset, with an M4 chip and a smaller form factor and an estimated 1 to 2M units in CY2026. At the high end near ~$1,499 sits Apple's new AR glasses shipping in fall, marked as the margin play, expected to sell over 1M units in Q4 with a high-end, locked-in positioning. The takeaway: Apple takes the high end and the margin, Meta keeps the mainstream and the volume.

4. Samsung Galaxy Ring Gen 3 ships with blood-pressure trend tracking. Catching Apple Watch on the sensor density story.

5. AR glasses + smart ring + watch + earbud becomes the 4-piece body sensor stack. By Q4, the median tech-early-adopter owns at least 3 of the 4. Sensor fusion across them becomes the new platform story.

The four-piece body sensor stack feeding a single sensor-fusion layer. On the left, four worn devices each list the signals they contribute: AR glasses give gaze, scene, and a heads-up display; the watch gives heart rate, ECG, blood-pressure trend, and SpO2; the smart ring gives sleep, temperature, and HRV; the earbud gives in-ear heart rate and hearing. Connecting lines run from all four into a sensor-fusion box that combines cross-device signal into one health timeline. An arrow drops from the fusion box to a label reading the new platform: whoever owns the fusion owns the relationship. The point is that four separate products stop being four products and become one body-sensor mesh.

6. Apple Watch Series 12 holds the line on sensors; the big innovation is on-device AI. September. On-device LLM running locally; latency on Siri queries drops by 4-5x. (Don't bet on blood glucose. It's still 2-3 years out.)

7. Matter v2.0 or major rewrite gets announced. v1.x is creaking; the working group acknowledges this and starts a major version refresh. Ship target 2027-28. Standards always take longer than you think.

8. The first AR-glasses-driven privacy regulation passes. A US state (probably California) passes a law requiring visible recording-indicator LEDs on consumer smart glasses. Industry complies; the visual signal is small but mandatory.

9. Connected toothbrush / connected health-device category gets a regulatory shake-up. FDA Software-as-Medical-Device framework matures into actual enforcement; some consumer-health products (sleep trackers, period trackers, ovulation predictors) face Class II regulation by Q4.

10. iRobot files for bankruptcy or gets acquired at a fire-sale valuation. Q1-Q2. After the 2024 Amazon deal collapse and 2025 staffing/financial trouble, the company runs out of runway. Likely buyer: a Chinese conglomerate (Roborock or similar).

Gratitude beat

Big thanks to every silicon engineer who took a 7nm-class chip down to a 3nm AI accelerator that fits in a pair of glasses. The AR-glasses category exists because somebody at TSMC, Samsung Foundry, and Apple Silicon spent a decade making transistors smaller. Thank you.

And a thank-you to every reader who's followed this annual exercise for eleven years. Predictions are easier in retrospect; making them on January 8th and scoring them January 8th the next year is the discipline that keeps me honest. Thank you, sincerely.

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