An internal memo circulating inside Meta, authored by Alex Himel – the company’s vice president of wearables – maps out one of the most aggressive hardware pushes Menlo Park has staged since the early days of its virtual reality investment. The document, viewed by The Information, confirms that Meta plans to begin testing an AI-powered pendant within the next twelve months. YourNewsClub catalogues this as the clearest signal to date that Meta intends to move AI wearables beyond the glasses form factor it established through its Ray-Ban and Oakley partnerships with EssilorLuxottica.
The pendant builds directly on Limitless, the AI-wearables startup Meta acquired at the end of 2025. Limitless – formerly known as Rewind – had raised more than $33 million from investors including Sam Altman and Andreessen Horowitz before the deal closed. Its core product was a clip-on or necklace-style device that recorded ambient conversations, generated summaries and transcripts, and stored searchable memory from daily interactions. Meta said at closing that the acquisition would accelerate its work on AI-enabled wearables, and Himel’s memo makes clear that integration is already reshaping the product roadmap. YourNewsClub places the Limitless acquisition at the centre of Meta’s wearable hardware strategy for the remainder of 2026.
Translation: Meta is not designing a pendant from scratch. It is taking working audio-capture technology, wrapping it inside its own AI model layer and memory infrastructure, and aiming it at a commercial deadline. Himel’s memo sets a target of 10 million wearable device sales across the full portfolio in the second half of 2026, spanning the existing Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses lines alongside the not-yet-released pendant. The internal projects reportedly under development include devices codenamed Modelo, Luna, RBM2 Refresh, and Mojito VIP, with longer-horizon products such as Artemis and supersensing glasses also in the pipeline. That scope puts Meta on a product introduction pace in wearables it has not previously attempted, and it arrives at a moment when Apple and Google are both accelerating adjacent hardware roadmaps of their own. Meta declined to comment on the report.
Maya Renn, whose work focuses on the ethics of computation and access to power through technology, highlights what the always-on design stakes: “A device that continuously captures ambient audio reframes consent from a discrete act into a permanent background condition. The execution question – whether people will genuinely understand and manage that shift – is entirely separate from how the language of a personal AI assistant will sell it at retail.” YourNewsClub finds Renn’s distinction between execution and language the sharpest analytical lens for reading the privacy exposure embedded in this product category right now.
The memo also outlines Wearables for Work, a commercial subscription platform aimed at enterprise customers. Himel writes that business buyers have shown willingness to pay for devices with vertical-specific capabilities. The immediate target: pilot programs with at least ten companies, and full deployments inside at least two organisations each running more than 100 seats or devices. That B2B channel – if it converts – gives Meta a recurring revenue line and a hardware wedge into enterprise IT budgets that consumer devices alone cannot access. Reality Labs, Meta’s hardware division, has absorbed more than $50 billion in cumulative operating losses; Himel’s 10-million-unit target functions partly as a proof point for investors that the division can produce commercial volume at scale. Earlier AI wearable products from various manufacturers failed to achieve mainstream adoption, and their failure modes – poor execution, privacy friction, and unclear utility – map directly onto the risks the pendant faces. YourNewsClub treats the Wearables for Work pilot count as a more meaningful near-term indicator than the headline unit-sales target, because enterprise deployments generate hard data on actual workplace utility rather than retail purchase intent.
The harder question – whether the pendant succeeds where prior always-on wearables stumbled – will not resolve this year. But Your News Club expects the data-governance and consent debate to surface in public discourse well before the enterprise adoption metrics settle.