This is Optimizera weekly newsletter sent every Friday from a senior Verge reviewer Victoria Song that analyzes and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps and other gadgets that promise to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10 a.m. EST. Report yourself Optimizer Here.
I had a major problem unboxing my Meta Ray-Ban Display review unit. To control the glasses display, you must wear a separate neural wristband on your dominant wrist. This isn’t a problem for most people, but I test wearables for a living. I always wear dual-joint smartwatches. On this particular day, my dominant wrist was occupied by the Google Pixel Watch 4. If the Neural Band and the Pixel Watch 4 couldn’t work well together, I was in a real crisis.
Luckily they did he did have fun together. However, the Oura Ring 4 on my right index finger did not do this. It interfered with scrolling gestures, so I had to switch it to my other hand.
Perform a facepalm that would make Captain Picard proud.
Later that day, I attended to a dumpster fire where my inbox was located. Various wearable device companies have launched a siege. Have I finished testing their device? Would I be interested in testing one more? This is anecdotal, but I’ve been offered more wearables in 2025 than any other year in my career. I wanted to scream. I only have two wrists, 10 fingers (only six of which are suitable for sharp rings), two ears, a chest, a neck and a face on which to test an increasing number of gadgets designed to be worn 24/7/365.
For most of my professional career, I wholeheartedly agreed that this was a sporadic problem that I volunteered to solve and that I was paid, paid, to solve. Except that over the past two years, I’ve had the feeling that Gigantic Tech increasingly wants more people – perhaps all of them – to live like me.
This fear first gripped me when I tested the Samsung Galaxy Ring last year. As I wrote in the review, it was not a device designed to stand on its own. While you could employ it as an alternative to a smartwatch, it is intended as an accessory for the Galaxy Watch. This is a way to get you into Samsung’s orbit. As sharp rings gained popularity, an increasing number of friends, family, colleagues, peers, and readers requested my reading on the Oura Ring. Most were looking for something more convenient and with longer battery life than a smartwatch, but turned pale at the thought of giving up noticeable notifications or touch alerts. Many people looked me in the eye when I said that Oura Ring works best in conjunction with a smartwatch, not instead of it, because Very People.
Now add to this the recent influx of AI hardware.
Humane’s ill-fated AI pin was something you wore on your lapel, but it couldn’t replace your phone or smartwatch. When I tested Bee, an always-listening AI wearable, I had to decide whether it took up a constrained amount of space on my wrist or was pinned to my neck. I was somewhat relieved that, for all its faults, Friend was something to wear around the neck, a relatively unused body part in wearable technology… so far.
It’s clear to me that in the search for what comes after the smartphone, tech companies have decided that they should survive – and ultimately IN — our bodies. (See: brain-computer interfaces and continuous glucose monitors.)
I wish I could write this off as my paranoia. Unfortunately, this is evident in what technology executives are saying about the next wave of hands-free computing.
Earlier this summer, I spoke with Sandeep Waraich, product manager for Google Pixel Wearables, and Rishi Chandra, Google’s vice president of Fitbit and health. They both told me explicitly that Google predicts that “the future will be a diverse set of accessories” embedded with artificial intelligence. They told me that the appeal of sharp watches and headphones is that they are existing products that you already employ.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said something similar Sources“Between 1 and 2 billion people wear vision correction glasses every day. Is there a world where in five or seven years the vast majority of these glasses are AI glasses to some extent?” Meanwhile, Apple is also said to be turning to sharp glasses, and it’s no secret what its stance is on the product ecosystem. The more you buy, the better.
Add to that Samsung’s fun with the Galaxy Ring and whatever the hell Sam Altman and Jony Ive at OpenAI are doing, and you have compelling evidence that the top Gigantic Tech players are working to bring us as many gadgets as possible. It would be nice if this could be improved one they can be worn, but the challenge is that no two bodies are ever the same. You’ll never fall asleep with sharp sleep monitoring glasses, sharp rings are inadvisable for lifting weights, and sharp watches just aren’t comfortable for some people.
Call me a cynic. I fully believe that all these companies will tout that you will have a choice in what accessories you employ and at the same time you will have a choice feel like you lose if you don’t buy everything.
It’s not just Gigantic Tech. A few months ago, Health Secretary RFK Jr., speaking about continuous glucose monitors and fitness trackers, said he wanted a wearable device everyone American in four years. Combine this with the push for sharp watches, sharp rings and sharp glasses? Welcome to my life, darling.
This existential crisis has been brought to you by AND Vergecast hotline I helped answer earlier this week. The caller asked if they should start life with two smartwatches. The Apple Watch alone was no longer sufficient to track strength training AND action. Should I add Garmin and switch between products to get the best possible performance?
My answer remains instinctive: “Absolutely not.”
My tolerance for this multi-device hell is high, but it’s still hell. Look at me. I live in constant double tanning, negated by AI necklaces and 30-minute data review sessions every morning when I wake up and after every workout. My eyes hurt from constantly looking at the displays of my sharp glasses. (They are rarely optimally placed!) When I wear a CGM, I end up analyzing the impact of every piece of food that passes through my mouth. Every time I receive a notification, various devices vibrate on my body to let me know that my neighbor has passed by my Nest Doorbell. As I wrote in a recent one OptimizerI need to schedule detox days to ensure this AND employ these tools, not the other way around.
If the goal of all this is to make life better, then Gigantic Tech needs to think long and challenging about whether the problems they are trying to solve were problems at all. Take it from me, a wearable maximalist: I’m exhausted, I’m running out of body parts, and with each passing day I feel more like a cyborg than a human. What if we blindly race into a future where all Is that how you feel? We’ve lost sight of why any of us loved technology in the first place.
Photography: Victoria Song / The Verge