Update 5/14/2026: After sharing frustrations over shipping and message deletion, I and at least one other Discord member have been deleted from the Discord server. Since it’s impossible to have more than one Discord account, I’m just totally in the dark over here now! Anyway here’s the announcement they posted shortly after banning me:
So yeah, they might start making glasses in June.
Introduction
I have a long-running interest in wearable computers. One of the most challenging parts to get right is the display, and modern commercial efforts typically skip the display entirely (Meta glasses) or make it a big binocular thing that covers half your face (Apple Vision Pro).
Brilliant Labs is a company that’s been doing interesting stuff with displays from the beginning. Their first product was the Monocle, a little plastic puck you could clip over one lens of your glasses. It had a tiny camera, a microphone, two touch sensors, and a little screen which can display about 8 lines of 26 characters each. Then, in 2024 they brought out the Frame, which was essentially a Monocle but built into the world’s goofiest pair of glasses. In August 2025, they announced the Halo, a more normal-looking set of glasses with a better screen and some bone-conduction speakers.
The Halo looks really neat! It’s more or less exactly what I want out of a wearable display unit: discreet display, speakers, microphone, camera, all wireless and built into frames that aren’t totally bizarre-looking. And, just as important, they’re the most open/hackable of the smart glasses producers I’m aware of. They’ve even got schematics for prior products up on their website, and that’s rare!
I really want Brilliant to succeed, but they keep doing stuff that’s detrimental to their reputation and, in my opinion, longevity as a serious hardware company:
- Constant delays in production
- Insane dissent-squashing on Discord
- Won’t release even the slightest details about API/SDK before hardware ships
- Basically guaranteed to drop all dev / support for the current device as soon as it ships… see Frame and Monocle and also:
Production delays
The original plan was that they’d ship their new device, the Halo in November 2025. In fact, if you looked at their website circa November 2025, you’d have been forgiven for thinking the devices were already produced and just waiting to ship: “Order Now” button at the top of the page, “Buy Now” button, and “Shipping starts late Q4 2025” (hah!).
Since then, every month has seen some form of excuse:
- Well, we actually meant Q4 2025
- We’re beta-testing in December, but we’ll definitely start production in January 2026
- We need a little more time to verify build quality (implying building has already begun), hopefully we’ll get mass production going before Chinese New Year
- Chinese New Year!
- “Scheduling issues”
- Did you know communist countries celebrate May Day? No way we could have possibly known this
Here’s a timeline of official communications from their #announcements channel:
(Here’s where it gets really fun)
And then, “hit[ting] the ground sprinting forward” comes down to this wet fart of an “announcement”:
Only good vibes allowed
As you might imagine, the repeated delays have people pretty annoyed, and they’re expressing that annoyance on Discord… but the Brilliant team keeps deleting the messages.
The screenshot above shows the remains of a brief conversation on the Brilliant Labs Discord which went roughly like this:
User 1: The site said “in stock” when I ordered the Halo in November, and since then we’ve just had repeated delays. I think I’m going to cancel now before they go out of business.
Me: [gif of Lucy yanking the football from Charlie Brown] It seems like we’re as close now as we’ve ever been, with them assuring us production is actually happening. Yeah, if they yank the football away yet again, then it’s surely time to cancel. On the other hand, fool me once, shame on you, fool me 6-7 times shame on me.
Me: I’m not too concerned because mine are ordered through work…
User 2 (not deleted): Be patient, they’ve already released two products. It’s a small team, and I find them very transparent about their progress. I’ve unfortunately backed real vaporware before, and I can assure you this is not the same situation at all!
Me: Yes, I would never have ordered except for that track record of actually shipping.
As you can see, everything except the one entirely uncritical message was deleted, and I was put on a 1 day time-out lest I spread more ~bad vibes~.
More deletions
Obviously, having “before” images to go with “after” is more compelling than a trust-me reconstruction, so I’ve started keeping an eye out and screenshotting messages I suspect might get deleted. Here’s a few I’ve noticed in the last few days:
(in that last one, the “cheerleader” started typing as soon as the mildly-critical message went up, but bobak acted so fast the original was deleted before the supportive message got posted. bobak then sent heart & praying-hands emoji reactions to the cheerleader’s message)
It seems like they’re also starting to just convert questions about shipping into “tickets”, which then get moved to an inaccessible location and deleted from the main channel:
Now, it seems to me that “when exactly are you going to stop making excuses and ship the damn things” is a reasonable question that a lot of people are asking, and it might be useful for other people to see the answer so they can stop asking again and again!
Discord is a shitty way to provide support
I’ve griped about Brilliant’s Discord before, and how it can be particularly hard to actually discuss anything beyond surface-level excitement and questions about ship dates. No, seriously, if I pop in and check the channel it’s almost guaranteed there’s a question about ship dates in the last hour, and the same response (“check the announcements channel for the latest”) unless the question has just been deleted instead.
Part of this is due to the way they release hardware: at any given time, the hardware currently available for actual use (Frame) is very likely getting memory-holed in favor of the new hotness coming Q4 2025, uh Q1 2026, uh Q2, honest we promise! So anyone who actually might have real hardware in their hands is getting ignored by the Brilliant staff who are much more incentivized to answer questions and generate hype for the new thing. I can’t remember the last time somebody who actually owned a Frame asked a question or posted anything about using it.
Another problem is that Discord is just really poorly suited to organizing and presenting information. This doesn’t just apply to Brilliant, it’s every Discord, Even the forum-ish feature sucks to use, and of course people don’t like to put in the mental effort to compose a proper post, so they just go directly to the chat channels anyway and the “support forum” languishes.
But there’s also a weird, uh, parasocial/cheerleady aspect to the interactions there, where every question has to be prefaced with “this is SO AMAZING” and the staff responds with fire emojis or whatever:
Or a big old round of unqualified praise for the decision to go for a third round in the release-and-abandon product cycle (more on that below):
And also the occasional vicious little dipshit who thinks he’s helping by attacking a disabled person asking about accessibility features (notice me, senpai!)
I guess some of this comes from the adjacency to AI, which has inherited some of the web3/nft/blockchain vibes: wealth and AI waifus will come to you but only if you forward this message to 8 friends in the next hour! I do believe in fairies! Diamond hands or NGMI!
But the result is: legitimate questions get lost in a flood of “omg so fire fr fr” messages, and criticisms get attacked by teenagers who watched Iron Man too many times (although that’s starting to taper off as said teenagers get frustrated over not receiving their glasses).
When it’s sold out, it’s sold out
There was an interesting note in the Halo announcement email that went out to their mailing list:
BUT available supply of Halo will be limited -- so when it's sold out, it's sold out.
When someone brought this up on the Brilliant Labs Discord, one of the founders confirmed that yes, they’re making a very limited number and “like Frame, it’ll be sold out”.
The intent is to sell this batch and move on to designing the next iteration. That’s how it was with the Monocle; as soon as the Frame was announced, the Monocle went on a fire sale and was largely excised from Brilliant’s website, although to their credit they’ve left the docs up. The same thing happened to Frame with the Halo announcement–just take a look at what happened to the Frame codebase:
And surely they’ll get around to filling in this section of the Frame documentation any day now:
Is this sustainable? Is there an end goal in sight, or just a continual stream of one-off products, produced and abandoned? Will there be a point where Brilliant declares yes, the HaloV7 is finally good enough, we’re going to produce this for a while and actually support it? It feels kind of weird that the previous 2 iterations were immediately dropped, memory-holed, as soon as the next gen was announced (not even shipped) – and I doubt I’m the only one who feels that way, but after what I’ve seen on the Discord I have no doubt that any criticisms of this strategy are simply deleted.
For all three products, there’s never really been a period where you could read third-party reviews of a Brilliant product, stew on it a couple weeks, decide yeah it sounds interesting, and then go order that product. You have to pre-order, wait, and just hope it turns out to be good. If Halo actually turns out to be amazing and I want to tell my friends to buy it, I fully expect they won’t be able to, because Brilliant will be working on their v4 product. It’s hype-driven development, getting people to buy your prototypes and test runs based on a couple highly-controlled demo videos and some optimistic specs.
Time to cancel your order?
I don’t actually think Brilliant is scamming people. I believe they are truly doing their best to produce and ship the device they’ve promised, and through a combination of ineptitude and supplier/assembler shenanigans they keep falling behind. They’ve already got the money, there’s surely only a slow trickle of new orders coming in at this point, if they were just going to bug out with the cash they’d have already done it.
That said, they are a small company, and as far as I know their sole revenue stream is selling their smart glasses. They have about all the money they’re ever going to get from selling Halo glasses, and now they’re burning through that as they try to get the devices built and out the door. Every month spent wrestling with Foxconn is a month of payroll, office rent, etc. coming out of a runway that’s not getting any longer. They’ve delayed 6 months already; I don’t know if they have the funds to delay another 6 months, or even 2.
My glasses were ordered through work, so I’m fine taking a chance. If it was my own money, I’d give through the end of May, then I’d start demanding a refund unless multiple people were reporting shipping notifications.
In conclusion
As I said at the start, I actually really want Brilliant to succeed. I want small companies to make niche, open hardware and sell it and make money. But as I’ve laid out above, they just keep making these inexplicable decisions and doing it all in a haze of cryptocurrency-style emoji, egged on by weirdo AI-ideas-guys who can’t wait to turn themselves into a meat puppet steered around by talking eyeglasses.
I want them to be upfront about the delays they’re experiencing, and the reasons for those delays. If Foxconn is jerking them around, just say so. I want them to develop some actual customer service and information practices, rather than shoving everything into Discord. I want them to come up with, and share, a business plan that extends beyond selling hype glasses like they were limited-run Nikes.
Asssuming Halo glasses actually do get produced and shipped and arrive at my house, I’ll write up my impressions of them and post them on this blog. Even, or rather, ESPECIALLY if they turn out to be amazing, because like I said above I do actually want Brilliant Labs to succeed and I want to get a neat wearable computing device out of this!