Have you ever put on a pair of glasses and suddenly felt like you were living ten years in the future?
I did exactly that last month in Shanghai. A friend handed me what looked like ordinary sunglasses. Thirty seconds later the thing was translating street signs in real time, identifying the dumpling shop across the road, and even whispering the current Bitcoin price in my ear. All without pulling out my phone. Honestly? It felt a little bit magical, and a whole lot inevitable.
While most of the Western tech world is still debating what the “post-smartphone” device will actually look like, China has quietly stopped debating and started shipping. Dozens of companies, hundreds of products, millions of units already in people’s pockets, on their faces, and sometimes (this one is wild) hanging around their necks.
The Hardware Nation Strikes Again
Everyone knows China builds pretty much everything physical in the modern world. What fewer people realize is how fast that manufacturing muscle can pivot when something new and exciting appears on the horizon.
When Meta launched its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2023 and quietly sold a couple million pairs, something predictable happened. Within months more than seventy Chinese companies had working alternatives. Some were cheap knock-offs, sure. But quite a few were genuinely better, cheaper, or just plain weirder in the best possible way.
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee (yes, that Kai-Fu Lee) put it bluntly in a recent interview: the same ecosystem that once made China the “iPhone factory of the world” is now perfectly positioned to make the defining hardware of the AI era. The engineers are here. The supply chains are here. The hunger is definitely here.
“Today the competition is on models and agents. But soon it will move to devices.”
Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of 01.AI
He’s not wrong. And the evidence is literally everywhere once you know where to look.
Smart Glasses: From Curiosity to Commodity
Let’s start with the category everyone expected to matter: AI-powered smart glasses.
Brands like Rokid, Inmo, and Xreal aren’t exactly household names in London or Los Angeles yet, but walk through any major Asian city and you’ll spot twenty-somethings wearing them on the subway. Lightweight frames, built-in cameras, tiny displays projected straight onto the lens, and (crucially) local language models that actually understand Mandarin slang and regional accents.
Price? Often half of what you’d pay for the American equivalents. And the feature race is brutal. One pair I tried could navigate me through a night market using only arrows floating in my vision. Another live-translated a menu faster than I could open Google Translate on my phone.
- Real-time translation overlay
- Navigation without looking down
- Instant object recognition and price comparison
- Hands-free photo and video (obviously)
- Some models even run small apps entirely on-device
It’s not perfect. Battery life still hovers around four to six hours of heavy use. They look a bit “tech bro” to some people. But the pace of improvement is ridiculous, month over month you notice the translation getting smoother, the display getting brighter, the frames getting lighter.
The Truly Strange Stuff Nobody Saw Coming
Here’s where things get properly Chinese in the most wonderful sense: the sheer willingness to ship something bizarre if there’s even a tiny market for it.
Take the “English-teaching neck pillow from hell” (my phrase, not theirs). A startup realized millions of Chinese parents want to practice English with their kids but feel embarrassed about their pronunciation. Solution? A U-shaped device you wear like a travel pillow with a microphone that covers your mouth, runs everything through Tencent’s or iFlyTek’s speech model, and then broadcasts perfectly accented English through a speaker near your chest.
Yes, you look like a low-budget sci-fi villain while wearing it. No, that seems to bother exactly zero of the parents buying them. At around three thousand yuan they’re selling faster than the factory can make them.
Or consider the credit-card-sized meeting recorder that’s become standard issue in half the startups in Beijing. Eight-meter pickup range, automatic transcription into perfect Mandarin, instant summaries, action-item extraction, and it uploads everything to your company’s cloud the moment you walk back into Wi-Fi range. I watched a founder use one during a pitch meeting and get a polished ten-page summary before the investors had even left the room.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Hardware has always been the silent multiplier in tech adoption.
Think about it. The iPhone didn’t win because it had the best touchscreen patents. It won because millions of people carried one in their pocket every single day and got comfortable with touch interfaces almost by accident. Familiarity breeds acceptance.
China is currently running that play at warp speed with AI.
Every weird necklace translator, every pair of slightly dorky glasses, every tiny AI box clipped to someone’s belt is another few hours of human interaction with large language models. Another few thousand prompts fed back into the training loop. Another vote of confidence that speaking to machines is normal.
“When people outside China are still asking what the AI device of the future looks like, the market here is already full of them. This creates a feedback loop that makes the AI itself better, faster.”
Beijing-based tech consultant Tom van Dillen
And feedback loops are everything in this game.
The Data Advantage Nobody Wants to Talk About
Here’s the uncomfortable truth Western regulators lose sleep over: every one of these devices is a data vacuum cleaner, and most of them are made by companies perfectly happy to feed whatever they collect straight into the next training run.
Privacy-conscious Europeans might buy exactly one pair of smart glasses and then disable the microphone forever. Chinese consumers? They’re wearing them on dates, in business meetings, while teaching their kids English, during night-market food runs. The behavioral dataset being assembled right now is staggering in both size and richness.
In my experience covering tech in Asia for the last decade, this willingness to trade privacy for convenience has always been the unspoken superpower of Chinese consumer tech. It’s why facial recognition went from creepy to commonplace in about eighteen months. It’s why super-apps know what you had for lunch before you’ve finished paying. And it’s why the next generation of Chinese AI models might understand casual human conversation better than anything trained exclusively on Reddit threads and public YouTube subtitles.
But Will Any of This Actually Go Global?
This is the billion-dollar question, maybe literally.
Some products already are. Rokid glasses are available on Amazon. Certain translation devices have English packaging and show up at CES. But the really interesting stuff, the neck pillows and hyper-local meeting gadgets, feels almost culturally untranslatable.
Then there’s the trust problem. After years of “Huawei might be spying” headlines, plenty of Western consumers will hesitate before putting a Chinese company’s camera two inches from their eyeball eight hours a day.
Fair or not, brand perception matters. Apple spent decades building a reputation that lets it charge $3,500 for lightweight titanium glasses with a fruit logo. Most Chinese brands are still fighting the “cheap knock-off” stigma, even when the product is objectively superior.
The iPhone Test
Kai-Fu Lee’s warning keeps echoing in my head: you don’t win the platform war by having eighty decent devices. You win it by having the one device a billion people can’t imagine living without.
China clearly has the manufacturing chops. It has the entrepreneurial energy. It has the data flywheel spinning faster than anywhere else on Earth.
What it doesn’t have, yet, is that one magical product that makes the rest of the world say “shut up and take my money” the way they did in 2007 when Steve Jobs pulled a touchscreen slab out of an envelope.
Maybe it’ll be elegant smart glasses that make smartphones feel primitive. Maybe it’ll be something we can’t even imagine yet, something that only makes sense after you’ve worn it for a week.
Either way, the race is very much on. And right now, the workshop of the world is working three shifts.
Next time someone tells you the AI device revolution is still years away, show them a photo of a Chinese parent wearing a glowing blue neck pillow while proudly teaching their six-year-old the difference between “their,” “there,” and “they’re.”
The future isn’t coming. In at least one corner of the planet, it’s already being worn around people’s necks.
