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Meta is making a smartwatch code-named “Malibu 2” with Health tracking, built-in Meta AI, coming sometime this year.
Before you think this is doomed to fail, I want you to sit with the business structure here for a second, because it’s genuinely revealing about what Meta thinks it is now.
Meta killed this exact project in 2022. Pulled the plug on three different camera watch prototypes when Reality Labs started posting the kinds of losses that make Wall Street send strongly worded letters.
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So why did they decide, after publicly abandoning it, that 2025 is the moment to try again? The answer, when you follow the org chart, is the Ray-Ban glasses.
Those glasses sold around 10 million units. For Meta, that’s proof that people will voluntarily strap Meta hardware to their bodies if it looks normal enough.
So now the logical next move on that product roadmap is a watch, which is even less weird-looking than camera sunglasses, and which sits directly against your skin, collecting biometric data all day.
That last part is where I want you to pay attention. Meta’s core business, the one that funds everything, runs on behavioral signals.
What you click, what you watch, and how long you pause on something before scrolling. That data pipeline is 20 years old and deeply refined.
A health-tracking wearable is a new pipe into that same system. Think of resting heart rate, sleep quality, and stress responses.
Unlike your Instagram feed, your body doesn’t know it’s being optimized. Meta hasn’t announced what they plan to do with health data from Malibu 2.
They haven’t had to yet. But they have announced, repeatedly and through their actual product decisions over two decades, exactly how they think about user data.
Meanwhile, Apple, the company that turned health tracking into a legitimate clinical tool and spent years getting the FDA to take it seriously, is sitting on a 2027 roadmap for its competing AI glasses. The AI pin might also arrive in the same year.
The wearables category that Apple essentially defined with the original Apple Watch is about to be seriously contested by a company whose entire business model is structurally opposed to what Apple has been selling for a decade: privacy as a feature.
I’m not saying don’t buy the Meta watch. I’m saying you should understand exactly what you’re buying into when you do. Meta has been very consistent about who they are. The watch is just a new surface area for it.
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Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Herby has a healthy obsession with all things Apple, especially the iPhone. He loves to rip things apart to see how they work. He is responsible for the editorial direction, strategy, and growth of Gotechtor.
Herby Jasmin
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