Pickle preorder cancelled
Pickle, the AI AR glasses startup, cancelled its first batch of preorders and issued full refunds after missing its end-of-June delivery deadline.
Snapshot · Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast
Nothing Beats Phone 4b with Ear 3a?
Explore episode
Jul 10, 2026
Where this was said
Meta Glasses LED Exploit Update
At 9:13 · chapter starts 7:37
It's a story the crew has followed since Meta's glasses launch: people were physically drilling out the recording-indicator LED on their Meta Glasses and then recording covertly without any visible warning. The reason it worked for so long is almost poetic in its simplicity — the glasses' firmware detected that current was still flowing through the LED circuit and assumed the light was functioning normally, even when the physical LED was absent. Joanna Stern's investigative video helped surface the exploit publicly, and Meta even acknowledged it at their last glasses launch event. Now they're finally doing something about it with a mandatory software update, though the crew hopes it can also retroactively catch glasses that have already been tampered with.
Meta LED Drilling Fix: Why This Privacy Problem Took So Long
Meta is pushing a mandatory software update to block the exploit where users physically drilled out the recording-indicator LED on Meta Glasses to record covertly without any warning light. The glasses couldn't detect the tampering because current was still flowing through the circuit even with no LED present.
Pickle Collapses: The Vaporware AR Glasses Startup Finally Admits Defeat
Pickle, the startup that promised binocular full-color AR glasses with a memory-based OS for under $1,000, has cancelled its first preorder batch and refunded deposits after missing its end-of-June deadline. The crew predicted this in January when they argued the live demos were probably fake.
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