After the reported cancellation of Apple’s Mac-tethered AR glasses, Apple is still working towards making a pair of standalone AR glasses. It just might take a little bit longer to get right, reports Mark Gurman from Bloomberg.
Late last month, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple had scrapped plans for an AR glasses product that would tether to your Mac for use:
The company shuttered the program this week, according to people with knowledge of the move. The now-canceled product would have looked like normal glasses but include built-in displays and require a connection to a Mac, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work wasn’t public. An Apple representative declined to comment.
Despite the fact that this sounds like devastating news, it actually isn’t. This cancellation was just for the tethered pair of AR glasses, something like the RayNeo Air 2S glasses that I reviewed last month. Apple’s pair would’ve been much higher quality (and more expensive) I’m sure, but same idea.
Nonetheless, Apple hardware chief John Ternus doesn’t want another flop on his hands, according to Gurman. For that reason, the company is going to take its time on the standalone dream pair of AR glasses, something that would more closely resemble Meta’s $10K prototype pair that they showed off last year.
Apple is still working on standalone glasses. It’s just going to take time. In the meanwhile, the companies Vision Products Group is still working on all of the key underlying tech for such a product:
In any case, it seems like the new boss of Apple’s Vision Products Group, John Ternus, doesn’t want another flop on his hands. So he is going to take his time and be cautious. I’m told that Apple’s long-term goal of standalone AR glasses remains intact, and the company will keep working on underlying technology — like screens and silicon — to help make such a device more feasible.
Top comment by iJon
How about CarPlay for your head? We already have a CPU in our pockets. Make the glasses a display device with support for gestures and let that iPhone in your pocket do the heavy lifting. Just need to make it low latency.
Regardless of their progress though, it’s still at least 3-5 years away. visionOS certainly lays the foundation for a pair of AR glasses, so hopefully Apple brings something truly interesting to the table.
What do you think of this rumor? Let us know in the comments.
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