True AR glasses to replace the iPhone may be Apple’s top priority

Apple CEO Tim Cook “cares about nothing else” other than the company mastering true augmented reality glasses devices, an engineer at the company has reportedly said.

Speaking to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the unnamed employee said Cook was determined to beat Meta to bringing an “industry leading” pair of specs to market. Meta’s Project Orion glasses were previewed last year but are still thought to be years away.

The goal is the “only thing he’s really spending his time on,” from a development point of view, the engineer reportedly said of Cook. It has been reported for years that Cook sees augmented reality glasses as the eventual replacement for the best iPhone models, but the tech is still some way away from being ready.

Gurman reports that multiple technical challenges still need to be overcome before Apple can create a compelling alternative to its marquee product, especially at a compelling price. Heaven knows how much this product would cost when the Vision Pro is currently £3,500.

In his Power On newsletter, the well-connected reporter wrote: “A variety of technologies need to be perfected, including extraordinarily high-resolution displays, a high-performance chip and a tiny battery that could offer hours of power each day. Apple also needs to figure out applications that make such a device as compelling as the iPhone. And all this has to be available in large quantities at a price that won’t turn off consumers.”

In the meantime, Apple is planning an “interim” solution, according to Gurman, that could enable the company to compete with Meta’s existing products – the collaboration with Ray-Ban. They would have cameras and microphones, but also benefit from Siri and the AI-based Visual Intelligence feature that surfaces information from the user’s environment. According to Gurman, Apple still has some reservations about enabling the glasses to capture images, for privacy reasons.

According to the same reporter, the next major release in the sector is the Vision Pro 2 headset, which may be lighter, more affordable and capable of a wired connection with Mac computers.

Opinion

Apple may be targeting the true AR as the product to lead the charge after the iPhone, it’s hard to see AR glasses having close to the level of success.

The iPhone has been such a juggernaut for more than 15 years because it took a product that had existed for well over a century – the telephone – and turned it into a handheld PC with a camera and dozens of other gadgets that had always required separate items. Gaming machines, video playback devices, music players, calculators, navigation devices, and so on…

It’s possible that a pair of AR glasses could be the eventual successor to the iPhone – arguably the peak consumer tech invention of this century – but it feels unlikely.

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