Apple’s long and choppy journey toward releasing a commercially available set of AR glasses just hit another snag. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the company has killed a second set of prototype smartglasses designed to connect directly to its Mac computers.
If that sounds like a somewhat limiting design, it wasn’t Apple’s first choice. The company initially wanted the iPhone to power it, Gurman writes, but engineers “ran into problems over how much processing power the handset could provide” and significant issues with battery drain.
Instead, engineers turned to the Mac, with its faster M processors and larger batteries or mains-connected design for the glasses (code-named N107). Perhaps unsurprisingly, given this limitation, “the Mac-connected product performed poorly during reviews with executives,” which caused this week’s cancellation. And it does sound like it would have had limited appeal, even among Mac users.
The glasses wouldn’t have been too far removed from Xreal One or Lenovo’s ThinkReality, according to Gurman’s sources. While it wouldn’t have Vision Pro’s virtual reality capabilities, it would lift one of the mixed reality headset’s most compelling features: the ability to project a giant virtual screen before the user’s eyes for a more immersive computing experience.
Without the bulk, strap and price tag of the full Vision Pro headset, this would be a more comfortable entry to what Apple likes to call Spatial Computing. The glasses reportedly had some neat ideas for real-world usage, like changing the tint of the lenses depending on what the wearer was doing to prevent unwanted interruptions from colleagues.
This latest disappointment may sound somewhat familiar, given the company was rumored to be abandoning AR glasses back in 2019 before delaying them ‘indefinitely’ back in 2023 (a version of the glasses that Gurman now refers to as “canceled” outright).
But despite these two failures, this isn’t necessarily the end of the road for Apple Glasses as a concept, and a report last week suggested that something is still on the map in the long run. Gurman states that Apple will continue to work on much of the underlying technology, including microLED screens, and while tethering to a Mac or iPhone isn’t ideal, the company does have success with products that supplement its other hardware, such as AirPods and the Apple Watch.
But augmented reality is significantly less proven than personal audio or smartwatches, and there’s a warning sign from Apple’s experience of Vision Pro which suggests that the company may ultimately fail to repeat its success elsewhere. That’s not so much in Vision Pro’s headset’s failure to become mainstream — which is to be expected given its $3,500 MSRP — but that the enthusiast early adopters who shelled out for the headset aren’t using their investment as much as expected, according to Gurman.
Tim Cook has a long history of hyping augmented reality as the future of computing, but it appears consumers will take more convincing. As seen through that lens, Apple’s fastidiousness in designing future AR hardware seems sensibly cautious: the next release could make or break the company's product category.
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