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Apple reportedly shelved its plans to release AR glasses any time soon

86 points by vthallam 4y ago

isaacfrond 4y ago
It's been discussed here in these threads as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34432848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34432848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34422843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34422843
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  There is little to no discussion in the linked threads.
aliqot 4y ago
Receiving these today and while not meeting the definition for AR, Im excited to see the outcome. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nreal-air https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nreal-air * I've been toying with the idea of some type of headmount display, an SBC with battery pack in my bib pockets, and a twiddler 3 or tiny bluetooth keyboard for input in my hand. With the amount of microsd storage and SBC computational power out now for small sums, it's tempting. Shout out to Steve Mann and Thad Starner for inspiring young me with their work on this stuff. As a little country bumpkin I didn't think I'd ever live to see this type of tech. Fun fact: Steve Mann is responsible for HDR video and smart watches https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5903ff66e4fcb573ba3b29fd/t/590cb58d1b10e36084e60cfa/1494005138300/smartwatch98.jpg https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5903ff66e4fcb573ba3b2... http://wearcam.org/hdr.htm http://wearcam.org/hdr.htm
- vxNsr 4y ago
  I thank you for your sacrifice. I thank everyone who buys half baked AR/VR gear as early adopters, proving there's a market while at the same time parting with large amounts of cash for disappointment. I'm not ready to invest anything in this space but I want it to succeed.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Thanks, I think it's the remnants of mom never getting me a powerglove as a kid.
- dchuk 4y ago
  If these can realistically and without eye strain produce a giant virtual monitor when connected to a MacBook Pro, I’ll buy these very quickly. What are you going to use them for?
  - aliqot 4y ago
    virtual monitors, on an m2. Ill come back and let you know how it goes.
    - aliqot 4y ago
      It worked. I got them about an hour ago, plugged them in and they immediately worked as a mirrored monitor. I decided to run Nebula, which attempted upgrade, upgrade failed on step 2. Running nebula again didn't prompt for upgrading again, neither after reinstall. I searched around online and found a link to this page which when used in chrome allowed me to install/patch the latest. Since then, I've run it in triple monitor mode, and normal mode, both as an extra monitor and as a mirror. Some odd things I noticed, if you dont have it situated on your nose correctly, the corners can be fuzzy. Also, I played a game with the settings turned all the way up and the framerate in the glasses was better than the m2's laptop screen itself, which was odd, considering I can run multiple games at the same time with browser tabs etc no problem, so the glasses are doing something apple isn't. one button on the right side turns off the display so you can see in front of you, another button does nothing that I can tell. the audio is very quiet, and seems to come from in your head near your ears. some things I dont like are that these glasses sit a bit in front of your face, so there is some light bleed, which considering how bright these are means nothing since they're transparent for no reason at all. You will have a hard time seeing whats behind the brightness when your display is turned on. I stood in front of a 70 inch TV at full brightness, and what I see in the glasses is the same as what I see at 5 feet of distance. One note about nebula, there is some jitter, like the movement of typing. Luckily there is a setting that allowed me to anchor the zero point of where my head is because when I first ran it I was sitting upward, and once the virtual screens launched, I leaned back in my chair and the monitors didnt follow my head. A way to 'pin' the displays would be cool if you want to be in static mode or gyro mode. By the comments other people left, I thought the experience would be lackluster, and the first 5 seconds having it on were fairly underwhelming, but these are pretty great. I can code in them just fine, play games just fine, virtual monitors just fine, everything they said they'd be has been fine. I want to try the realtime subtitles next, since I have a relative who can't hear for shit and this would be a gamechanger, though they'd have a hard time seeing through the display unless they were in bright daylight. Oh, also it was shipped in the box itself, like a retail box you'd buy headphones in, with a label slapped on it. The box is well made to withstand a ginger toss by a delivery driver on to the concrete. Prepare yourself though, the parts are anchored to the box and everything comes flying out if you dont start off from the goal of just trying to disassemble the whole box. I assumed the initial flap you open will let you remove things, but each step and removal of each object requires you disassemble some other part of the packaging. Best just take the whole box apart.
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  I was interested in these after reading your comment until I read the specs — Field of View: 46°
- aantix 4y ago
  Have you tried coding with these glasses?
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    Yea. It’s doable, but I found that I needed to scale the UI to read comfortably. For normal UI elements, I mostly knew what the buttons did and didn’t need to read them, but its like using a TV as a computer monitor… its just far enough away that everything felt too small. The resolution isn’t quite high enough for fine text details and unlike VR goggles, glasses aren’t as secured to your head so it shakes more. Again, making focusing on text harder. That said, they’re good enough for use in a pinch (eg. on a plane, I tried this). They prove the tech is around the corner. They work, they do what they’re advertised, they just need to refine a bit. 1-2 years if people keep buying them and the proper version would be made I suspect. But they work today if you’re really into it. Surprising, but I actually like the oculus screen sharing, in terms of ability to focus and read the screen. The headset is too heavy and resolution too small, but I like the experience. The NReal is slightly worse in some regards, and slightly better in others. Edit: they have 2 modes. One is as a USBC monitor, and the other is where your computer (via an app) projects virtual monitors that you see when spinning your head via accelerometer. Mode 1 is good, mode 2 is glitchy. I couldn’t use mode 2 for anything real.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  Ah yes, I had my finger above the buy button yesterday but I need to get a new phone to use it on the go which I am holding off on. Please write down your experience; it really looks pretty great from the reviews. No batteries in the glasses are great as well.
- 33955985 4y ago
  I hope they work for you. They did not for me, unfortunately. The text was too fuzzy to not give me a headache and something about it gave me motion sickness.
- iuafhiuah 4y ago
  I've had a pair of these since September 2022 and tried them on quite a few things. The 45* viewing angle is not really a problem, because it's not for VR and VR support is _very_ limited (currently just specific Android devices or with CloudXR on specific GPUs with USB-C DP-alt output). The device support for AR functionality is better but there aren't any killer apps. Although there was a recent tech demo of them being used for live captioning real life.[0] However, they work fantastically as a _dumb_ external display on any computer with USB-C DP-alt output. Tested on MacOS, Linux and Windows 7. My glasses with the firmware revision from ~November 2022 works without issue on M1 MBPs, 2018 Dell XPS and the SteamDeck. Prior firmware revisions had several issues with misrepresenting their capabilities to the host system causing unstable framerates so older reviews which mention this may no longer be applicable. Best usecase I've found is for watching films on a plane or in bed. You can comfortably lay flat, staring at the ceiling without the cable getting in the way. But there is an amount of reflection on the screen when used in bright places which can be annoying. I got mine cheaper imported from Japan. If you're in the UK do not bother trying to get them from EE. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LauvOTnZMZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LauvOTnZMZg
  - dchuk 4y ago
    Given these are AR, when you're using them on an airplane to simulate a big monitor, how does that fit into the constrained physical world you're in where there's a seat two feet in front of your face?
    - aliqot 4y ago
      Politely ask the people seated ahead of you to enjoy the lavatory for the duration of your movie.
    - iuafhiuah 4y ago
      They come with a plastic insert you can clip on the front so you have a solid background to look at.[0] [0] https://resource.nreal.ai/web/images/air/air_packaging_verticle.jpg https://resource.nreal.ai/web/images/air/air_packaging_verti...
st3ve445678 4y ago
Good, I don't think the masses are clamoring for AR glasses and if its not an amazing product, it would probably be a flop. Seems like current tech just isn't there yet to make these things tolerable to the average person.
- oblio 4y ago
  > Good, I don't think the masses are clamoring for AR glasses Oh, I think they are. But they want the SF movie AR glasses. Aka regular glasses just with a ton of extra tech. What I mean by this is that AR glasses look a lot like the next major OS. Mainframes - minicomputers - workstations - PCs - laptops - tables - smartphones - (minor impact compared to rest) smartwatches/wireless headphones/earbuds - ... - AR glasses.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    AR as a principle assuming arbitrarily advanced and unobtrusive technology (and, perhaps, ignoring social pantopticon concerns) that works for most people even those without perfect vision would probably be pretty transformative. Look at anything/anyone and have basically a HUD overlaid with all sort of information. I suspect we're a very far way away from that.
    - WeylandYutani 4y ago
      Yes what you describe is what I first saw in Deus Ex- a videogame from 2000. We're still far away from that level of tech. As for the panopticon: it would be a veritable gold mine for hackers and the surveillance state.
kayodelycaon 4y ago
This doesn’t really surprise me. Apple is really good at miniaturization but they also have an aversion to cables. If they still can’t get an Apple Watch to smoothly and consistently stay connected to an iPhone, AR is pretty much DoA unless they want to run the whole package on the glasses.
- wil421 4y ago
  When I read there was a cable that attached to your hip I knew it wasn’t coming out anytime soon. I couldn’t see Apple of all companies doing something like that. It sounds more like a prototype than anything else.
  - mattgperry 4y ago
    I believe these are the AR glasses, not the mixed-reality headset supposedly coming this year.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Cable is cool, isn't it? https://i.insider.com/5273e2a669bedd7c06afe99f https://i.insider.com/5273e2a669bedd7c06afe99f Anyway Apple can make something uncool to something fine. See Apple Pencil gen1.
nerdjon 4y ago
TBH I am a bit disappointed, I was holding out hope that maybe Apple could finally be the one to crack this. But at the same time I am kinda glad not to see another half baked AR come out, especially from someone like Apple (or Google) that has a big enough name that many will know about it.
- chadlavi 4y ago
  They still could be. Just not now.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  Unfortunately, yes this seems to be the state of matters currently regardless of cash invested, similar to ie fully automated driving. And since Apple is very consistent to wall-gardening everything it can, its usefulness would be limited hard to Apple-only ecosystem as much as possible, which means basically useless expensive product for most of humanity (sorry for this jab but it reflects how Apple does its business, monetarily successful or not)
samtheDamned 4y ago
I wonder if the leak of the design was a way for them to gauge how the public would respond to a device like that and the sharp negative response was all they needed to hear to put it on the back shelf for a few more years.
stephc_int13 4y ago
I wonder if the prototypes they built really are too weak to launch or if Apple management is overestimating the risk of launching this product.
Aperocky 4y ago
What happened to glasses that had a display but isn't AR? I don't need to augment reality, I just want to maybe read things on the fly.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  That’s still on track to be announced this year and released (may be this year?)
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Why not use an Apple Watch? I think the issue with a Google-glass style device is that you can see just as much info on a watch. We already have watches and are socially familiar with them, and watches are out of the face when not needed. What info could you need that isn’t accessible by a watch? Especially considering a watch can be a simple touchscreen but a glasses UI is…? The NReal Air is pretty cool, and it’s just glasses with a screen, but is it compelling enough for the price tag? Especially an apple price tag? It’s just a “head mounted monitor”. The problem is that moving around makes it shake and hard to focus on, and it requires a cable to get data and power. Apple probably could make it wireless with Apple Watch internals, but then it wouldn’t be able to stream graphics very well.
  - grumple 4y ago
    The watch has a very small display surface. Glasses can potentially use your whole field of vision. You could display an entire room full of monitors rendering full size web browsers and other applications. So there's a huge difference in what info you could see.
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      I don’t think “data on the fly” and “display a room full of web browsers” has a lot of overlap. The NReal is a “full vision(ish)” glasses, so that’s available, but you probably couldn’t produce that wire-free. It it’s doable if you’re willing to plug-in when needed (so not on the fly). You could do apple-watch-in-the-eye (Google glass basically) but that probably couldn’t sustain browsers or monitor images for long. It would work for things like notifications though… which the watches already do.
pavlov 4y ago
The report says that Apple's $3,000 mixed reality headset is still planned for this year, probably followed up by a cheaper (but still expensive!) $1,500 model by 2025. IMHO this would be good news for Meta which has spent years figuring out how to ship this technology in a $400 consumer-level unit. Apple's entry would validate the market, and make it more obvious what a good deal the Quest actually is (from a pure hardware POV — the quality of the software deal remains in argument).
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  I agree the Quest is a good deal at $399 (I paid $299, the original price) but is something still a good deal if it's no longer used and on a shelf with similar dusty inert equipment?
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Well, it's certainly a better deal than paying $3,000 for the same result? What I'm trying to say is that Apple introducing such an expensive unit will make people take another look at the Quest as an option to see what the XR fuss is about. $400 is impulse buy territory for a lot of people who might be willing to try out the technology, while $3k isn't.
    - bookofjoe 4y ago
      Concur
    - chaostheory 4y ago
      Supposedly, the $3000 Apple mixed reality model is significantly cheaper than AR device that Apple just delayed.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      AR/“Mixed reality” isn't VR. It’s VR plus low latency actual reality plus processing data from the actual reality to interact with VR. So, its not the same market as the $400 Quest, but the $3,500 Hololens.
jmyeet 4y ago
This is unsurprising. The tech just isn't there yet. It may never be more than a niche product and has some fundamental problems (eg displaying black). Apple generally isn't on the cutting edge of things. Apple's primary positioning is to take something that's proven and make it not suck. There was Internet on phones before the iPhone. There was a time when you had to tell your OS if your Wifi was WEP, WPA or WPA2. There were MP3 players befofe the iPod.
- stephc_int13 4y ago
  Exactly. Apple is good at product design and hardware/software integration. AR/VR is much more difficult than people expected, there are fundamental issues, on the optical side (lenses, projection, depth, fov) and on the 6DOF tracking side (latency, robustness, occlusion handling. Once all of that is really working, then we cal talk about batteries, weight, design, software. I am not convinced that AR/VR is something that will replace screens any time soon. It is a good reminder that technology improvement is not a given and not magical, it is pushed by hard work and quite often the results are not there. In the 60s many people were convinced that flying cars, domestic robots and spaceships were only a few decades away.
  - jmyeet 4y ago
    People fall into some interesting traps when it comes to technology. A huge one is around FTL travel and communication. Any weird idea for this gets attention basically because people want it to be true. You'll often find defenses like "well, people once said it was impossible to [get to space,fly,go to the Moon]", which is a specious argument and (deliberately) ignores all the very real problems. Another is putting a lot of weight in fiction. This applies to the FTL issue too (eg Star Trek, Star Wars) but goes well beyond it. There are a whole bunch of literary devices that make for an interesting read eg teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, (unaided) flying, any form of magic and space flight working like flight in an atmosphere. VAR has a big latency problem to contend with. Even AR does but in this case it's just rendering latency. But that's still significant.
rvz 4y ago
So I guess Meta is still in the races for their AR glasses then given their recent acquisition, that almost nobody was talking about. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189419
vxNsr 4y ago
Off topic: The verge's homepage has become entirely unusable. I'm not sure what's up with it but it's a total mess, you gotta scroll for days to see any stories. they appear to be hiding the fact that they've dropped half their staff by filling the gap with twitter feeds. I've gone back to just using rss to find stories there
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  Concur: I ranked tech site [Verge/TechCrunch/ArsTechnica/Wired/CNET] homepages last week (can't find the link, alas) and the Verge came in dead last.
- hellomyguys 4y ago
  Definitely one of the worst redesigns for a news site I can think of. I only look at the top article and then close the site now.
impulser_ 4y ago
They should focus on making the iPhone better at AR. There is so much potential in using smartphones as an AR device. The problem is it clunking and unreliable. Google sees the potential, they been adding a lot of AR features to their mobile apps, like Maps. Lens is also getting pretty good.
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  iphone has the better AR toolkit in terms of capabilities. the problem is, making compelling software requires another generational leap in object detection. We need to be able to do good object segmentation to allow things to hide behind real objects. Not only that, but we need room understanding, like this is a table, and its this way up. That mug is over there and is the wrong way round. That stuff is a long way off, even if you ignore the battery power constraints.
  - kroltan 4y ago
    I think the second point is essential. Occlusion is cool, sure, but not terribly important. Right now AR is very limited in what it can do because it can only understand the virtual objects the creators of the app have put in, the world is just arbitrary low resolution meshes. Querying the world would be such a big step. Even just being able to persist annotations on specific objects would be so handy. (And yes I know paper notes and blutack exist, but data can be synced and queried in different ways)
looseyesterday 4y ago
I am guessing battery and display are the biggest problems. When you try some AR app on an iPhone the battery starts dropping like a stone.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  From my recent past experience working on AR at one of the companies named in this thread, I can say that battery, display, processing power, heat, and user input are all among the biggest problems being worked on.
  - cheeselip420 4y ago
    So everything?
    - fatnoah 4y ago
      Basically.
tootie 4y ago
I've been very bearish on AR and especially headset AR for years. Building useful UX in front of someone's face is incredibly hard and doing it with such poor visual precision is impossible. I worked at a digital design shop a few years ago and they were throwing devices at us and asking us to come up with just some compelling demos and I don't think we really succeeded. We need multiple optics breakthroughs before we can even think about what these could be good for. Magic Leap pivoted to enterprise and the US military just paused the Hololens project. The market is not clamoring for this stuff and industry has not convinced anyone in 10+ years of trying. Phone-based AR is both more vivid and more accessible and still hasn't really caught on at all. Word Lens and Pokemon Go were so long ago at this point and there's been no major followup.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Small nit: the US didn’t pause the HoloLens, they said it wasn’t rugged enough to deploy as is, and they wanted more design before they bought a bunch for field use. That isn’t a particular damnation because it’s a very particular use case that has super tough requirements. I think phone-based AR is completely different from face-mounted fwiw and phone-based has no reason to catch on because I’d you have to hold a phone, the UX is extra terrible. I do agree that the experiences aren’t ready yet for facemounted either, however.
  - tootie 4y ago
    Phone and headset AR have different affordances for different situations. Phone AR actually works right now and is deployed to everyone's pockets. And phones are much more capable input devices that headsets which allows for things like Pokemon Go. And you don't need to worry about obscuring the user's view so they can do full occlusion of real images and not worry about someone walking into a telephone pole. You can't do immersive, but immersive isn't the only or even the best approach.
chaostheory 4y ago
For anyone who doesn’t want to read the article, Apple has apparently been working on an AR device that is separate from the mixed reality headset that is slated to be announced this year. Aside from this piece, all the previous news was centered on the mixed reality headset which may confuse people I didn’t even realize that Apple had an AR device that was anywhere near release. This article and its main source read like clickbait.
- gwill 4y ago
  would you mind explaining the difference between AR and mixed reality or what makes each of these devices unique from each other?
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    Imo the difference is how they display their images. The mixed reality headset tends to be a VR headset where its “AR” mode is just a camera passthrough to an LCD screen. AR headsets tend to beam specific images directly to the human eye
    - gwill 4y ago
      ahhh that makes sense. thank you
  - tfandango 4y ago
    I think of AR (Augmented Reality) as something unobtrusive like glasses where you can see the real world just fine and digital content can be overlayed, maybe like a fancy Heads-Up Display in a car. I think of VR as something that has no real world view, the entire thing is digital. So Meta's headsets are VR, Google Glass/Microsoft Hololens is AR. Naturally there is some overlap, I think the ultimate set would be something that can do both, but as it stands now I don't really think it's possible to do both well.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    My impression is mixed reality is a made up marketing thing. By Magic Leap in particular I think, I remember them pushing the idea. It just means AR where the device recognises real objects. So if you pick up a a book, you can have a version of it in AR. So there’s interactions between the AR and the real world and vice versa. That’s my impression.
ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
I always get laughed at when voicing this, but I was one of the (admittedly ridiculous-looking) people who tried out the Google Glass when it came out. It was, in many ways, a bad product, but if you could abstract away from how goofy it looked or how bad the battery life was, it was kinda awesome. I tried hard for a couple weeks to use it exclusively, and granted that back then my phone wasn't as much an appendage as it is now, but I found the experience of going back to my phone deeply disappointing. It made me aware, in a way I thought impossible, of just how much I strain my neck all day long to look at the phone, for instance. Calling my wife on Hangout and having her see what I'm seeing and picking groceries together while she was at work was a very neat experience... to have map overlay as I drove on my glasses, too, was awesome. That's all to say, I think anyone who implements a pretty good version of this with modern tech will usher in glasses as the new compute form factor. Which, paradoxically, is why I think Apple may be the last to do this. Good AR tech will absolutely destroy the iPhone... either they'll do it when they think they are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED they can successfully cannibalize their own product, OR somehow the iPhone proves to start becoming an unsuccessful business on its own right. I think those two things are pretty unlikely; far likelier for META to keep their nose to the grindstone and perhaps, just perhaps, knock something out of the park.
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  Same here. Was flown out to Google to pick them up. It was an awesome product, for hardly any of my use cases. But I could see where certain industries or applications they would excel at.
  - parthdesai 4y ago
    That's exactly the direction google took: https://www.google.ca/glass/start/ https://www.google.ca/glass/start/
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      They are just a bit glossier alternative to dealers and vuzix though which have been in this market for ages. There's nothing special about the Enterprise glass compared to those except the sightly cooler looking design.
bentt 4y ago
Apple is probably like "let's just wait this out and let Zuck take all the heat and pain of getting this figured out. By that time he'll be out of money and we'll look like the heroes for fixing everything. If we go in too early with even a 90% baked product we have nothing to gain."
- Salgat 4y ago
  What they're doing is completely different. AR is meant as a tool to greatly enhance your day to day life, while VR is more focused on entertainment.
  - anotherman554 4y ago
    Quest Pro has AR features. They seem to call it mixed reality for some reason.
    - georgeecollins 4y ago
      I think the difference is that mixed reality is assuming you will mostly stay in one place with defined boundaries, and the device doesn't take in a lot of spatial information about where you are. But it has video pass through so you are aware of your surroundings. Augmented reality is similar, but it is more like trying to illustrate on the world around you (put an object on the real table in front of you). AR is draw on your environment as you move around. MR is like VR with pass through.
    - filoleg 4y ago
      I think the distinction they have is helpful. They call it mixed reality because when people say AR, they assume virtual stuff overlaid on the actual real world stuff (like with glasses). Quest Pro isn't that, you don't look at the real world through lenses, you are looking at what the camera feed of the real world in front of you displayed on the "screen".
- jamil7 4y ago
  I think it makes sense, they're not normally first movers.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
When I heard that Apple was working on AR glasses, I ditched my Killer AR App idea and bought a chunk of their stock. I figured that this would be the company that could pull it off because they have a much better pulse on culture and marketing than players like MS, who are as out of touch as a cable news watching boomer. I figured that they would be all over the blazingly obvious Killer App that would make them ubercool again and that sidesteps all the problems of glassholes and liability for safety issues. As soon as Apple announced AR, I knew they would make the Killer App in house (ala Final Cut Pro and Logic) and, in doing so, crush my startup. What's that Killer App you ask? Learn an instrument (guitar, bass, keyboard, drums etc.) with AR. I surely don't need to spell out the what/how/why right? Are you kicking yourself now for not thinking of it? I guess it is time to sell my Apple stock. PS. If you didn't need me to spell out the above and have the technical chops and connections, I have the music industry connections (music instructors and real rock stars) and a background as a PM for global products - let's talk.
- lostgame 4y ago
  Hey, hit me up at the email in my username. I’m a multi-instrumentalist and professional software and audio engineer who has worked in music technology in the past. :) This piques my interest.
ttul 4y ago
Apple often delays product releases if they aren’t sure the product is going to deliver on its promise of high usability, or if the manufacturing can’t yet be scaled to the volumes they know they will need to pump out if it is successful. I wish more companies had this level of discipline.
ben_w 4y ago
These rumours have been milled for years now with the same cycle each time: 1. Leak of new Apple Glass! 2. It's coming next year with a price of $(1500-3000).random()! Analysts say this puts it into the high-end market segment. 3. Rumours suggest the Apple Glass has as many pixels per eye as (most expensive monitor on consumer market) and is powered by a (current generation plus two) processor. 4. Apple has [delayed, cancelled, updated] their plans for Apple Glass, delaying the release by a year. At this point, I'm starting to suspect details of this thing are just the NDA equivalent of a Trap Street.
- procgen 4y ago
  These are distinct from the AR goggles which they are expected to announce before the developers conference.
- andybak 4y ago
  Things have moved on. There is solid evidence of an imminent AR/MR product release. It's the next product after that, that has apparently been delayed/cancelled.
CharlesW 4y ago
Having watched Apple wrestle with "rumors sites" for decades and eventually develop a symbiotic relationship with them for its benefit, I'm going to posit that nothing's actually changed. Apple "leaked" this news to cool analyst and market expectations. Apple will (and was always going to) launch this new product line whenever the necessary technology, user experience, and manufacturing dependencies allow them to execute on their 1.0 vision. In the meantime, they continue to develop the platform in plain sight: https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/ https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/

86 points by vthallam 4y ago

It's been discussed here in these threads as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34432848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34432848 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34422843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34422843

kayodelycaon 4y ago
There is little to no discussion in the linked threads.

aliqot 4y ago

Receiving these today and while not meeting the definition for AR, Im excited to see the outcome. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nreal-air https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nreal-air * I've been toying with the idea of some type of headmount display, an SBC with battery pack in my bib pockets, and a twiddler 3 or tiny bluetooth keyboard for input in my hand. With the amount of microsd storage and SBC computational power out now for small sums, it's tempting. Shout out to Steve Mann and Thad Starner for inspiring young me with their work on this stuff. As a little country bumpkin I didn't think I'd ever live to see this type of tech. Fun fact: Steve Mann is responsible for HDR video and smart watches https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5903ff66e4fcb573ba3b29fd/t/590cb58d1b10e36084e60cfa/1494005138300/smartwatch98.jpg https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5903ff66e4fcb573ba3b2... http://wearcam.org/hdr.htm http://wearcam.org/hdr.htm

vxNsr 4y ago
I thank you for your sacrifice. I thank everyone who buys half baked AR/VR gear as early adopters, proving there's a market while at the same time parting with large amounts of cash for disappointment. I'm not ready to invest anything in this space but I want it to succeed.
- aliqot 4y ago
  Thanks, I think it's the remnants of mom never getting me a powerglove as a kid.
dchuk 4y ago
If these can realistically and without eye strain produce a giant virtual monitor when connected to a MacBook Pro, I’ll buy these very quickly. What are you going to use them for?
- aliqot 4y ago
  virtual monitors, on an m2. Ill come back and let you know how it goes.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    It worked. I got them about an hour ago, plugged them in and they immediately worked as a mirrored monitor. I decided to run Nebula, which attempted upgrade, upgrade failed on step 2. Running nebula again didn't prompt for upgrading again, neither after reinstall. I searched around online and found a link to this page which when used in chrome allowed me to install/patch the latest. Since then, I've run it in triple monitor mode, and normal mode, both as an extra monitor and as a mirror. Some odd things I noticed, if you dont have it situated on your nose correctly, the corners can be fuzzy. Also, I played a game with the settings turned all the way up and the framerate in the glasses was better than the m2's laptop screen itself, which was odd, considering I can run multiple games at the same time with browser tabs etc no problem, so the glasses are doing something apple isn't. one button on the right side turns off the display so you can see in front of you, another button does nothing that I can tell. the audio is very quiet, and seems to come from in your head near your ears. some things I dont like are that these glasses sit a bit in front of your face, so there is some light bleed, which considering how bright these are means nothing since they're transparent for no reason at all. You will have a hard time seeing whats behind the brightness when your display is turned on. I stood in front of a 70 inch TV at full brightness, and what I see in the glasses is the same as what I see at 5 feet of distance. One note about nebula, there is some jitter, like the movement of typing. Luckily there is a setting that allowed me to anchor the zero point of where my head is because when I first ran it I was sitting upward, and once the virtual screens launched, I leaned back in my chair and the monitors didnt follow my head. A way to 'pin' the displays would be cool if you want to be in static mode or gyro mode. By the comments other people left, I thought the experience would be lackluster, and the first 5 seconds having it on were fairly underwhelming, but these are pretty great. I can code in them just fine, play games just fine, virtual monitors just fine, everything they said they'd be has been fine. I want to try the realtime subtitles next, since I have a relative who can't hear for shit and this would be a gamechanger, though they'd have a hard time seeing through the display unless they were in bright daylight. Oh, also it was shipped in the box itself, like a retail box you'd buy headphones in, with a label slapped on it. The box is well made to withstand a ginger toss by a delivery driver on to the concrete. Prepare yourself though, the parts are anchored to the box and everything comes flying out if you dont start off from the goal of just trying to disassemble the whole box. I assumed the initial flap you open will let you remove things, but each step and removal of each object requires you disassemble some other part of the packaging. Best just take the whole box apart.
bookofjoe 4y ago
I was interested in these after reading your comment until I read the specs — Field of View: 46°
aantix 4y ago
Have you tried coding with these glasses?
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  Yea. It’s doable, but I found that I needed to scale the UI to read comfortably. For normal UI elements, I mostly knew what the buttons did and didn’t need to read them, but its like using a TV as a computer monitor… its just far enough away that everything felt too small. The resolution isn’t quite high enough for fine text details and unlike VR goggles, glasses aren’t as secured to your head so it shakes more. Again, making focusing on text harder. That said, they’re good enough for use in a pinch (eg. on a plane, I tried this). They prove the tech is around the corner. They work, they do what they’re advertised, they just need to refine a bit. 1-2 years if people keep buying them and the proper version would be made I suspect. But they work today if you’re really into it. Surprising, but I actually like the oculus screen sharing, in terms of ability to focus and read the screen. The headset is too heavy and resolution too small, but I like the experience. The NReal is slightly worse in some regards, and slightly better in others. Edit: they have 2 modes. One is as a USBC monitor, and the other is where your computer (via an app) projects virtual monitors that you see when spinning your head via accelerometer. Mode 1 is good, mode 2 is glitchy. I couldn’t use mode 2 for anything real.
tluyben2 4y ago
Ah yes, I had my finger above the buy button yesterday but I need to get a new phone to use it on the go which I am holding off on. Please write down your experience; it really looks pretty great from the reviews. No batteries in the glasses are great as well.
33955985 4y ago
I hope they work for you. They did not for me, unfortunately. The text was too fuzzy to not give me a headache and something about it gave me motion sickness.
iuafhiuah 4y ago
I've had a pair of these since September 2022 and tried them on quite a few things. The 45* viewing angle is not really a problem, because it's not for VR and VR support is _very_ limited (currently just specific Android devices or with CloudXR on specific GPUs with USB-C DP-alt output). The device support for AR functionality is better but there aren't any killer apps. Although there was a recent tech demo of them being used for live captioning real life.[0] However, they work fantastically as a _dumb_ external display on any computer with USB-C DP-alt output. Tested on MacOS, Linux and Windows 7. My glasses with the firmware revision from ~November 2022 works without issue on M1 MBPs, 2018 Dell XPS and the SteamDeck. Prior firmware revisions had several issues with misrepresenting their capabilities to the host system causing unstable framerates so older reviews which mention this may no longer be applicable. Best usecase I've found is for watching films on a plane or in bed. You can comfortably lay flat, staring at the ceiling without the cable getting in the way. But there is an amount of reflection on the screen when used in bright places which can be annoying. I got mine cheaper imported from Japan. If you're in the UK do not bother trying to get them from EE. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LauvOTnZMZg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LauvOTnZMZg
- dchuk 4y ago
  Given these are AR, when you're using them on an airplane to simulate a big monitor, how does that fit into the constrained physical world you're in where there's a seat two feet in front of your face?
  - aliqot 4y ago
    Politely ask the people seated ahead of you to enjoy the lavatory for the duration of your movie.
  - iuafhiuah 4y ago
    They come with a plastic insert you can clip on the front so you have a solid background to look at.[0] [0] https://resource.nreal.ai/web/images/air/air_packaging_verticle.jpg https://resource.nreal.ai/web/images/air/air_packaging_verti...

st3ve445678 4y ago

Good, I don't think the masses are clamoring for AR glasses and if its not an amazing product, it would probably be a flop. Seems like current tech just isn't there yet to make these things tolerable to the average person.

oblio 4y ago
> Good, I don't think the masses are clamoring for AR glasses Oh, I think they are. But they want the SF movie AR glasses. Aka regular glasses just with a ton of extra tech. What I mean by this is that AR glasses look a lot like the next major OS. Mainframes - minicomputers - workstations - PCs - laptops - tables - smartphones - (minor impact compared to rest) smartwatches/wireless headphones/earbuds - ... - AR glasses.
- ghaff 4y ago
  AR as a principle assuming arbitrarily advanced and unobtrusive technology (and, perhaps, ignoring social pantopticon concerns) that works for most people even those without perfect vision would probably be pretty transformative. Look at anything/anyone and have basically a HUD overlaid with all sort of information. I suspect we're a very far way away from that.
  - WeylandYutani 4y ago
    Yes what you describe is what I first saw in Deus Ex- a videogame from 2000. We're still far away from that level of tech. As for the panopticon: it would be a veritable gold mine for hackers and the surveillance state.

kayodelycaon 4y ago

This doesn’t really surprise me. Apple is really good at miniaturization but they also have an aversion to cables. If they still can’t get an Apple Watch to smoothly and consistently stay connected to an iPhone, AR is pretty much DoA unless they want to run the whole package on the glasses.

wil421 4y ago
When I read there was a cable that attached to your hip I knew it wasn’t coming out anytime soon. I couldn’t see Apple of all companies doing something like that. It sounds more like a prototype than anything else.
- mattgperry 4y ago
  I believe these are the AR glasses, not the mixed-reality headset supposedly coming this year.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Cable is cool, isn't it? https://i.insider.com/5273e2a669bedd7c06afe99f https://i.insider.com/5273e2a669bedd7c06afe99f Anyway Apple can make something uncool to something fine. See Apple Pencil gen1.

nerdjon 4y ago

TBH I am a bit disappointed, I was holding out hope that maybe Apple could finally be the one to crack this. But at the same time I am kinda glad not to see another half baked AR come out, especially from someone like Apple (or Google) that has a big enough name that many will know about it.

chadlavi 4y ago
They still could be. Just not now.
saiya-jin 4y ago
Unfortunately, yes this seems to be the state of matters currently regardless of cash invested, similar to ie fully automated driving. And since Apple is very consistent to wall-gardening everything it can, its usefulness would be limited hard to Apple-only ecosystem as much as possible, which means basically useless expensive product for most of humanity (sorry for this jab but it reflects how Apple does its business, monetarily successful or not)

samtheDamned 4y ago

I wonder if the leak of the design was a way for them to gauge how the public would respond to a device like that and the sharp negative response was all they needed to hear to put it on the back shelf for a few more years.

stephc_int13 4y ago

I wonder if the prototypes they built really are too weak to launch or if Apple management is overestimating the risk of launching this product.

Aperocky 4y ago

What happened to glasses that had a display but isn't AR? I don't need to augment reality, I just want to maybe read things on the fly.

chaostheory 4y ago
That’s still on track to be announced this year and released (may be this year?)
vineyardmike 4y ago
Why not use an Apple Watch? I think the issue with a Google-glass style device is that you can see just as much info on a watch. We already have watches and are socially familiar with them, and watches are out of the face when not needed. What info could you need that isn’t accessible by a watch? Especially considering a watch can be a simple touchscreen but a glasses UI is…? The NReal Air is pretty cool, and it’s just glasses with a screen, but is it compelling enough for the price tag? Especially an apple price tag? It’s just a “head mounted monitor”. The problem is that moving around makes it shake and hard to focus on, and it requires a cable to get data and power. Apple probably could make it wireless with Apple Watch internals, but then it wouldn’t be able to stream graphics very well.
- grumple 4y ago
  The watch has a very small display surface. Glasses can potentially use your whole field of vision. You could display an entire room full of monitors rendering full size web browsers and other applications. So there's a huge difference in what info you could see.
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    I don’t think “data on the fly” and “display a room full of web browsers” has a lot of overlap. The NReal is a “full vision(ish)” glasses, so that’s available, but you probably couldn’t produce that wire-free. It it’s doable if you’re willing to plug-in when needed (so not on the fly). You could do apple-watch-in-the-eye (Google glass basically) but that probably couldn’t sustain browsers or monitor images for long. It would work for things like notifications though… which the watches already do.

pavlov 4y ago

The report says that Apple's $3,000 mixed reality headset is still planned for this year, probably followed up by a cheaper (but still expensive!) $1,500 model by 2025. IMHO this would be good news for Meta which has spent years figuring out how to ship this technology in a $400 consumer-level unit. Apple's entry would validate the market, and make it more obvious what a good deal the Quest actually is (from a pure hardware POV — the quality of the software deal remains in argument).

bookofjoe 4y ago
I agree the Quest is a good deal at $399 (I paid $299, the original price) but is something still a good deal if it's no longer used and on a shelf with similar dusty inert equipment?
- pavlov 4y ago
  Well, it's certainly a better deal than paying $3,000 for the same result? What I'm trying to say is that Apple introducing such an expensive unit will make people take another look at the Quest as an option to see what the XR fuss is about. $400 is impulse buy territory for a lot of people who might be willing to try out the technology, while $3k isn't.
  - bookofjoe 4y ago
    Concur
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    Supposedly, the $3000 Apple mixed reality model is significantly cheaper than AR device that Apple just delayed.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    AR/“Mixed reality” isn't VR. It’s VR plus low latency actual reality plus processing data from the actual reality to interact with VR. So, its not the same market as the $400 Quest, but the $3,500 Hololens.

jmyeet 4y ago

This is unsurprising. The tech just isn't there yet. It may never be more than a niche product and has some fundamental problems (eg displaying black). Apple generally isn't on the cutting edge of things. Apple's primary positioning is to take something that's proven and make it not suck. There was Internet on phones before the iPhone. There was a time when you had to tell your OS if your Wifi was WEP, WPA or WPA2. There were MP3 players befofe the iPod.

stephc_int13 4y ago
Exactly. Apple is good at product design and hardware/software integration. AR/VR is much more difficult than people expected, there are fundamental issues, on the optical side (lenses, projection, depth, fov) and on the 6DOF tracking side (latency, robustness, occlusion handling. Once all of that is really working, then we cal talk about batteries, weight, design, software. I am not convinced that AR/VR is something that will replace screens any time soon. It is a good reminder that technology improvement is not a given and not magical, it is pushed by hard work and quite often the results are not there. In the 60s many people were convinced that flying cars, domestic robots and spaceships were only a few decades away.
- jmyeet 4y ago
  People fall into some interesting traps when it comes to technology. A huge one is around FTL travel and communication. Any weird idea for this gets attention basically because people want it to be true. You'll often find defenses like "well, people once said it was impossible to [get to space,fly,go to the Moon]", which is a specious argument and (deliberately) ignores all the very real problems. Another is putting a lot of weight in fiction. This applies to the FTL issue too (eg Star Trek, Star Wars) but goes well beyond it. There are a whole bunch of literary devices that make for an interesting read eg teleportation, telepathy, telekinesis, levitation, (unaided) flying, any form of magic and space flight working like flight in an atmosphere. VAR has a big latency problem to contend with. Even AR does but in this case it's just rendering latency. But that's still significant.

rvz 4y ago

So I guess Meta is still in the races for their AR glasses then given their recent acquisition, that almost nobody was talking about. [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189419

vxNsr 4y ago

Off topic: The verge's homepage has become entirely unusable. I'm not sure what's up with it but it's a total mess, you gotta scroll for days to see any stories. they appear to be hiding the fact that they've dropped half their staff by filling the gap with twitter feeds. I've gone back to just using rss to find stories there

bookofjoe 4y ago
Concur: I ranked tech site [Verge/TechCrunch/ArsTechnica/Wired/CNET] homepages last week (can't find the link, alas) and the Verge came in dead last.
hellomyguys 4y ago
Definitely one of the worst redesigns for a news site I can think of. I only look at the top article and then close the site now.

impulser_ 4y ago

They should focus on making the iPhone better at AR. There is so much potential in using smartphones as an AR device. The problem is it clunking and unreliable. Google sees the potential, they been adding a lot of AR features to their mobile apps, like Maps. Lens is also getting pretty good.

KaiserPro 4y ago
iphone has the better AR toolkit in terms of capabilities. the problem is, making compelling software requires another generational leap in object detection. We need to be able to do good object segmentation to allow things to hide behind real objects. Not only that, but we need room understanding, like this is a table, and its this way up. That mug is over there and is the wrong way round. That stuff is a long way off, even if you ignore the battery power constraints.
- kroltan 4y ago
  I think the second point is essential. Occlusion is cool, sure, but not terribly important. Right now AR is very limited in what it can do because it can only understand the virtual objects the creators of the app have put in, the world is just arbitrary low resolution meshes. Querying the world would be such a big step. Even just being able to persist annotations on specific objects would be so handy. (And yes I know paper notes and blutack exist, but data can be synced and queried in different ways)

looseyesterday 4y ago

I am guessing battery and display are the biggest problems. When you try some AR app on an iPhone the battery starts dropping like a stone.

fatnoah 4y ago
From my recent past experience working on AR at one of the companies named in this thread, I can say that battery, display, processing power, heat, and user input are all among the biggest problems being worked on.
- cheeselip420 4y ago
  So everything?
  - fatnoah 4y ago
    Basically.

tootie 4y ago

I've been very bearish on AR and especially headset AR for years. Building useful UX in front of someone's face is incredibly hard and doing it with such poor visual precision is impossible. I worked at a digital design shop a few years ago and they were throwing devices at us and asking us to come up with just some compelling demos and I don't think we really succeeded. We need multiple optics breakthroughs before we can even think about what these could be good for. Magic Leap pivoted to enterprise and the US military just paused the Hololens project. The market is not clamoring for this stuff and industry has not convinced anyone in 10+ years of trying. Phone-based AR is both more vivid and more accessible and still hasn't really caught on at all. Word Lens and Pokemon Go were so long ago at this point and there's been no major followup.

vineyardmike 4y ago
Small nit: the US didn’t pause the HoloLens, they said it wasn’t rugged enough to deploy as is, and they wanted more design before they bought a bunch for field use. That isn’t a particular damnation because it’s a very particular use case that has super tough requirements. I think phone-based AR is completely different from face-mounted fwiw and phone-based has no reason to catch on because I’d you have to hold a phone, the UX is extra terrible. I do agree that the experiences aren’t ready yet for facemounted either, however.
- tootie 4y ago
  Phone and headset AR have different affordances for different situations. Phone AR actually works right now and is deployed to everyone's pockets. And phones are much more capable input devices that headsets which allows for things like Pokemon Go. And you don't need to worry about obscuring the user's view so they can do full occlusion of real images and not worry about someone walking into a telephone pole. You can't do immersive, but immersive isn't the only or even the best approach.

chaostheory 4y ago

For anyone who doesn’t want to read the article, Apple has apparently been working on an AR device that is separate from the mixed reality headset that is slated to be announced this year. Aside from this piece, all the previous news was centered on the mixed reality headset which may confuse people I didn’t even realize that Apple had an AR device that was anywhere near release. This article and its main source read like clickbait.

gwill 4y ago
would you mind explaining the difference between AR and mixed reality or what makes each of these devices unique from each other?
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Imo the difference is how they display their images. The mixed reality headset tends to be a VR headset where its “AR” mode is just a camera passthrough to an LCD screen. AR headsets tend to beam specific images directly to the human eye
  - gwill 4y ago
    ahhh that makes sense. thank you
- tfandango 4y ago
  I think of AR (Augmented Reality) as something unobtrusive like glasses where you can see the real world just fine and digital content can be overlayed, maybe like a fancy Heads-Up Display in a car. I think of VR as something that has no real world view, the entire thing is digital. So Meta's headsets are VR, Google Glass/Microsoft Hololens is AR. Naturally there is some overlap, I think the ultimate set would be something that can do both, but as it stands now I don't really think it's possible to do both well.
- kranke155 4y ago
  My impression is mixed reality is a made up marketing thing. By Magic Leap in particular I think, I remember them pushing the idea. It just means AR where the device recognises real objects. So if you pick up a a book, you can have a version of it in AR. So there’s interactions between the AR and the real world and vice versa. That’s my impression.

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago

I always get laughed at when voicing this, but I was one of the (admittedly ridiculous-looking) people who tried out the Google Glass when it came out. It was, in many ways, a bad product, but if you could abstract away from how goofy it looked or how bad the battery life was, it was kinda awesome. I tried hard for a couple weeks to use it exclusively, and granted that back then my phone wasn't as much an appendage as it is now, but I found the experience of going back to my phone deeply disappointing. It made me aware, in a way I thought impossible, of just how much I strain my neck all day long to look at the phone, for instance. Calling my wife on Hangout and having her see what I'm seeing and picking groceries together while she was at work was a very neat experience... to have map overlay as I drove on my glasses, too, was awesome. That's all to say, I think anyone who implements a pretty good version of this with modern tech will usher in glasses as the new compute form factor. Which, paradoxically, is why I think Apple may be the last to do this. Good AR tech will absolutely destroy the iPhone... either they'll do it when they think they are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED they can successfully cannibalize their own product, OR somehow the iPhone proves to start becoming an unsuccessful business on its own right. I think those two things are pretty unlikely; far likelier for META to keep their nose to the grindstone and perhaps, just perhaps, knock something out of the park.

zikduruqe 4y ago
Same here. Was flown out to Google to pick them up. It was an awesome product, for hardly any of my use cases. But I could see where certain industries or applications they would excel at.
- parthdesai 4y ago
  That's exactly the direction google took: https://www.google.ca/glass/start/ https://www.google.ca/glass/start/
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    They are just a bit glossier alternative to dealers and vuzix though which have been in this market for ages. There's nothing special about the Enterprise glass compared to those except the sightly cooler looking design.

bentt 4y ago

Apple is probably like "let's just wait this out and let Zuck take all the heat and pain of getting this figured out. By that time he'll be out of money and we'll look like the heroes for fixing everything. If we go in too early with even a 90% baked product we have nothing to gain."

Salgat 4y ago
What they're doing is completely different. AR is meant as a tool to greatly enhance your day to day life, while VR is more focused on entertainment.
- anotherman554 4y ago
  Quest Pro has AR features. They seem to call it mixed reality for some reason.
  - georgeecollins 4y ago
    I think the difference is that mixed reality is assuming you will mostly stay in one place with defined boundaries, and the device doesn't take in a lot of spatial information about where you are. But it has video pass through so you are aware of your surroundings. Augmented reality is similar, but it is more like trying to illustrate on the world around you (put an object on the real table in front of you). AR is draw on your environment as you move around. MR is like VR with pass through.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    I think the distinction they have is helpful. They call it mixed reality because when people say AR, they assume virtual stuff overlaid on the actual real world stuff (like with glasses). Quest Pro isn't that, you don't look at the real world through lenses, you are looking at what the camera feed of the real world in front of you displayed on the "screen".
jamil7 4y ago
I think it makes sense, they're not normally first movers.

wintermutestwin 4y ago

When I heard that Apple was working on AR glasses, I ditched my Killer AR App idea and bought a chunk of their stock. I figured that this would be the company that could pull it off because they have a much better pulse on culture and marketing than players like MS, who are as out of touch as a cable news watching boomer. I figured that they would be all over the blazingly obvious Killer App that would make them ubercool again and that sidesteps all the problems of glassholes and liability for safety issues. As soon as Apple announced AR, I knew they would make the Killer App in house (ala Final Cut Pro and Logic) and, in doing so, crush my startup. What's that Killer App you ask? Learn an instrument (guitar, bass, keyboard, drums etc.) with AR. I surely don't need to spell out the what/how/why right? Are you kicking yourself now for not thinking of it? I guess it is time to sell my Apple stock. PS. If you didn't need me to spell out the above and have the technical chops and connections, I have the music industry connections (music instructors and real rock stars) and a background as a PM for global products - let's talk.

lostgame 4y ago
Hey, hit me up at the email in my username. I’m a multi-instrumentalist and professional software and audio engineer who has worked in music technology in the past. :) This piques my interest.

ttul 4y ago

Apple often delays product releases if they aren’t sure the product is going to deliver on its promise of high usability, or if the manufacturing can’t yet be scaled to the volumes they know they will need to pump out if it is successful. I wish more companies had this level of discipline.

ben_w 4y ago

These rumours have been milled for years now with the same cycle each time: 1. Leak of new Apple Glass! 2. It's coming next year with a price of $(1500-3000).random()! Analysts say this puts it into the high-end market segment. 3. Rumours suggest the Apple Glass has as many pixels per eye as (most expensive monitor on consumer market) and is powered by a (current generation plus two) processor. 4. Apple has [delayed, cancelled, updated] their plans for Apple Glass, delaying the release by a year. At this point, I'm starting to suspect details of this thing are just the NDA equivalent of a Trap Street.

procgen 4y ago
These are distinct from the AR goggles which they are expected to announce before the developers conference.
andybak 4y ago
Things have moved on. There is solid evidence of an imminent AR/MR product release. It's the next product after that, that has apparently been delayed/cancelled.

CharlesW 4y ago

Having watched Apple wrestle with "rumors sites" for decades and eventually develop a symbiotic relationship with them for its benefit, I'm going to posit that nothing's actually changed. Apple "leaked" this news to cool analyst and market expectations. Apple will (and was always going to) launch this new product line whenever the necessary technology, user experience, and manufacturing dependencies allow them to execute on their 1.0 vision. In the meantime, they continue to develop the platform in plain sight: https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/ https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/