Apple‘s rumored AR smart glasses could be joining the Apple car in the company’s graveyard of shelved products.
According to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, Apple has shelved a project to develop AR smart glasses to pair with the MacBook. The shutdown came after an initial failed design that paired the glasses with the iPhone. When the iPhone couldn’t provide enough processing power and battery life for the glasses, Apple pivoted to connect them to the MacBook instead.
As reported by Gurman, executives weren’t happy with the new design and couldn’t agree on the features it should have, so the project was shuttered.
That’s obviously bad news for anyone looking forward to an Apple-made competitor to Meta‘s Ray-Ban glasses, but it could also be even worse news for an Apple product you can buy right now.
Apple’s felled smart glasses are far from the first product that it’s scrapped over the years, but it could be a pivotal failure that leaves Apple high and dry in a competitive emerging product niche. The AR glasses’ failure may also be bad news for the Vision Pro and its rumored “Vision SE” or “Vision Air” successor.
Could this be the beginning of the end for Apple’s XR hopes?
Apple’s Vision is blurry
When the Apple Vision Pro launched last year, everyone knew it was meant to be a first generation product, the precursor to something lighter and more affordable.
While that sequel, the “Vision SE” or “Vision Air,” appears to still be in development, Apple’s AR glasses could have been an even more ambitious follow-up to the Vision Pro. A pair of glasses may still be the ultimate end goal Apple envisions for its headset line-up, but this early failure doesn’t bode well for Tim Cook’s team.
Apple arrived late to the headset game with the Vision Pro, but it delivered hardware that certainly had its strengths, despite a high price. Apple has long had a better-late-than-never approach to innovation, so it could still theoretically find a place in the headset market with a less expensive model that provides most of the same features as the Vision Pro.
The glasses are a tangent from that strategy, though. Apple may have been rushing to catch up to Meta, which could be the reason Apple’s AR glasses didn’t pan out, at least not right now.
The Vision Pro still needs a lot of refining, a killer app, and wider adoption. A less expensive Vision SE is the obvious next step toward a pair of AR glasses, but Apple clearly isn’t there yet.
For the sake of innovation and friendly competition in the AR glasses market, I hope Apple figures out how to get its headset strategy back on track. However, it doesn’t look good for the Cupertino team shuttering its AR glasses development while Meta pushes full steam ahead with Orion.
