As Apple prepares for its AR headset preview next month at WWDC, the company’s rumored plans with its pair of AR glasses somehow appear to pop up. It is a Herculean task to incorporate cutting-edge hardware into eyewear, especially when that hardware needs to consume power at just 10 percent of an iPhone’s current chip power draw. This, and many other reasons, are why the AR glasses will take several years to launch.
New report claims that Apple’s AR glasses are at least four years away, with minimal resources allocated to its development
Apple’s rumored struggles with its AR headset have been in the news on multiple occasions, with the company’s top executives and development team at an impasse over its launch timeline. Given the hurdles the company and its employees had to face for the headset, we can only imagine the difficulties faced by these people during the AR glasses development. Well, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, what we know is just the tip of the iceberg.
The new report states that a minimal amount of resources have been allocated towards the AR glasses development, with one employee working on the project claiming that it is ‘hopeless’ and the only reason work continues on it is to keep CEO Tim Cook happy. Mike Rockwell, a former Dolby executive that Apple hired to lead the company’s head-mounted wearable division, had a meeting with over 100 Apple employees, stating that the smart glasses could launch just a year after the AR headset’s inception.
Unfortunately, that launch timeline seems impossible right now. With Apple’s top executives seemingly pessimistic over the AR headset for its watered-down design and features, what hope could the AR glasses have? At this moment, those challenges appear insurmountable, but according to Gurman, a viable product could be ready for the masses four years from now, so we will keep our fingers crossed.
One of the biggest challenges faced by Apple’s AR glasses development team was the overheating part. To work properly, the smart eyewear needed to have an SoC delivering the performance of a current-generation iPhone while consuming just 10 percent of the power. Just imagining such a chip in action seems like a wild dream at this stage, but given the advances made by TSMC’s foundry, it is a problem that can be solved several years into the future. As for the near future, Apple plans to release a budget-oriented AR headset in 2025.
News Source: Bloomberg
