Apple’s secretive AR and VR Headset plans altered by internal differences | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s secretive AR and VR Headset plans altered by internal differences

bloomberg.com

165 pointshhs105 comments

I think Tim Cook and Apple made the correct decision.

I own an Oculus Quest, which is fairly light weight and totally self contained while my Brother owns a more capable Oculus device that is tethered to his gaming PC.

I use my Quest many times a day, often for just a few minutes at a time. It is so easy to get up from my desk, and jump into a ping pong game, enjoy a favorite part of Vader Immortal, randomly try a VR art piece, etc., etc.

I don’t want to spend huge amounts of time on the quest, rather to just use it the way I would take a walk or a hike.

I love the Oculus Quest, and if Apple sells something better with good content, then I am all in.

Swapping out the SOC from an Oculus quest to an a13 or higher would be extremely compelling for me to buy.

Other than ease of use Oculus Quest the price point (sub 500) might be another factor but OTOH I don't think that's a big factor if its an apple product.

> Swapping out the SOC from an Oculus quest to an a13 or higher would be extremely compelling for me to buy.

I agree, but I believe the battery will need upgrade as well

It might help the balance of the system to put the battery at the back of the headband, like this: https://uploadvr.com/vr-power-battery-quest/

Agreed, since picking up a Quest my use of tethered VR has dropped significantly.

Self contained VR is the way forward IMO. I would only use tethered VR for seated simulations such as flight or racing, which would typically use more peripherals anyway.

Doesn't even need to be self-contained if you use simple streaming over Wifi.

If the machine doing the streaming is on the local network maybe.

VR is not a forgiving environment for latency. If your target 72fps (Quest), about 862 miles is an upper bound for distance. That's just to get data round-trip at fiber speed, additional latency sources (wifi, rendering, encoding, wifi again) are going to make things worse. Prediction and "timewarp" only get you so far.

I'm all for wireless headsets to eliminate the tether when using a PC, but to me the Quest is compelling primarily because it's standalone. I can bring it almost anywhere (empty warehouse, a large field outside, hotel rooms) and not need to worry about lugging a bunch of extra gear.

It's also really compelling for quick product demos if that's your thing. We can keep builds of software installed on a headset that can go from packed in a small hard-case to ready to show off in about the time it takes to boot.

That's interesting, I think a lot of people may use their Quest a lot often because of that hurdle to put on the headset (or charge batteries, etc).

This is sort of a self-plug, but we're experimenting with the idea of an app that has a comic reader, book reader, Reddit client, art viewer, video player syncing/streaming from a desktop, if you are interested in trying builds. We sort of looked to build the same thing, something you use a little bit everyday because it's better than tiny screens.

And I think as usual, Apple may be what will make VR mainstream, and that'll take quite some time given their AR/Glass focus.

> we're experimenting with the idea of an app that has a comic reader, book reader, Reddit client, art viewer, video player

Why? I have all of those on my computer without strapping anything to my head.

You could potentially always have with you as many displays you want to whatever size you prefer and use them wherever you like: desk, couch, laying in bed... VR / AR Headsets can be a more convenient and comfortable replacement for traditional displays and desk setups.

[edit] typo

Yeah, but all the things mentioned are things that require my full attention for longer spans of time. I don't need separate displays for them, I need one single good display.

A VR headset can also give you a single good display on demand. What about reading a 100” mural scale comic book while laying down in bed?

It definitely will not have the relative resolution of a physical monitor.

Current headsets resolution is already surprisingly good with some dev tricks. We use something called Compositor Layers at https://supermedium.com/ to render comic books in VR that look sharp and vivid. Not “retina” resolution yet but improving very quickly. Give it a couple of headset generations. We already have much much higher resolution and density panels but need to work within other constraints like small form factor, mobile SOCs limited compute power, weight, thermals and battery life.

It's still unclear to me what the benefit is, though. The drawbacks are obvious - I have to wear a headset, I lost the physical interfacing, both in terms of input interfaces and in terms of being able to, say, just a put an e-reader down to stop reading it. What do I gain, after giving up all that?

Best is to try. If you have an Oculus Quest handy you can give supermedium demo a try. Your feedback would be super appreciated. With a headset you get better ergonomics: resize and position a display at will and don’t have to hold anything. For comic books in particular, mural scale pages give you an appreciation of the art not possible on a traditional display. Notice that physical input is still available via controllers: similar to a TV remote or gamepad and also tracked in space enabling more subtle interactions than “traditional” input. Tracked physical keyboards will be eventually available too. I agree wearing / removing a headset is additional friction. We consider it a feature, not a bug. Hard to focus these days with so many distractions. Once you put a headset on you’re committed to the task and it removes all the noise. We see VR as a tool for focus, like shutting the door of a super fancy and private office.

I personally would love VR/AR glasses that I could keep attached and do everything on. Phone, CLI, PowerPoint, web browser, unlimited monitor space, Netflix, Xbox, etc.

I know the pixel density isn’t there yet but I don’t want different screens. The AR/VR would be the “single good display” you’re looking for. I want glasses I can use for literally everything I need a screen for.

For the reality-clingers, this is also the perfect set-up. No more closing your laptop and having your TV staring back at you. Your screen is your screen is your screen, and you can turn it off and not have to deal with any of them.

Of course I would like to try it. Your email is not in your profile, so contact me if you want my feedback.

Hmm but the article does say it could operate in a stand alone mode. It sounds pretty similar to the Quest but it could only tether to some special unit and not a Mac?

Well, an Internet connection is required for the Quest since you do everything in the environment like buying content (but there is a ton of good free content in many genres). Once content is on the device, you don’t need an Internet connection (I sent an Oculus Go to my grandson, he can load it up and then use it at sea on the Coast Guard cutter he is assigned to).

Apple’s device(s) should be the same.

Conceptually this breaks along really similar lines to PC Gaming vs Console/Set-Top Boxes (Roku, or similar).

I've similarly seen much more usage of the Quest from non-technical people as it's much less intimidating to get going.

I co-setup the SAIC VR Lab about 25 years ago, and I literally spent months buying gear, setting it up, and integrating the good stuff into our lab. We engineered full on motion platforms, haptics feedback, and used SGI Reality Engines.

But yes, I do like the easy experience of using the Quest. I expect Apple’s gear to be similarly easy to enjoy.

A lot of people seemed to miss the part that the hub would connect wirelessly.

You could still do that. Just plugging in something in the same room is not that much more difficult. I personally would’ve preferred higher graphics. I love my quest but there needs to be a premium offering that is wireless and it seems like that’s what they were going to do. Ive’s response about not taking people out of the world is stupid. That’s the point of VR.

It's not only that. It's also the portability and price.

The word from those with known accurate sources in Apple's supply chain say that the versions of Apple's AR glasses currently being tested will pair wirelessly with an iPhone, which will do the heavy lifting.

I certainly trust Kuo's track record for accuracy more than I trust Gurman's.

> I use my Quest many times a day, often for just a few minutes at a time. It is so easy to get up from my desk, and jump into a ping pong game, enjoy a favorite part of Vader Immortal, randomly try a VR art piece, etc., etc.

It was great in that until recently. I leave my quest powered on between gaming sessions. Sometimes I even leave game (beat saber or boxvr) open. It worked great for some time, but for about a couple of months I am experiencing a lot of bugs when it's impossible to recenter headset (using hardware button) and image weirdly freezes for a couple of seconds.

Reboot fixes everything until next time.

It really ruins using headset for frequent short sessions.

And support was really unhelpful.

Try going to oculus home, recenter, going back to game (no need to close the game). I use this when I have the issue on BeatSaber.

Have the same problem.

Fingers crossed it's a temporary regression. Exactly like you, it's been a boon working from home because I will get up for 10 minutes after a long stint of video call and do some SynthRiders etc., which has been amazing for fitness, concentration, etc. Adding 3 minutes to reboot the thing definitely tips it past a critical threshold for that kind of use.

I have the exact opposite opinion. The Quest is massively underpowered for the games I want to play. I want GTA VR (which is amazing except for the fact that it's not designed for VR). I want beautiful worlds to visit. I want more Half Life Alyx like experiences. I won't get those on a Quest with a mobile GPU anytime soon.

This is the major problem will all the mobile tech based VR. The content is not and will never be compelling to the audience that actually wants this tech.

This is classic Apple, they try to widen the audience that wants a tech by simplifying as much as possible, then finding a key value.

Prime example is the Apple Watch... who "wears" it now? Sports people...

Apple Watch sales are increasing year over year.

"Apple now sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry"[0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/5/21125565/apple-watch-sales...

> Prime example is the Apple Watch... who "wears" it now? Sports people...

Two years ago I was on vacation in Hawaii and took a whale watching / snorkel tour. I was the only person on the boat not wearing an Apple Watch. They are pretty much ubiquitous, like the iPhone, among an upper middle class demographic.

People on a snorkel tour are sports people.

You are being snarky and not adding to the conversation. From the time the Apple Watch appeared, it's been denigrated, but I see them everywhere. I see regular complainers here on HN about the iPhone too, but it misses the total saturation in certain demographics. Apple is successful. Yes, we should continue to hold them to a high standard of ethics, but the haters need to realize that consumers like their gear.

The glass frame business is ~25B, eyewear market is ~125B.

What is the minimum key value to take a chunk from Luxotica?

For higher end stuff, you can play Alyx through Virtual Desktop on Quest. I haven't tried it myself yet, but I've watched the videos and apparently it is quite good assuming you get everything setup correctly.

I did this exact thing for the first time the other day after a friend's recommendation. It worked FLAWLESSLY. I was as amazed by it working so well as I was the first time I used the inside-out tracking of the Quest.

Alternatively you can now use a (properly spec'ed) USB-C cable to turn your Quest into a native desktop-powered headset (search for Oculus Link). I've used it recently to play Alyx and I realized I had clearly forgotten how awesome a proper graphics card can be (paired with high quality content), it's really quite incredible.

Actually actually, now you can use any old USB cable, even the charging cable that comes with the Quest works for Link. The quality is a bit reduced on USB2.0 but honestly still totally fine.

The thing that most amazes me about how well this works is that I can actually get a great experience rendering remotely on a cloud pc (Shadow, 350 miles away) using VirtualDesktop or one of the other streaming solutions.

So there's a bit to be said for both approaches. But as far as the hardware goes, a decently powerful standalone device is still necessary for a lot of local operations such as view reprojection or frame interpolation that is necessary to make the remote experience usable.

> The content is not and will never be compelling to the audience that actually wants this tech.

You are not the arbiter of that.

One of the Google cardboard demos has you flying along with a bunch of seagulls. The first time I saw that I was extremely annoyed they didn’t just make it an endless loop of flying. It felt magical, if I could have put on some psybient music with it it would have been 10/10 relaxing. I also showed the demo to my 60yr+ mom and she felt similar.

That is where the big money for VR would be, once polished, in the same way that mobile games went absolutely stratospheric and are worth more than 50% (in value) of the gaming market. You want to tap the mainstream.

I don't agree. I believe most people will look at that 3 times and then never touch it again.

Phones enabled casual gaming but don't believe VR is for casual users (except maybe VR porn). Sealing yourself off from the world in a 3x3 meter space (or even on the sofa) is just not a "casual user" use case so chasing the casual VR users with low-powered VR devices is doomed to fail IMO.

I think both of you have valid points. While I have a Vive Pro, I'm rooting for Quest and PSVR to gain for traction. While nothing beats PC VR in performance, quality, and tracking; the price of entry alone is bad enough for PC VR. Then you have to add the complexity of base station setup. With procrastination, it took me weeks before I had the right PC VR setup vs instant plug and play with the Quest. That said, you can't beat the refresh rate, resolution, and tracking on the PC (especially when you count emerging full body tracking support).

I'll probably jump into Quest if wireless to PC gets an official solution and if they fix the low refresh rate. VR sickness is not fun.

Check out Shadow http://shadow.tech/

It's not perfect, but I got HL Alyx running via the cloud with no local hardware.

My brother is the use case you describe.

If you have a chance, try playing one of the three parts to the Vader Immortal trilogy. It is like being inside a Star Wars movie. At first Darth Vader is not too bad but the more you work with him to try to bring Padme back to life, the scarier he gets. Really unlike a regular game because of the motion of your body. When you are fighting with a light saber in one hand and levitating rocks to hurl at opponents with your other hand, the whole experience is very compelling.

About 25 years ago I did VR projects for SAIC and Disney, and I have written little games for fun since the 1970s, and being where I am now in my life, I am thrilled at the Oculus Quest experience and I can’t wait to see Apple’s system and what 3rd parties write for it.

I love my Quest too. I use it all the time and really can’t see myself using something tethered.

They made a mistake because they didn’t ship anything. It would be much better to ship something and iterate then to wait and miss the boat. Look at HomePod, market share and mind share is minuscule.

I have to side with Ive here. Apple is not a gaming company, and that's the only consumer motive I could see for a bulky headset that's tethered to a base station. Any other use would be pure novelty. Plus, the already-small market is being well-served by traditional VR headsets.

But a new wearable - a lifestyle product, slim and stylish enough to go anywhere and slide into a pocket if need be - is right up Apple's alley. On top of that, there's the incredibly obvious solution of pairing it to the user's iPhone for heavy-lifting, making use of those absurdly powerful mobile chips and gaining a new source of ecosystem synergy (or lock-in, depending on your perspective) in the process.

It's shocking to me that someone holding such high regard in Apple could be so out of touch.

Indeed. I'm surprised they're even trying the "stationary" product rather than just working directly towards a glasses version of the Watch.

Gurman's sources are good enough that I imagine he has the narrative right, but this sounds a little bit like the iPad / iPhone evolution in retrospect: As I understand the history, the iPad was actually under development first, but it became obvious that the better initial market to target with the technology was smartphones. It wouldn't shock me if they belatedly have the same revelation again.

Maybe they have sold themselves on a kind of "meet in the middle" strategy, where major YoY improvements in AR-enhanced smartphones build a market for mobile-focused apps, while the HUD technology is ramped up and refined in an environment where you don't worry so much about power and portability.

But again, if I were Apple, I'd stick to mobile and wait until they are ready to leapfrog everyone else rather than try to build a market with awkward enthusiast tech.

Any company with a VR product that didn't react to the Oculus Quest would be making a mistake in my view. It is suboptimal in nearly every way, but the first headset in my view that is "good enough" in every single way to be a blockbuster hit. The strategy for Apple of simply starting with the Quest and using its superior chips and overall hardware expertise to make it twice as fast and half the weight, while tying it into the iOS ecosystem should be extremely straight forward and basically make them the dominant VR player overnight. I imagine that for someone like Rockwell this isn't nearly as exciting as introducing a revolutionary tech breakthrough. But Apple has never been good at that. They are good at significantly raising the bar on what other people have already done badly.

One giant question I have in this space is, where the hell is Google? Are they really so burned by Google Glass that they are going to give up on an area that has a small but realistic chance of being a large part of the future of both consumer and business computing?

They straight up gave up on Daydream VR - the Pixel 4 doesn’t even support it!

Really poor timing considering I think the Quest (for mobile) and Alyx (for tethered content) are an inflection point for the medium imho.

Google developed VR headset internally for years, but in typical Google fashion this seems to be half-assed effort that didn’t go anywhere.

Stadia seems like such a good tie in for a VR headset. Not sure what they are thinking here.

Google did put a couple hundred million into Magic Leap. If they weren’t feeling burned before...

I have heard quite different info from one man working at Apple supplier.

Apple for long tried to license display tech from Beijing university, a solid state microled chip with microlenses, but they never agreed on lump sump payment Apple wanted, despite it being "n-times the price" of their whole IP trading business.

So, it became a blocker, with relationship souring, and them resorting to "patenting around," poaching their engineers, and other nasties.

They tried to recreate the chip by themselves, but Beijing uni got a tip of it, and claimed that Apple is now "IP tainted" by what they saw under NDA, and them hiring their engineers.

And so, Apple went on developing "ordinary" transparent VR glasses instead.

A company called Kura is said now to reuse the same chip from Beijing university IC company in their own take on what Apple tried originally.

I'm not sure if I'd put a lot of stock in an Apple supplier knowing more than people who talk to internal engineers.

The idea of a combined VR/AR device sounds silly, and I think Ive is right: AR is where Apple should be focusing right now. There is something there for AR, and Apple has been laying the groundwork for AR for years with iOS and iPad OS. VR is very much stuck in a niche right now, and it seems like it will be for awhile.

What they say about N421 is pretty much is what they were saying a generic "transparent VR" or "lightweight AR" display would be, and what the technology would allow.

Think of Google Glass sans camera, and creepiness.

For anything else, there is simply no practical tech on this planet.

The lowest common denominator for "a real world usable AR" is well known: an emissive display, and a simple reflective projection system on some semitransparent medium/mirror dots/viewfinder-overlay-like prisms. No magic.

Pretty much everything else requires battery packs bigger than the glasses themselves, especially if you want daylight visibility.

> I'm not sure if I'd put a lot of stock in an Apple supplier knowing more than people who talk to internal engineers

You will be surprised how much RnD stuff Apple outsources around in China.

Maybe they design their products in California, but they definitely engineer them here in Shenzhen.

I had hard time understanding why they were so skittish talking about their RnD centres in China, and even once denying their existence, when the whole city knew of them, and where they are.

I'm not sure if I'd put a lot of stock in a Bloomberg article versus an Apple supplier. Isn't this the same Bloomberg who filled a political debate audience full of plants to cheer for himself, after buying his way on to the stage?

AR is going to have severely limited consumer appeal until the FOV issue is solved, which is much, much harder for AR than it is for VR. Combined AR/VR is because the only way to get a decent FOV is to essentially pass a camera through a VR headset. Tracking latency is also still a huge issue, as is UX (hand-tracking, currently in its infancy, is what is expected, whereas VR can still get away with using handsets, which have become very impressive lately with their impementations of grip-tracking and haptic feedback).

Saying VR is a niche for XR headsets would be like saying word processing was a niche for home computers in the 70s. The tech simply isn't here yet to make an appealing product without everything you need for the "niche" application, so you might as well include it anyway.

> He started building his team in late 2015, and what grew into a 1,000-strong group of engineers

There were about 30 people in the original iPhone team. Something tells me larger teams find it hard to bring out innovations faster.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/13/15782200/one-device-secre...

Apple has been working on glasses at least since 2006 and perhaps earlier, far longer than this article indicates. Perhaps there's not continuity in these projects, but I suspect an R&D team or two has been working on this for over a decade. Whether or not you still believe it, Apple generally releases new new products when they're ready.

"Apple started working on an augmented reality headset at least as early as 2006, but put the idea on ice because it seemed a mere curiosity compared to the iPhone. The possibility of some sort of iGlass device was confirmed by Tony Fadell, the former iPod division head who is now the CEO of Nest Labs, during an interview for the oral history."

https://www.fastcompany.com/3018060/apples-iglasses-are-real...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474968/innovation--ap...

If this is really what went down, it's highly disappointing, and potentially a market-losing choice akin to Microsoft chopping off the internal processing for the original Kinect (which left it far too under-powered to perform its core competencies). VR is already computationally-intensive; adding in the features necessary for AR UX and still trying to achieve a compelling experience on, essentially, mobile hardware is a fool's game (ask anyone who has been underwhelmed by Magic Leap and, again, Microsoft's offerings). From a performance perspective, perhaps the latency of using an wireless connection to a hub was concerning, but if it wasn't, that would have been the only way to achieve the kind of exceptional performance expected of a market-defining product launch of an Apple product. They really shot themselves in the foot on this one, for a guy who was about to jump ship anyway.

>For Ive, who left last year after almost three decades at the company, a more realistic experience was potentially problematic: He didn’t want Apple promoting technology that would take people out of the real world.

And, on a philosophical level, that's not his decision to make. People build artificial worlds to suit or make up for their imperfections; that's just who we are as a species. I notice that those who are successful in the real-life social or corporate world are often horrified at the prospect of those not being central to the average person's experience, but the truth is that they're just as manufactured and distracting from "reality" as anything else. What is reality? I would say, "The base layers of Maslow's hierarchy," with everything above being artifice. Apple's contemporaries have shown that one doesn't need a false 3D overlay of their apartment to be swayed by the unreal; all you need is a willing mind and a text editor/reader. The problem is therefore orthogonal to the medium, and instead a matter of mental self-regulation of the near-limitless bounds of our imaginations. Let's get that figured out and stop trying to hold technology back.

The article ended abruptly for me, which was confusing. (Bloomberg has this weird black magic used by news sites where articles blend into one another, leading to buggy behaviour.)

Here's the full text in archive: https://archive.vn/Ue3Kp

Hmm that's a bit disappointing.. I feel like Ive and Cook could be wrong on this one. If desktop/mobile is an appropriate parallel, then it seems like they've decided to undercut their desktop machine to have the "ergonomics" of a mobile device while still not being mobile. If the VR headset is a stationary experience, then what's wrong with having a hub sitting around nearby?

I’d guess the AR headset is more interesting to Apple and probably not a stationary experience.

The goal is new UI extension of iOS similar to the watch. Eventually making it so you don’t need to pull out your iPhone to interact with software (and the world) at all.

Probably at first will be notifications and such. No idea if there’s any truth to this video, but it makes sense to me that Apple would focus on this as the next platform when the hardware becomes possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5J_6oMMG7Y

I think there’s huge potential for a massive shift in capability if this is done right.

The same post-Jobs Ive that caused the keyboard fiasco.

Some of the decisions made under him should be re-visited it seems, his product instincts beyond the design were flat out wrong.

Ive checked out ages ago, and even before that Apple Park must have occupied most of his last decade. Meanwhile the butterfly keyboard is rumored to return next week so maybe we should start blaming the executives who actually run the company?

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/12/arm-based-macs-12-inch-...

Seriously, his reasoning for not needing better graphics in VR is out of touch with the purpose of VR. I now wish he left sooner so they would’ve focused on the best possible VR experience.

Both VR and AR require a lot of horsepower. I think VR might need less horsepower than AR.

I wonder if either of them will be as generally useful for a wide group of people day to day. I don't mean useful as in apps, I mean tolerated by eyes and brain.

Tethering the headset to an iPhone in your back pocket to offload the processing still makes the most sense to me. By the time this thing comes out, iPhone 13 or 14 will be pretty powerful, and most people already own one so the headset can be a lot cheaper and more lightweight.

Wireless tethering would be best, but a thin wire would be fine too, I'd probably prefer that to having a radio on my temple all the time.

I wonder what kind of display tech they are planning to use - laser projection or something else? I've been seeing tiny 1" OLED displays from China lately with 2560x2560 resolution on Alibaba, pretty cool. But of course they block your vision, unlike a projector.

The main problem with this approach is you decimate your phone's battery life anytime you use it as a remote processing unit for VR/AR, at least in the case of Samsung Gear VR that's what John Carmack learned. Users end up having to calculate whether they'd rather use the VR device or have more spare battery to get them through the day / until next charge.

They could have captured both ends of the scale with two different devices: a powerful VR (for Mac/iPad) as well as a slimmer always-worn AR (maybe an iPhone companion like the Apple Watch).

They need VR credibility, especially after Valve dropping Mac support for SteamVR: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/01/valve-drops-steamvr-mac...

>They need VR credibility

5 months until they bring in John Carmack?

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/13/20963899/john-carmack-st...

Are you suggesting that Carmack is sitting out his non-compete period and has already been poached?

If not - then I'm suggesting it. ;-)

Interesting theory.

Do you remember the Avegant Glyph VR headset from a few years ago? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEmVyMm8opE

Apple should perfect this idea instead, make it look like a normal set of highend overear headphones from the outside, and integrate a AR screen into the headband. This form factor is a winner for bulkier AR/VR headsets because people already wear headphones around their necks, people are used to seing other people wearing them like that. Meaning that one of the biggest barriers of adoption (where to store it, looks) is already solved.

A portable mobile cinema/AR viewer, and a Macbook/Ipad auxiliar screen through USB-C would be enough for a v1.

They'd have the capability to integrate powerful technology into such a package.

The Glyph was simply a display with speakers. I agree that the form factor visually pleasing, and they weren't uncomfortable to wear (save for extended periods, where it was easier than even with VR sets to develop dry eyes), but adding in everything necessary to make them a true AR/VR headset with inside-out 6DoF tracking, let alone the SoaC, would have drastically changed its shape and size.

It doesn't have to be a "true AR/VR headset" to become a hit if it can enhance activities like coding or media production on a mobile device by providing a screen alternative.

Bicycle for the mind. That should be the primary vision for the product.

They shouldn't be thinking about market segments or if it looks cool enough. Just make the next step in human-computer interaction. Make history.

“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle... a new man-machine partnership... a new generation of entrepreneurs.” — Steve Jobs, c. 1980

I think Steve Jobs would have sold it internally. And gotten people to work together by hook or by crook.

People don't realize Steve Jobs was the great integrator.

The ipod was a great achievement, but it was dwarfed by his ability getting the music people and the computer people together.

If Apple had been first to market with a "wireless tether" VR headset that could have been interesting. A straight Quest competitor seems like an uninspired choice, especially as Apple has never been great at gaming, and the market seems less than Apple-sized.

AR glasses on the other hand they could bust wide open, but it all depends on the display technology. Literally nothing else matters unless the display is a huge breakthrough. I doubt that it will be good enough by 2023, unless Apple goes for a niche market first and expands wide a few generations later. But that doesn't really seem their style.

Apple doesn’t care about first to market. They will take the time necessary to refine a huge breakthrough.

It’s interesting that Ive had hesitations about building a product that takes the user out of reality. I also have that hesitation about VR; that is, I don’t like the fact that it takes up my entire field of vision, and I am hesitant to adopt a new screen technology when I don’t feel like I have properly reckoned with the screens I already have.

I hope that Apple will have Screen Time on this device.

Ultimately we will have software modulation of all photons hitting your retina, in hardware packages that are unobtrusive. To not be aiming there seems to be swimming against the tide.

It certainly makes sense for Apple to aim there. But I'm not sure that I want to go there. Perhaps I will have to in order to keep up.

Yup, I’m afraid so.

I agree that having this tethered to a stationary hub inhibits the scope of this being a device which can be worn anywhere.

If anything I could see the iPhone acting as the hub (for the first few generations at least) in the same way the iPhone is the hub for the Apple Watch. Not sure what protocol they would use to communicate, Bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth and Wifi is still a power hog.

UWB that is in the iPhone 11's.

By the way, here's an example of cool everyday-AR could be, if done right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm-4GPSnj94

The killer applications of AR would be when glasses are as ubiquitous as smartphones and display the same virtual world for everyone:

Imagine walking outside and seeing your neighbor's favorite fictional character mowing their lawn, because that's the avatar they chose to display themselves to other AR users.

Or seeing kids battling their Pokémon in the park. :)

That YouTube video you showed, though, just left me wondering "why?" I mean, it looked cool, but we've all basically got our phones always in reach. If anything, I'd like to get rid of plastic cards, not get more that would require glasses and an unintuitive interface to figure out what to do.

It just looked like a million other AR demos I've seen: gimmicky with less utility than what I've got now. I can imagine a place for AR, but "worse interface for something I can do right now on my phone" is not it.

> gimmicks

> worse interface for something I can do right now on my [computer]

Were quite literally the arguments people used against the advent of smartphones. :)

What problems do you think smartphones solved? People were not exactly clamoring for them.

Why do you think the Apple Watch became so successful?

When you don't HAVE to hold a phone to be able to do something, you wouldn't want to. In fact, I could see smartphones being supplanted by a combination of smartwatch + AR glasses.

> What problems do you think smartphones solved?

Mobility

this blew my mind.

Interesting news as it pertains to the ARM Macs. Implies the graphics capabilities may be substantially better than most of us were anticipating- much better than the already very good iPad graphics.

https://archive.vn/Ue3Kp

The untethered headset makes sense from the perspective of Apple’s history.

One of Apple’s core tenets is that convenience trumps everything.

Often to the chagrin on power users. Always to the chagrin of spec lovers. But it has worked very well for them until now.

What does this mean to me as an apple prosumer? When will this come out? What will it be like?

More like Google Glass and less like Microsoft Hololens / Magic Leap One

tldr: Ive: "Thinner."

“ Ive balked at the prospect of selling a headset that would require a separate, stationary device for full functionality. He encouraged Rockwell and his team to redevelop N301 around the less powerful technology that could be embedded entirely in the device.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com