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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a false leak here, because one of the comments on the Bloomberg article mentions them going with a design where the battery is external and connected via a wire to the headset (to prevent heat issues). That seems like such a bizarre design choice for Apple that I can't imagine they'd actually do that. Just... make the chip weaker?

(Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go? Or if you're sitting in a chair your back pockets may not be easily accessible, which means the battery is either in front and you're constantly bumping the wire, or it's on the floor or something. I know it's not a completely unsolvable problem because the Vive had that special head strap that draped down the middle of your head which was fine, but I still got tangled up from time to time.)

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This device is going to have color passthrough vision. That means it has cameras on the outside, and then an image of the real world is shown on the inside. If you try to just directly display the video from the camera on the screen inside the user will throw up. You need to do a lot of processing to reconstruct what the user’s eyes need to see on the inside display, which probably includes a stack of analytic methods and ML inference that has to run in real-time and produce high-resolution video signal. Trust me that the engineers working on this are absolutely pushing the limits of what their hardware can do. The tradeoff space would include the following factors:

1) low quality passthrough is unpleasant

2) heavy headset is unpleasant

3) headset with weight imbalance is unpleasant

4) sensors, chips, and display all use power

5) battery with more capacity is heavier

6) battery with more power draw is hotter

7) hot headset in your face is unpleasant

8) battery at the end of a cord is ugly and annoying

So it’s easy to say “use a weaker chip”, but what if that means you have to degrade some must-have functionality? Or it means you have to wait 3 years for TSMC to come out with a smaller node before you can release your product? Battery on the end of a wire is a “bold” choice, probably an engineer won a cage match against an executive to make it happen.

Or you could just use transparent lenses you can vary the darkness of... but hey I'm not building it.

Ok, you just gave yourself a different set of hard engineering problems to solve. Turns out that field-of-view, brightness, color reproduction, and resolution are all difficult to achieve on that kind of display. You can try a Magic Leap 2 if you want to experience those constraints.

One thing that Apple’s approach has going for it is that it could also be great at VR content like Beat Saber, Half Life Alyx, Bigscreen movies, or as a monitor for your MacBook. A Magic-Leap-esque device will suck for any of those.

However, the Magic Leap form factor may work better for a Google Glass type use case where you wear the headset as you go about your life and get some augmented features (maybe it can be an iPhone replacement eventually).

> Just... make the chip weaker?

Making it not able to do as much is sometimes a winning move, but also sometimes not. The primary utility concerns that people have with headset products come from display resolution and framerate. It takes a lot of pixel density for readable text and a lot of frames per second to prevent display-lag-induced motion sickness. Crapping out on the displays and processing makes that worse, not better.

> Like if you don't have pockets, where does the battery go?

Clips. Straps. Bags. Hooks. People have been successfully carrying things on their person without pockets for millennia. Have you really never seen someone at the gym strap their phone into an armband?

You may as well be asking "Like if you don't have pockets, where does your cellphone go?" And yet billions of people all over the world manage to carry cellphones.

Interesting take.

I kind of hope it's not a false leak, just to see the battery with cord, lmao.

The display on these are bleeding edge. It’s an order of magnitude more dense, and as such draws more power.

Heat and weight from the battery directly just exacerbates the problem.

lol, just make the chip weaker? On an AR/VR headset that means potato graphics and motion sickness. Guaranteed flop.

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