Apple's Unusual Headset Design Has Led to Unprecedented Production Challenges
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Hmmm, that sounds weird.
Dassault Systèmes 3DExperience has supported non-planar and flexible circuit boards for years - if not decades - at this point.
Based on the term "motherboard" used here I'm interpreting this to mean a bent/curved rigid circuit board which to my knowledge, is in fact novel. Obviously,the sections of the board containing the SoC and other chips will need to be flat, so I'm interested to see the utility here.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what they're actually doing.
Curved (in 3d space) circuit boards are certainly not novel in wearables though.
It's a very common design requirement to shape things to the human body area the device is being placed upon.
Thus people creating their own circuit boards using CNC on non-planar surfaces and similar. Saying that from having done it myself several years ago. There are also Youtube videos about this stuff as well.
I've spent the last 15 years as a hardware design engineer in consumer electronics, 4 of those years were working on wrist worn wearables for one of the biggest players. Wearables utilize FPCs for curved sections. Sometimes sections the FPC will be stiffened with pieces of FR4 to support larger components, but the SoC, DDR, etc is always SMTd to flat rigid PCB. I've heard reports of rigid boards being bent if the stack up is only a few layers, but have never seen in a production product. Generally the traces and solder ball joints for the chips can't handle the strain.
Which I'm sure is the point of the marketing plant ... :-)
I feel like this would be easier for manufacturers to achieve and refine if they weren’t trying to make their glasses do everything else (AR industrial apps, VR gaming, etc). It seems to me that just about every professional would want a pair for plane/train trips at least. While not a market as huge the one dreamed of by offering the holy grail of VR, it’s still a sizable audience.
To me it’s the holy grail of remote work. I can do a lot of my job from just about anywhere, but certain parts really benefit from having sizable external monitors which I’m absolutely not lugging around. Every alternative solution (external 15” screen(s), projectors) are far less than ideal workarounds, despite possessing the advantage of being obtainable.
If not, "Headset? What headset? You can't believe everything you read in the gossip blogs."
The bigger question is who is doing the leaking from within Apple. It will be interesting to see what turns out to be true. It’s also very interesting to wonder how much of the leaking is intentional and strategic.
If they wanted to set expectations low and diffuse a lot of naysaying, it makes sense for them to leak all the stuff people are likely to moan about. That way when they demo it, all the actual experience stuff will (hopefully) be a pleasant surprise.