After years of teasing from CEO Tim Cook, it looks like we’ll finally get our first real glimpse at Apple’s mixed-reality headset next week at WWDC, the company’s big annual developer conference on Monday.
Apple’s headset will undoubtedly be one of the biggest announcements from Silicon Valley this year. Just don’t get too excited.
First-generation gadgets, while exciting, are often pretty bad and buggy. It usually requires years of iteration for any new tech to be worth the price.
If you’re unfamiliar with, or don’t understand the appeal of, a mixed-reality headset, just think of a device that you wear on your head that changes the world you see and experience. With two tiny high-resolution displays in front of your eyes, it can trick your brain into thinking you’re immersed in a completely different world (virtual reality), or that virtual elements exist in the real world (augmented reality).
While plenty of VR, AR and mixed-reality headsets already exist, many people are probably wondering what Apple is bringing to the table — and thanks to reporting from the likes of The Information and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, we already have a pretty good idea of what that looks like.
Gurman says to expect an iOS-like interface called “xrOS,” which should be a familiar experience if you’ve ever used an iPhone or iPad: basically, a grid of apps and widgets. But with more than a dozen optical cameras on the headset to track your eyes and hands, you can simply look at an item to select it, and use a hand gesture to activate it.
Apple has reportedly re-built versions of its popular first-party apps—including Maps, Safari, Photos, Messages, and its two premier subscription services, Apple TV+ and Apple Music—specifically for this new xrOS experience. The headset will even have its own customized FaceTime app. But a big focus of this headset is said to be gaming, which means Apple will likely use the WWDC platform to encourage developers to build AR and VR games for xrOS.
But, there is much we don’t know: Will its design be attractive enough for people to want to wear on their heads? Will it be sleek? Powerful? What about the battery life? Will it feel heavy? Will it get hot if you wear it for too long? Importantly, how much is this going to cost?
Apple will have to make trade-offs. Will they be smart ones?
While Apple appears to have mastered chip performance and efficiency in portable computing devices, battery life and weight—two critical factors that will always be at odds—will likely force Apple to make some design compromises with this headset.
Crucially, if Apple expects people to actually wear these devices on their heads, they need to be lightweight. Heaviness was one of the key issues that sunk Meta’s high-powered Quest Pro with critics: The Verge, for example, made a big point about how uncomfortable it was to wear.
But a mixed-reality headset also needs lots of power, and that means packing in as much battery as possible. The rub, though, is that batteries are heavy. It will be interesting to see which concessions Apple made, if any, to keep the headset small enough to wear while robust enough to power these new experiences.
Then there’s the price. VR headsets tend to cost hundreds of dollars. Meta’s brand-new Quest 3 headset, which was unveiled this week and also supports mixed reality, costs $500. That’s on the lower end of the scale; VR headsets can get much more expensive. Meta’s beefier Quest Pro starts at $1,000, and Sony’s PSVR 2 costs $550, but requires a $500 PlayStation 5 to power it.
AR devices tend to be even more costly than their VR counterparts. The Vuzix Blade Upgraded smart glasses start at $1,000. Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 starts at $3,500. Most AR devices are aimed at the enterprise, since few consumers would be able to afford them.
The Information reported Apple’s headset could cost around $3,000, which would automatically make it out of reach for many people. But even if Apple accepts a lower profit margin and prices these headsets to be more affordable—say around $500—it’s still a tough purchase to reconcile if you’re not already invested in VR or AR. Smartphones have obvious appeal: making calls, using the internet. A device that replicates these features but simply moves them into a head-mounted format, while novel, might feel superfluous to many people.
But there’s a bigger reason to be wary of Apple’s initial foray into mixed reality.
The first generation is often the worst generation
Though it’s reportedly been in development since at least 2016, Apple’s headset is ultimately a first-generation tech product — and first-gen tech tends to be buggy, costly, and incomplete. There are inevitable issues a company just can’t predict until a product gets into the hands of millions of people.
It happens with new tech all the time: Most video games receive software patches in the following days and weeks after their release, since people inevitably find issues and exploits. It can get particularly bad with hardware: The first reviewers for Samsung’s first foldable phone, the Galaxy Fold, found it warped and distorted after a short period of time, which forced the company delay its wide release. It even happened when Apple changed its smartphone design with the iPhone 6 (remember “BendGate”?)
Bugs and issues aside, though, first-edition tech is often more expensive and has fewer features compared to later versions. The first iPhone, for example, retailed for $550 and was extremely rough by today’s standards: no App Store, no cutting, copying, and pasting text, no selfie camera, and its cruddy 2-megapixel rear camera couldn’t even take video. Later versions of the iPhone added all of these features and more, there were more variations to choose from, and the starting price was cheaper to boot.
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Another Apple product, the Watch, had a similarly rough debut. It cost $400 to start but required an iPhone to work—and it still suffered from a ton of performance issues. And, in true first-gen fashion, there were hardware issues, too. Many people found the Watch’s battery could swell up and balloon, causing the display to either break or pop out of the watch case. (Apple ultimately extended its warranty policy for the first Watch to help cover this issue.)
Tim Cook needs a "killer app"
Apple’s magic headset could, of course, buck this first-generation trend and be a wonderful, feature-rich product. But Apple has reportedly run into many design, manufacturing, and production challenges, like needing to create a curved motherboard to fit the headset’s curved shell. Development issues have been so extensive that Apple’s plans to follow up the initial headset with a sleek pair of glasses, which it believed would have wider appeal with customers, were put on indefinite hold due to technical difficulties.
The headset we’ll see at WWDC is likely the result of many compromises that were necessary to make in order to get a product out the door. And, notably, it will likely be pretty barebones in terms of applications, especially at launch. Mixed reality, for all its promise, still lacks that killer app—and It’s going to take time for developers to build apps for xrOS.
It’s always exciting when Apple debuts a brand-new product category. Having changed the industry many times with the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, and AirPods, people look to Apple to see where tech is going next. But even if its first headset looks exciting, just know it’ll be that much more refined, and desirable, with more time in the oven.
