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Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses 37

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
Apple has paused development of a cheaper, lighter Vision Pro headset to shift resources toward AI-powered smart glasses aimed at competing with Meta. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports: The company had been preparing a cheaper, lighter variant of its headset -- code-named N100 -- for release in 2027. But Apple announced internally last week that it's moving staff from that project to accelerate work on glasses, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The company is working on at least two types of smart glasses. The first one, dubbed N50, will pair with an iPhone and lack its own display. Apple aims to unveil this model as soon as next year, ahead of a release in 2027, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters.

Apple is also working on a version with a display -- something that could challenge the just-released Meta Ray-Ban Display. The Apple version had been planned for 2028, but the company is now looking to accelerate development, the people said. [...] Apple's glasses will rely heavily on voice interaction and artificial intelligence -- two areas where it hasn't always excelled. It was slow to introduce the Apple Intelligence platform and had to delay upgrades to its Siri voice assistant.

The Apple glasses are expected to come in a variety of styles and run a new chip. They'll include speakers for music playback, cameras for media recording, and voice-control features that will work with a connected phone. Apple has also been exploring a suite of health-tracking capabilities for the device. The priority shift to glasses is just the latest change to the company's headset strategy following an underwhelming debut by the Vision Pro. The $3,499 product, which melds virtual and augmented reality, is seen as too heavy and expensive to be a mainstream hit. It's also short on both video content and apps. Apple executives have acknowledged the product's shortcomings in private, viewing it as an overengineered piece of technology.
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Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses More

Apple Shelves Vision Headset Revamp to Prioritize Meta-Like AI Glasses

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  • Remember when 3D TVs were the next big thing?

  • Everyone running in the same direction (Score:4, Insightful)

    by silvergig ( 7651900 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @09:09PM (#65696970)
    This is the problem with AI and other fad technologies. Eventually, everyone is running towards the cliff, all screaming that they're going to get there first and therefore, that makes them awesome.

    • That's a problem not with the technologies, but with the herd mentality of the C-class. Now that Steven Jobs has apparently not only retired, but left the Moon base for good and gone out of reach, the post-visionaries have no idea what to do next. So they read reddit and dutifully follow the fads like every other 14 year old who wants to make an impression.

      • Same as it ever was, Apple succeeds on execution and lack of competition which is not dragged down by advertising enshittification.

    • This is the problem with AI and other fad technologies. Eventually, everyone is running towards the cliff, all screaming that they're going to get there first and therefore, that makes them awesome.

      The question is who brought the abseiling equipment. There are two types of companies in the VR space: Those who want to own the ecosystem (Meta, and Apple), and those who want to make hardware (HTC, Microsoft, HP, etc, etc, etc). In the first two there was a race of two wildly differently prepared people. You had Meta who invested a fuckton into building a market by starting entire game studios, making their product affordable, contributing to development tools, while releasing headsets; and on the other s

      • Just think if you're Quest on steroids in regards to power and display, and the current AVP with its M2 chip is already much MUCH more powerful as the Quest 3, and Apple is coming out with a revision of the AVP with the M5 chip by the end of this year, so that one is a real beast in regards to standalone power, that would mean another step towards current PCVR midrange performance. If you already are looking forward to new games for the Q3, just think what kind of games would be possible with a powerful mob

        • Indeed what kind of games can I play on Apple's new toy. 0% of the ones from the Quest store for starters.

          Also the "beast" with regards to standalone power doesn't mean much when a company releases a product with an external battery pack, allowing you to get tangled like it's 2016 with your cables.

          By the way I'm not fussed about the improved performance because ... I have a PC. I'm also not fussed because having performance doesn't mean anything when developers will target the common market - a lot of games

          • I agree with you on the external battery. As an owner of the HTC Vive Pro with the 'wireless'module, the cable from the headset to the battery is almost just as annoying as the cable to a computer/console for a VR hearset. My Pico 4 is soooo much better without a cable, and I'm sad to hear even Meta is contemplating using an external wired puck for their Quest 4. I will never buy a headset which would have an external puck/battery using a wire, which can't be mounted comfortably on a headstrap (as many thir

    • This isn't about AI. HUD glasses were always a good concept poisoned by Google and outrage hype, if even Meta can launch HUD glasses the outrage has dissipated. Apple is late to the party, but it's too big a niche to ignore. Much bigger than pass through goggles, especially since Apple is allergic to VR.

  • this is fun, going offtopic (Score:4, Informative)

    by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Wednesday October 01, 2025 @09:21PM (#65696986)
    I get the impression that good ideas don't come around that often.
    Having ONE good idea rarely seems to lead to any more.. "good" in this case means popular.

    Apple.. hmm.. yeah, I guess they've done pretty well... Mac.. iphone... that's 2 good ideas.
    Facebook...hmm... does buying instagram and whatsapp count as a good idea?
    Microsoft...hmm... windows, office... xbox? does the cloud count? no, that's just follow the leader... I guess for all the abuse they deservedly get, they have 3.
    No, xbox was just a cheap playstation copy. no? So MS is back to 2.
    Google... search, survellance oh, there's a lucrative but not exactly popular idea... android? they kind of bought it, didn't they... well, at least it is (was?) open.
    Amazon? delivery I guess. Robotics in the warehouse, but you don't see that.
    Looks like 2 good products/ideas is about as good as it gets, then coast on your laurels.

    I'm very skeptical when the word "innovation" gets uttered. Innovation is just throwing shit at the wall until something sticks.
    Like AI/LLMs... is it innovative or just shit that didn't stick to the wall?
    It's pretty clear no one knows what is going to be the next big thing.

    Oh, btw, those facebook glasses are just as creepy as the google glasses, probably more creepy... and Apple wants to copy them.
    Did anyone notice that those big black plastic glasses don't make Zuck look smart, but really just creepier than without them?
    Creepy crap for creepy creeps.
    • It seems that money can make people and companies more stupid. Or maybe it just puts existing stupidity on display.

    • Apple had the trifecta of three visionary types. Steve Wozniac (pretty much single handedly invented the 80s portable TV computer), Steve Jobs (Didnt invent shit, but had a god-like sense of predicting what consumers would want.) and Jonny Ives (Masterful industrial designer. Love or hate Apples, but the devices that came out under his watch where beautiful).

      Jobs should have left the company to Ives. Tim Cook is a fine enough businessman, and he seems a decent person (I've yet to hear of him throwing tables

      • Re:this is fun, going offtopic (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday October 02, 2025 @01:56AM (#65697324) Homepage Journal

        Apple had the trifecta of three visionary types. Steve Wozniac (pretty much single handedly invented the 80s portable TV computer), Steve Jobs (Didnt invent shit, but had a god-like sense of predicting what consumers would want.) and Jonny Ives (Masterful industrial designer. Love or hate Apples, but the devices that came out under his watch where beautiful).

        Jobs should have left the company to Ives.

        Please, no. The Mac under Ive was a train wreck of missing functionality. From the lack of floppy drives in the iMac (which was a nightmare in the education market, to the point where ~100% of them ended up with some kind of floppy drive or Zip drive or similar attached externally), to the premature dropping of FireWire (which Apple literally just dropped support for a few weeks ago, but which was phased out on the hardware side from 2008 through 2012), to the premature removal of USB-A ports (which a lot of Mac laptop users still curse to this day), to the premature removal of HDMI ports, SD card slots, and MagSafe (all of which Mac users complained about so much that they actually put them all back).

        That's before we even get into human interface issues like the butterfly keyboards, the touch bar, the removal of Touch ID and the home button on the iPhone, etc.

        The post-Ive MacBook Pro models are IMO a breath of fresh air pretty much across the board. I'm hoping the iPhone gets there eventually.

        Tim Cook is a fine enough businessman, and he seems a decent person (I've yet to hear of him throwing tables at staff members like Jobs did) but the only real innovations to come out under him where watches (which where kind of predicted by everyone, so more just getting in early) and the ARM thing, again less innovation more just smart use of resources.

        To be fair, that ARM thing resulted in Macs that run all day without a charge, which is literally the thing more Mac users have asked for than probably any other feature, and have literally been begging for since the PowerBook G4 took away the dual battery bays in 2001.

        And remember that the iPhone team wasn't led by Ive. It was led by Forstall, and the hardware team was led by Tony Fadell. That's where bulk of the innovation that made the iPhone a success came from, IMO. This is not to say that Apple should have held on to Forstall, given reports of his personality conflicts with other execs, but I think he should get credit for a lot of the fundamentals of what made the iPhone a success, along with Tony Fadell, who also gets credit for the iPod.

        Ive... made a case. It was a beautiful case, where they talked about how they carefully matched each front and back in various ways to ensure that the alignment was perfect, yada, yada, yada, but it was still a case with a glass screen and a port and a headphone jack (that was recessed so badly that no headphones anyone owned could even plug in).

        Has Apple lost its innovators? Maybe. Will Apple find new innovators? Probably. Is Apple doing good engineering in the meantime? Definitely.

        But nothing that completely blows the market apart. macs look more or less the same as they did a decade ago. IPhones have stagnated because the updates are so incremental. IPads are still IPads. Wheres the new product lines?

        They tried to do a self-driving car, but I guess they couldn't pull off the AI. I know they've been doing stuff with drones for Maps imaging purposes since at least 2016, and I'd imagine that tech could eventually turn into a real-world product if they ever decide to productize it. I'm sure there are other skunkworks projects at Apple that could eventually turn into something cool, or at least I hope so, because that's how innovation usually happened at Apple, and presumably still does.

        All we've gotten is the bloody VR headset thats too expensive and nobody wants since VR is an intractably flawed technology that causes eye

        • not picking a fight here, but... you used the I word, one of my hobby horses.

          >Has Apple lost its innovators? Maybe. Will Apple find new innovators? Probably. Is Apple doing good engineering in the meantime? Definitely.

          You laid out a chronology of Jony Ive missteps, for instance, which I believe underlines my point about innovation. ... it's just flopping around, throwing shit at the wall until something sticks.

          This is just me, but I scoff whenever that word is trotted out, because it's not only misunders
        • A lot of people donâ(TM)t notice it because itâ(TM)s not as flashy as hardware, but Apple started an arms race with Google over their Maps product. There has been a TON of innovation from both companies in that area, purely because they created competition that couldnâ(TM)t be bought out.

      • Jobs just had a really good sense for thinking about how technology could integrate into human life. I fully remember the world before things like the iPod - the infamous Sony VCRs with 40 buttons on the remote control, and you could open up the top set of buttons to reveal...another 40 buttons. I'm pretty sure it could do everything but you had to read the instruction manual to figure out how to change the channel properly.

        Tech was like this everywhere. I remember LAN parties in the 90s where you'd spend a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      Apple.. hmm.. yeah, I guess they've done pretty well... Mac.. iphone... that's 2 good ideas.

      You forgot Apple TV. The concept was brilliant, and it was arguably the first viable off-the-shelf set-top box, beating Roku by a few months.

      The problem was that Apple A. did not license their tech, and B. insisted on being treated as a luxury brand in a field where being a luxury brand is a significant competitive disadvantage. A better UI isn't good enough if you can outfit every TV in your house from Roku ($29.99) for less than you pay for one set-top box from Apple ($130). And it is doubly hopeless i

      • Off the shelf set top boxes are much older than Apple TVs.

        And the Newton was just Apple's "Me too" device, a copy of many other tablets of that time. It didn't inspire the Palm Pilot, the Palm Pilot was was created by Jeff Hawkins who in 1989 helped develop the Gridpad by Grid Systems. Even Samsung had already developed a tablet computer in 1992, a year before Apple's Newton.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Off the shelf set top boxes are much older than Apple TVs.

          Apple's were the first ones that anyone took seriously. Before that, you mostly had HTPCs, which were kind of niche.

          And the Newton was just Apple's "Me too" device, a copy of many other tablets of that time.

          Wow. Today I learned about two devices I had never heard of. But look at the user interface of the Samsung tablet [youtube.com] from that era and the GridPad tablet [vintagecomputer.ca]. Compare with the Palm [uxdesign.cc]. They're nothing alike.

          Now tell me the Newton UI [uxdesign.cc] wasn't a major influence on Palm's UI.

          • Apple didn't take set top boxes seriously in the beginning. The first models needed iTunes to stream things to it in 2007, and it wasn't until an update a year later that it stopped needing that requirement. Even ignoring that, there were things like the Philips Streamium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamium) That were able to do the same thing since 2003.

            As for the tablet PC part, Palm's UI was used in their first PDA device, the Tandy Zoomer in 1992. Here is a training video of that time showing all i

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              Tandy Zoomer in 1992.

              The only reference I could find to Zoomer being released in 1992 is an uncited mention in the Wikipedia article, which seems likely to be erroneous given the Byte article linked below.

              Now tell me the Newton UI wasn't majorly influenced by Palm's UI.

              Nope. The timeline doesn't work. Palm wasn't even founded until 1992. Newton was unveiled to the general public in May of 1992 and was first sold in August of 1993. Zoomer was released, as best I can tell, in November of 1993 [blogspot.com], by which time the Newton UI had been demonstrated publicly for 18 months, and had been available

              • The Tandy Zoomer went under the other name of the Tandy Z-PDA, so that might be part of the issue with timing it (and the whole OS function was also used by Casio). Here are some other sites that mention it from 1992:
                https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-golden-age-of-pdas
                https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-tandy-zoomer-the-x86-pda-before
                https://lowendmac.com/2016/a-history-of-palm-part-1-before-the-palmpilot/

                But it does seem that it's OS is originally by Geoworks, not Palm (my mistake). (GEOS had been first releas

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dgatwood ( 11270 )

              Apple didn't take set top boxes seriously in the beginning. The first models needed iTunes to stream things to it in 2007, and it wasn't until an update a year later that it stopped needing that requirement. Even ignoring that, there were things like the Philips Streamium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streamium) That were able to do the same thing since 2003..

              Oh, holy crap. Talk about a small world. I was working at a company that did the operating system software for a competitor of theirs (Kerbango) right around the turn of the century. Unfortunately, at the time, most people's home Internet connection just plain wasn't good enough to do streaming audio in any meaningful way, so the product never shipped.

              As for streaming video, YouTube didn't even start until 2005, and Netflix didn't start streaming until 2007. So what Philips shipped in 2003 was also seve

      • Microsoft had Windows MCE and a certification program for HTPCs to run it.

        It was half baked, but it was early.

      • I agree with you. If Steve Jobs and Tim Cook knew what to do with Apple TV they wouldn't have called it a hobby project for nearly a decade. Maybe they were still gun shy after the major failure of the Pippen.

      • Great examples. Again not to flog this horse too much, but all those notable attempts and failures, I believe shores up my position : innovation is just pure luck. Throw some shit at the wall, if timing and position of the stars is just right, it's a hit.
        otherwise, it just gets added to the list of things that didn't work.

        remember Thomas Edison: "Genius is 99% perspiration and only 1% inspiration"
        sooo... I didn't say it, a great man said it, must be true? :-)

  • But maybe, for just a moment, can we take a step back and assess this from a perspective other than, "Apple is shit, AI is shit, Meta is shit, technology is shit, and I hate everything?"

    One of the bigger complaints about the first round of Vision PRO or whatever that thing was called, aside from the price, was the bulkiness. So they're aiming for something less bulky. That I see as a positive acknowledgment of user complaints, something Apple is not recently accustomed to doing. It's a rather shocking turn

  • Back in the late 00's, Apple was on a roll. Coming out with authentically novel products that both looked good and functioned good.

    Ever since Jobs died they have just been churning the same waters of "lighter, slightly faster". Now their chasing trends, first VR headsets that they have been late to the party with and are overpriced, then with AI, now with going for the VR/AR Glasses.

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