Apple Scraps Work on Mac-Connected Augmented Reality Glasses

I feel like whenever the topic of AR glasses come up, these large companies focus too much on cameras. When really, I&#x27;d be happy with just a persistent display that can be in my field of vision. A clock, notifications, maybe a map if I&#x27;m walking. I&#x27;ve been using the Viture One glasses as an external monitor and they&#x27;ve been great for privacy in public places. You definitely can&#x27;t walk around with them since the internal prism messes with your sense of balance. But they are a nice step in the right direction.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bdc9rcrZW8I" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=bdc9rcrZW8I</a>

These stories about unreleased Apple products always make me laugh. It&#x27;s rumored Apple stops working on something they were rumored to be working on.

Apple&#x27;s adventures in XR are weird.<p>I started my career as a dev working in VR apss. At the time there was consensus in the industry that apple was about to release something huge that would push the whole industry to the mainstream - and indeed you couldn&#x27;t rely on any new VR&#x2F;AR product or software without it being silently acquired in months and their website redirecting to apple.<p>Fast forward one decade, nothing&#x27;s happened yet. I moved to web dev long ago, but people seem to be still waiting.

Fast forward to the year 2025. We have ultra-wide monitors that cover our entire field of view for less than $800, don&#x27;t need to wear bulky headset, and can perfectly maintain our situational awareness without the need for 1 TFLOP of compute and 8 tracking cameras.

The lesson here is that simply wanting something to be true doesn&#x27;t make it possible or practical. We also tend to get carried away with sci-fi becoming reality.<p>You see this constantly where people desperately hope for some form of FTL. They want it to be true and cling to fringe theories because of that.<p>Companies have been trying to make VR happen for decades. It&#x27;s not going to happen. Not only do people not want to strap something to their head, there are fundamental technical limitations around latency, true blacks, depth-of-field and what input feels &quot;natural&quot;.<p>People just take Snow Crash and Ready Player One too seriously.<p>AR is kind of the between of that but it has fundamentaly technical problems and constraints like processing power, energy, true blacks and lag. A true AR experience would have to constantly repaint the overlay as you move your head at incredibly low response time to feel &quot;natural&quot;.<p>Lag will be a major factor with AI chatbots for probably some time to come. The processing loop is basically text to language to embedding into AI model and then converting that token stream to spoken language. That takes time. We&#x27;re such a long way from something that feels &quot;natural&quot; like talking to another person.

Apple reshuffles internal programs and product roadmaps all the time.<p>Just because a program with an internal codename gets terminated doesn&#x27;t mean there aren&#x27;t a bunch of other initiatives in related spaces going on.<p>And the work on the core technologies certainly doesn&#x27;t end.<p>There&#x27;s no product until there are boxes piling up in warehouses, getting ready to be shipped.<p>If only we could stop giving attention to these &quot;news&quot;, which are really just propped up narratives for investors to nudge the market in their favor, and for Mark Gurman to get a paycheck.

Interesting reminder from the article that those AR glasses are one of a family of ideas Apple is simultaneously pursuing:<p>&gt; The company is still working on successors to the Vision Pro, including updated versions of the original model. It also has other concepts in the works, such as AirPods with cameras, and executives still hope to eventually create a set of standalone AR glasses someday.

In the U.S. in 2024, 32% of adult Americans reported being the target of workplace bullying[1]. Nearly 3 in 10 women (29%) and 1 in 10 men (10%) reported being subjected to debilitating sexual, physical or psychological abuse by their partner[2]. This means that 1&#x2F;3rd of workers do not feel safe in their workplace, and a significant number of people don&#x27;t feel safe in their own homes. There is no way these people are going to put anything on their faces that obscures their vision - not a pair of glasses, and not a giant headset. Until these numbers come down, VR and AR will never, ever go mainstream.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workplacebullying.org&#x2F;2024-wbi-us-survey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workplacebullying.org&#x2F;2024-wbi-us-survey&#x2F;</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehotline.org&#x2F;stakeholders&#x2F;domestic-violence-statistics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehotline.org&#x2F;stakeholders&#x2F;domestic-violence-st...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Ny2oj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Ny2oj</a>

Previous posting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42901132">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42901132</a>

I love my Vision Pro, but I do feel like it&#x27;s quite heavy and delicate for every day, general use. Also, one thing that I have to keep in mind when using it is that the room needs to stay <i>very</i> well lit. Something I don&#x27;t need to even think about with my phone, laptop etc.

This is only semi related but I wonder what will happen to these huge hierarchical orgs when the pace of software development improves by 10-20x thanks to LLMs.<p>How will these risk averse slow moving teams with a ton of process keep up with 100x more tiny teams of engineers who can ship whole features in days instead of months.