Future Apple Vision Pro rumored to be directly connected to a Mac

A cheap, tethered experience would help a lot. 

AppleInsider said:

While Apple may still be on the road to augmented reality glasses, a detour it is taking along the way is a future Apple Vision Pro that goes far beyond just mirroring a Mac's display.

Apple Vision Pro, with a Mac keyboard

Apple isn't abandoning the Apple Vision Pro concept, despite the repeated calls from naysayers to do so. In the lates Power On newsletter, author Mark Gurman details what he's been told Apple is working on, for one of Apple's follow-on units.

The report spits a very fine hair for what's going on with one of the units. A previous report said that Apple had stopped work on glasses that tethered to a Mac. Instead, it is working on a headset that directly connects to a Mac.

The Apple Vision Pro does this already -- sort of. The Developer Strap accessory allows developers to capture a direct video feed from the Vision Pro to a Mac via a USB-C connection, using Reality Composer Pro or QuickTime. This is just a 100 megabit network connection, though, and is relatively bandwidth-challenged for anything other than video stream.

Presumably, this future version would be more flexible than just mirroring a Mac display. It should providing a bidirectional path of data, and not requiring a $300 accessory that only developers can buy to do so.

A cabled versus wireless connection also cuts video latency way down. Cited in the report is viewing surgical imagery or flight simulation -- both needing as little latency as possible.

The concept is fairly sound, and is more or less what happens from most other vendors' headsets. A tether offloads the heavy processing power needed for the headset, keeping the weight off the user's head.

The Valve Index, for instance, relies on cable, beacons, and controllers for identifying the headset and user intent. Meta's devices have taken both approaches, depending on model.

A timetable for release isn't clear. Depending on who you listen to, it could be as soon as the next year, but 2027 seems more likely.

Also not clear is pricing. Apple still catches heat for a $3499 virtual reality and augmented reality headset.

Rumor Score: Likely

Read on AppleInsider

If it is aimed at flight sim and medical uses then the price is not going to drop drastically.  Will be interesting to see how they get a higher bandwidth on a flexible connection given free movement is kind of device requirement. Also a long cable is kind of a key need as well. Sounds like it needs thunderbolt optical to finally be a real thing. 

$799-999 could work. Mac Studio pricing does not. 

This sort of pricing is a pipe dream. There’s no way that Apple will abandon internal computing and make this just a monitor that you wear on your head. 

The vision of “spatial computing” is fundamentally sound; inevitably we will be interacting with our computing devices in a spatial environment. It’s just a matter of when it comes to maturity… whether it’s in the next five years or in the next fifteen. Probably it’s the latter.

For that spatial computing paradigm, the cost of a laptop makes a lot of sense. I can imagine that Apple sees in the long run users owning iPhones, iPads and Visions - whilst the Mac becomes an increasingly niche product.

sloaah said:

$799-999 could work. Mac Studio pricing does not. 

This sort of pricing is a pipe dream. There’s no way that Apple will abandon internal computing and make this just a monitor that you wear on your head. 

The vision of “spatial computing” is fundamentally sound; inevitably we will be interacting with our computing devices in a spatial environment. It’s just a matter of when it comes to maturity… whether it’s in the next five years or in the next fifteen. Probably it’s the latter.

For that spatial computing paradigm, the cost of a laptop makes a lot of sense. I can imagine that Apple sees in the long run users owning iPhones, iPads and Visions - whilst the Mac becomes an increasingly niche product.

Indeed Apples first laptops were the same price range. When they did get a laptop to $2.5k it didn’t sell well but was a very effective at getting customers in to convince to pay for the upper end models. MacBooks even hit that same mark today but stretched down to price people keep saying the Glasses need to hit. 

To me the vision family will eventually, like in a decade or two, spread down picking up more market as it goes. That will be a long journey. 

mattinoz said:

sloaah said:

$799-999 could work. Mac Studio pricing does not. 

This sort of pricing is a pipe dream. There’s no way that Apple will abandon internal computing and make this just a monitor that you wear on your head. 

The vision of “spatial computing” is fundamentally sound; inevitably we will be interacting with our computing devices in a spatial environment. It’s just a matter of when it comes to maturity… whether it’s in the next five years or in the next fifteen. Probably it’s the latter.

For that spatial computing paradigm, the cost of a laptop makes a lot of sense. I can imagine that Apple sees in the long run users owning iPhones, iPads and Visions - whilst the Mac becomes an increasingly niche product.

Indeed Apples first laptops were the same price range. When they did get a laptop to $2.5k it didn’t sell well but was a very effective at getting customers in to convince to pay for the upper end models. MacBooks even hit that same mark today but stretched down to price people keep saying the Glasses need to hit. 

To me the vision family will eventually, like in a decade or two, spread down picking up more market as it goes. That will be a long journey. 

My guess would be that the Vision is an intentional way to replace laptops in most situations. Takes up much less space, is fully mobile, weighs less, doesn’t need a wired connection, allows a big screen experience (giving demonstrations more impact), etc, etc. This isn’t a device you walk around using, except in limited circumstances. At least for now. 

So this is a bet on what the future of laptop computing will be, not a replacement for desktops, or tablets, or phones. This is for where you sit down and do extended computing work that a tablet won’t be completely suited to (there’ll be overlap).

Yeah, yeah … media consumption. But the facts are that family members rarely watch the same things and certainly less and less at the same times. People’s schedules don’t align. So this isn’t for family time. It acknowledges that it’s for a single person’s media consumption. (Just imagine the consumer data they’ll get from that! Woo!)