Tim Cook really wants Apple Glass to become a reality

The fabled Apple Glass continues to be in development, with augmented reality glasses still a top priority for CEO Tim Cook to produce.

Headset initiatives like the Apple Vision Pro are a gradual step towards smaller, lighter smart glasses that provide augmented reality experiences to the user. This future concept is rumored to be in development at Apple, under the name of Apple Glass.

While the Apple Vision Pro has had a relatively shaky start, CEO Tim Cook is still very much interested in producing Apple Glass. He's wanted the product to be created for over a decade.

In Sunday's newsletter for Bloomberg, sources of Mark Gurman say that Cook is doing what he can to get the smart glasses made. "Tim cares about noting else," one source claimed. "It's the only thing he's really spending his time on from a product development standpoint."

Tough Meta battle

It's become a top priority for Apple's engineers, all to try and outpace Meta in creating a category-leading device. Meta already leads in terms of headsets, but it's also taken first blood when it comes to smart glasses as well.

Meta already has a hit with its RayBan smart glasses, which are used for taking pictures and for AI purposes, but it's not the kind of smart glasses that Cook is keen on making. That would involve making something that can display AR images to the user, much like the Apple Vision Pro but in a much slimmer form.

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Achieving a product like Apple Glass is an engineering nightmare for any company, let alone Apple, to produce. You're effectively trying to make a heads-up display that doesn't have the bulk of a headset, while still retaining the processing and audio capabilities.

Doing so requires some considerable miniaturization, careful designing, and offloading of elements to a host device if necessary. For example, using a nearby iPhone to handling processing and rendering duties to save from adding the weighty components and a hefty battery to the supposedly light headwear.

It is certainly a pet project for Cook that could give Apple a considerable lead in wearable electronics. That is, if it can pull the feat of engineering off before Meta does it.

11 Comments

9secondkox2 9 Years · 3356 comments

About 1 week ago

This is the way to go. Apple should have never gone with a cliche headset. Even late to market, glasses would be big.

mattinoz 10 Years · 2598 comments

Optimistic renders indeed.
Thank you for a refreshingly honest description.

wonkothesane 13 Years · 1740 comments

I suppose there are about five gingillion challenges for such a device to become true. One of them is battery tech, like in general for all battery driven gadgets. No one wants to wear a separate battery pack, or accept a very short time between charges. Even if the glasses would be effectively powered by your phone, you still need decent battery life for the networking, sponsoring and the displays. So, if this is THE device for TC, then I would also suppose they are working hard on breakthrough battery tech, which I would expect to be quite some years away.
In the meantime, he focuses on so quality overall, and _maybe_ takes more interest in what happens on the AI side of things within Apple, I just as an example.
Apart from AI-add-ons, I personally would welcome things like a real 5.1/7.1 good sounding HomePod audio system, a subscription service for books, finally blood pressure monitoring through the AW, and as Anton Ego said in Ratatoullie: “surprise me”. Like re-thinking the car, which may have been too big for them.
As for the repeatedly occurring reports on “unfriendly competing teams” I would like to hear more on Apple having a clear vision and strategy on the way forward, aligning the LS team.

mpantone 19 Years · 2392 comments

9secondkox2 said:

This is the way to go. Apple should have never gone with a cliche headset. Even late to market, glasses would be big.

AR glasses and VR HMDs have different goals and functions. There's really no way to get true immersion with a pair of AR glasses.

Also, the technological challenges of AR glasses are much higher in terms of power efficiency, weight, and performance. My prescription eyeglasses weigh 30 grams and I still take them off from time to time to give my eyes, temples, ears, and face a rest.

I also own an Oculus Rift S HMD which is way lighter than the Apple Vision Pro and yet I can't wear the Oculus more than 40-45 minutes per sitting.

At least in 2025, it is extremely doubtful that Apple has access to technology that can be distributed on a wide scale at an reasonable price (i.e., not $3500) that can be crammed into eyeglasses weighing in at 50 grams or less. With useful battery performance, not something that needs to be recharged every two hours.

Note that Apple has committed to protecting privacy and data security. To achieve that they can't just send everything to the cloud (and there's latency involved with that anyhow). These smart wearable devices create special challenges for a privacy-focused company like Apple. For Alphabet and Meta, no problem, Google Glass and Meta Glass can upload everything to their servers because they're going to sell your activity behavior: that's their business model.

Being first to market is useless. The device needs to work considerably better than what is already out in the market.

entropys 14 Years · 4428 comments

I am not convinced. Apart from being really cool technology, how many people will buy it especially at Apple prices? I suppose over time it may end up being a screen for the phone, but in the foreseeable future it can only be just a wireless AR/HUD for apps like maps, including that room to go to for a meeting etc. but at least for the first few years of availability the hardware (weight and battery life) and software just won’t be there.

And that is before you resolve the issues of prescriptions , and more so progressive lenses, and that specs for years have tried to be fashion accessories. TBH I would love to throw my glasses out and never have to wear them again. To walk into a shop and buy sunglasses if I need to off the shelf for pennies. But otherwise, no glasses.

Like the Vision Pro, really cool tech that doesn’t have a large market. and that is even because inevitably wearing these down the street you get bombarded with AR ads as you walk past every shop.