from Hacker News

Apple reportedly shelved its plans to release AR glasses any time soon

by vthallam on 1/19/23, 1:04 PM with 146 comments

  • by ChicagoBoy11 on 1/19/23, 3:12 PM

    I always get laughed at when voicing this, but I was one of the (admittedly ridiculous-looking) people who tried out the Google Glass when it came out. It was, in many ways, a bad product, but if you could abstract away from how goofy it looked or how bad the battery life was, it was kinda awesome. I tried hard for a couple weeks to use it exclusively, and granted that back then my phone wasn't as much an appendage as it is now, but I found the experience of going back to my phone deeply disappointing. It made me aware, in a way I thought impossible, of just how much I strain my neck all day long to look at the phone, for instance. Calling my wife on Hangout and having her see what I'm seeing and picking groceries together while she was at work was a very neat experience... to have map overlay as I drove on my glasses, too, was awesome.

    That's all to say, I think anyone who implements a pretty good version of this with modern tech will usher in glasses as the new compute form factor. Which, paradoxically, is why I think Apple may be the last to do this. Good AR tech will absolutely destroy the iPhone... either they'll do it when they think they are ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED they can successfully cannibalize their own product, OR somehow the iPhone proves to start becoming an unsuccessful business on its own right. I think those two things are pretty unlikely; far likelier for META to keep their nose to the grindstone and perhaps, just perhaps, knock something out of the park.

  • by bentt on 1/19/23, 3:20 PM

    Apple is probably like "let's just wait this out and let Zuck take all the heat and pain of getting this figured out. By that time he'll be out of money and we'll look like the heroes for fixing everything. If we go in too early with even a 90% baked product we have nothing to gain."

  • by aliqot on 1/19/23, 2:20 PM

    Receiving these today and while not meeting the definition for AR, Im excited to see the outcome. https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nreal-air

    * I've been toying with the idea of some type of headmount display, an SBC with battery pack in my bib pockets, and a twiddler 3 or tiny bluetooth keyboard for input in my hand. With the amount of microsd storage and SBC computational power out now for small sums, it's tempting.

    Shout out to Steve Mann and Thad Starner for inspiring young me with their work on this stuff. As a little country bumpkin I didn't think I'd ever live to see this type of tech.

    Fun fact: Steve Mann is responsible for HDR video and smart watches

    https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5903ff66e4fcb573ba3b2...

    http://wearcam.org/hdr.htm

  • by chaostheory on 1/19/23, 3:00 PM

    For anyone who doesn’t want to read the article, Apple has apparently been working on an AR device that is separate from the mixed reality headset that is slated to be announced this year. Aside from this piece, all the previous news was centered on the mixed reality headset which may confuse people

    I didn’t even realize that Apple had an AR device that was anywhere near release. This article and its main source read like clickbait.

  • by pavlov on 1/19/23, 2:36 PM

    The report says that Apple's $3,000 mixed reality headset is still planned for this year, probably followed up by a cheaper (but still expensive!) $1,500 model by 2025.

    IMHO this would be good news for Meta which has spent years figuring out how to ship this technology in a $400 consumer-level unit.

    Apple's entry would validate the market, and make it more obvious what a good deal the Quest actually is (from a pure hardware POV — the quality of the software deal remains in argument).

  • by tootie on 1/19/23, 2:56 PM

    I've been very bearish on AR and especially headset AR for years. Building useful UX in front of someone's face is incredibly hard and doing it with such poor visual precision is impossible. I worked at a digital design shop a few years ago and they were throwing devices at us and asking us to come up with just some compelling demos and I don't think we really succeeded. We need multiple optics breakthroughs before we can even think about what these could be good for.

    Magic Leap pivoted to enterprise and the US military just paused the Hololens project. The market is not clamoring for this stuff and industry has not convinced anyone in 10+ years of trying.

    Phone-based AR is both more vivid and more accessible and still hasn't really caught on at all. Word Lens and Pokemon Go were so long ago at this point and there's been no major followup.

  • by CharlesW on 1/19/23, 4:53 PM

    Having watched Apple wrestle with "rumors sites" for decades and eventually develop a symbiotic relationship with them for its benefit, I'm going to posit that nothing's actually changed. Apple "leaked" this news to cool analyst and market expectations.

    Apple will (and was always going to) launch this new product line whenever the necessary technology, user experience, and manufacturing dependencies allow them to execute on their 1.0 vision. In the meantime, they continue to develop the platform in plain sight: https://www.apple.com/augmented-reality/

  • by kayodelycaon on 1/19/23, 2:21 PM

    This doesn’t really surprise me. Apple is really good at miniaturization but they also have an aversion to cables.

    If they still can’t get an Apple Watch to smoothly and consistently stay connected to an iPhone, AR is pretty much DoA unless they want to run the whole package on the glasses.

  • by ben_w on 1/19/23, 4:51 PM

    These rumours have been milled for years now with the same cycle each time:

    1. Leak of new Apple Glass!

    2. It's coming next year with a price of $(1500-3000).random()! Analysts say this puts it into the high-end market segment.

    3. Rumours suggest the Apple Glass has as many pixels per eye as (most expensive monitor on consumer market) and is powered by a (current generation plus two) processor.

    4. Apple has [delayed, cancelled, updated] their plans for Apple Glass, delaying the release by a year.

    At this point, I'm starting to suspect details of this thing are just the NDA equivalent of a Trap Street.

  • by jmyeet on 1/19/23, 2:37 PM

    This is unsurprising. The tech just isn't there yet. It may never be more than a niche product and has some fundamental problems (eg displaying black).

    Apple generally isn't on the cutting edge of things. Apple's primary positioning is to take something that's proven and make it not suck. There was Internet on phones before the iPhone. There was a time when you had to tell your OS if your Wifi was WEP, WPA or WPA2. There were MP3 players befofe the iPod.

  • by st3ve445678 on 1/19/23, 2:19 PM

    Good, I don't think the masses are clamoring for AR glasses and if its not an amazing product, it would probably be a flop. Seems like current tech just isn't there yet to make these things tolerable to the average person.

  • by looseyesterday on 1/19/23, 2:55 PM

    I am guessing battery and display are the biggest problems. When you try some AR app on an iPhone the battery starts dropping like a stone.

  • by vxNsr on 1/19/23, 2:45 PM

    Off topic:

    The verge's homepage has become entirely unusable. I'm not sure what's up with it but it's a total mess, you gotta scroll for days to see any stories. they appear to be hiding the fact that they've dropped half their staff by filling the gap with twitter feeds.

    I've gone back to just using rss to find stories there

  • by rvz on 1/19/23, 2:45 PM

    So I guess Meta is still in the races for their AR glasses then given their recent acquisition, that almost nobody was talking about. [0]

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189419

  • by nerdjon on 1/19/23, 2:22 PM

    TBH I am a bit disappointed, I was holding out hope that maybe Apple could finally be the one to crack this.

    But at the same time I am kinda glad not to see another half baked AR come out, especially from someone like Apple (or Google) that has a big enough name that many will know about it.

  • by Aperocky on 1/19/23, 2:36 PM

    What happened to glasses that had a display but isn't AR?

    I don't need to augment reality, I just want to maybe read things on the fly.

  • by ttul on 1/19/23, 4:02 PM

    Apple often delays product releases if they aren’t sure the product is going to deliver on its promise of high usability, or if the manufacturing can’t yet be scaled to the volumes they know they will need to pump out if it is successful. I wish more companies had this level of discipline.

  • by samtheDamned on 1/19/23, 2:27 PM

    I wonder if the leak of the design was a way for them to gauge how the public would respond to a device like that and the sharp negative response was all they needed to hear to put it on the back shelf for a few more years.

  • by stephc_int13 on 1/19/23, 2:37 PM

    I wonder if the prototypes they built really are too weak to launch or if Apple management is overestimating the risk of launching this product.

  • by impulser_ on 1/19/23, 2:46 PM

    They should focus on making the iPhone better at AR. There is so much potential in using smartphones as an AR device. The problem is it clunking and unreliable.

    Google sees the potential, they been adding a lot of AR features to their mobile apps, like Maps. Lens is also getting pretty good.

  • by wintermutestwin on 1/19/23, 3:33 PM

    When I heard that Apple was working on AR glasses, I ditched my Killer AR App idea and bought a chunk of their stock. I figured that this would be the company that could pull it off because they have a much better pulse on culture and marketing than players like MS, who are as out of touch as a cable news watching boomer. I figured that they would be all over the blazingly obvious Killer App that would make them ubercool again and that sidesteps all the problems of glassholes and liability for safety issues. As soon as Apple announced AR, I knew they would make the Killer App in house (ala Final Cut Pro and Logic) and, in doing so, crush my startup.

    What's that Killer App you ask?

    Learn an instrument (guitar, bass, keyboard, drums etc.) with AR. I surely don't need to spell out the what/how/why right? Are you kicking yourself now for not thinking of it?

    I guess it is time to sell my Apple stock.

    PS. If you didn't need me to spell out the above and have the technical chops and connections, I have the music industry connections (music instructors and real rock stars) and a background as a PM for global products - let's talk.

  • by isaacfrond on 1/19/23, 1:23 PM