Despite Vision Pro’s $3,500 price tag, which is nearly 12 times more expensive than the $300 Quest 3S, Apple and Meta are destined to be direct competitors in the XR space at some point in the near future. According to a report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple may be rethinking its XR strategy moving forward though following Meta’s unveiling of its impressively slim AR glasses prototype, Orion.

Citing Apple insiders, Gurman reports that Apple “seems aware that it needs to rethink its approach to headsets, but there isn’t consensus on how to do that,” further detailing a number of options currently on the Cupertino tech giant’s table.

Gurman maintains the company could continue down the current path of just making its Vision Pro follow-up less expensive, offering a Vision Pro Lite of sorts. Separately, a second generation of Vision Pro could include yet higher-end components, such as its new M4 chip—basically your regularly scheduled upgrade pathway to provide a cheaper version of Vision Pro to the masses alongside a hypothetically Vision Pro 2 for prosumers.

Image courtesy Apple

Apple has put a ton of resources into making VisionOS work seamlessly with both XR and standard mobile apps, putting it somewhere near an iPad in functionality but with the added ability to tether to Mac for work stuff. All of that ecosystem integration can’t get any tighter than removing on-board compute from Vision Pro and offloading it to iPhone, the second option.

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This would make the headset significantly lighter, but also likely more reliant on having the latest iPhone to run it. It also makes Vision Pro cheaper, and possibly more attractive, as it will be pitched as a peripheral and not the standalone general computing device as it is today. Heat management, whether it would be tethered or wireless, and what devices it could support are all up for speculation.

Gurman also notes Apple is considering its own smartglasses, which would be similar to Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, which has thus far have been so successful it’s spurred Meta to reorganize its Reality Labs to better focus on smart wearables.

Meta’s second-gen Ray-Ban smartglasses

Unlike Meta’s Orion prototype, Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses don’t pack in AR displays, instead relying on the appeal of taking pictures, videos, listening to music, and using Meta’s AI-powered object recognition for the sort of “look and tell me what you see” tasks such as on-the-go language translation and object searches. Compared to Vision Pro, they’re also pretty cheap, fetching $300 for a basic pair of smart Wayfarers.

By leveraging an existing product line with wide appeal, there’s also the possibility of integrating camera sensors and more AI into AirPods Pro, making for some smarter headphones that could conceptually do everything those slick Ray-Bans can do, tinted shades be damned.

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And then there’s something Gurman calls “the holy grail route”.

“The ultimate goal is standalone augmented reality spectacles that come with high-performing lenses, a battery system, on-board computer, cameras, eye tracking and other components built-in—all while still being the size and weight of normal glasses,” Gurman says.

Meta’s Orion AR Glasses Prototype | Image courtesy Meta

Notably, a report from early 2023 maintained Apple actually shelved its most promising AR glasses project, which would mean restarting with aims of competing with Meta’s own Orion hardware.

We’re very likely a few years away from companies scratching the sort of consumer-friendly form factor and large field of view (FOV) afforded by Orion though, which uses a wireless compute unit, EMG wristband for hand tracking, and packs in a class-leading 70-degree FOV.

At present, Orion costs somewhere near $10,000 per unit to make, which will likely be lowered with the inclusion of cheaper components and likely a smaller FOV, as its current silicon carbide waveguide optics are difficult and expensive to make. Meta CTO and Reality Labs chief Andrew Bosworth revealed a device similar to Orion would be priced closer to smartphones or laptops, and come to consumers before 2030.

With Apple’s war chest, none of these options outlined above seem mutually exclusive, with Gurman noting it could be some or all of these products moving forward. At least from the outside, this leaves Meta well positioned to take a massive foothold in the coming age of AR glasses, and Apple lagging with an expensive XR headset with no visible roadmap since the company doesn’t disclose prototypes to the public, leaving us waiting for more timely leaks leading up to another patently Apple ‘one more thing’.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • another juan

    orion's puck and neural bracelet reminded everyone of a traditional smartphone and smartwatch.
    that's a clear advantage that both apple and google will leverage to dominate the future ar market.

    • wheeler

      That's a really good point that I hadn't fully considered, and perhaps that's why they are billing it as a smartphone substitute? As a piece of technology Orion is very interesting, but there are otherwise some very suspect things about this strategy.

      If due to technical limitations early AR ends up being an accessory of/additive to the phone and wrist worn devices rather than a complete replacement, then once again Meta will be in the same position that they've always been: under the thumb of the existing dominant mobile hardware/platform companies. So therefore their dream is to replace all of that at once.

      I can say for certain that while I'm personally very interested in some forms of AR, I would never wear huge ridiculous looking glasses like that outside of private situations. And having used other AR headsets, 100 grams on the nose (give or take) is more than twice as heavy as is tolerable. Moreover, I noticed that the optics significantly dimmed things (both ways?) and emitted a lot of distracting light to those around you. And the battery life is only an hour and a half.

      For something to actually function as a phone substitute, they would need to fix all of these problems … while also actually using scalable/non-prototype optics and displays (in other words much, much worse ones).

      I am much more optimistic about slow, piecemeal improvements to AR as a supplement to existing devices. We already see how slow VR has progressed (especially compared to what many had hoped it would be) and also how many stubborn problems it faces. Are we expecting things to be any easier in AR? Reading around the usual XR places, Meta has people thinking they will have phone replacement AR glasses in a mere 5 years or so. I'm getting 2016 deja vu…

      But then let's say it's not a phone substitute and it's rather something used by consumers indoors, for shorter periods of time, without fighting with daylight, in contexts that don't disrupt social situations, and so forth. But from the impressions I've read, the displays themselves aren't actually all that good–clarity, motion, opaqueness, and so on. I mean, they are good compared to existing AR displays (which is itself not surprising given we're comparing >$10k prototypes to real consumer products), but compared to other display technologies they are not good. So, for this usage scenario, why would I not wear a small form factor VR headset with a fantastic display and good passthrough (much like Meta's rumored Vision Pro competitor slated for 2027) instead of glasses like these?

  • M2 Studio

    I've been saying for years that a wireless compute unit companion to a eyeglass form factor was the way to go. It seems like the obvious solution. Hope both Apple and Meta point to that direction with investment and continued R&D.

    • Nevets

      Perhaps you have, but I bet Rony Abowitz said it first.

      • M2 Studio

        I am sure you are right.

    • Ondrej

      It seems like the obvious solution.

      The bandwidth problem is gigantic here. The only way to do it without compression would be 50 GHz, but you cannot put that into a pocket. A normal wifi has a small fraction of necessary bandwidth , so it requires a lot of compression and having only compressed "native" mode is not great. The cable here is a huge win, but feels archaic.

      In other words: this is a huge trade-offs choice – the opposite of "obvious solution".

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Orion solves this differently. Instead of streaming the full image from the compute unit, the headset itself maintains the basic image, with only changes to application windows being pushed over the wireless connection. So its less like a Quest receiving a PCVR stream covering the full image, and more like an old X11 terminal that shows windows for applications running on a remote server with very limited bandwidth, rendering the simple parts on the terminal with only larger changes being pushed to it.

        For now Orion is really only suitable for productivity apps. The issue most likely isn't even the bandwidth, as hardware encoding and modern video algorithms can squeeze a large image into very limited amounts of data. The main reason will be saving energy. With Orion showing text information or somewhat static app windows, and the headset part maintaining the display until a change actually requires transferring a newly rendered image from the compute unit, the wireless connection can be shut down most of the time. Otherwise it would eat a significant amount of the battery on a device where everything has been trimmed down to operate on a few milliamps to enable at least 2h of battery life.

        So at least for now it is doubtful that Orion would be useful for e.g. watching a movie, regardless of other problems like the transparent image, simply because even though it should be technically possible, it would drain the batteries very quickly. Given that the Orion HMD part weights 98g, while a Quest 3 battery weights 64g, I wouldn't expect similar devices to fully rely on wireless streaming unless there will be a significant jump in battery capacity.

  • ArtB

    In the VR world, Apple are totally lost and irrelevant, they are waiting for Meta to show the world how to move forward in VR.

  • STL

    “The ultimate goal is … all while still being the size and weight of soft contact lenses.”
    Just to correct the big man, speaking about "ultimate" goals!

    • Alex Soler

      "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal."
      Ivan Sutherland, 1965

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Ivan Sutherland, a computer graphics pioneer, presented the first stereoscopic HMD showing virtual images in 1968. It used two small b/w CRT displays and mirrors, suspended from the ceiling, therefore was called "Sword of Damocles" as a joke. The actual name was "Head-Mounted Display", the first use of the term.

        The display mount allowed for 6DoF movement, at the same time enabling tracking with 0.25mm/sub-millimeter accuracy. Semi-transparent mirrors provided optical passthrough, making it an AR/MR HMD. It ran at 30FPS with a 40° FoV and, due to the analog screens, a theoretical vertical resolution of 3000 lines. Limited computer performance restricted them to rendering simple wireframe models though, and they had to create their own math accelerator hardware to even get there.

        So Sutherland first described the future with "the ultimate display", and then went ahead and started to actually build it, based on the same principles as today's VR headsets, half a century before Quest.

        "A head-mounted three-dimensional display" incl. diagrams/pictures dl_acm_org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1476589.1476686

        • Arno van Wingerde

          I would hate to wear soft contact lenses with CRT displays in them… but Sutherland proved visionary!

  • Ondrej

    A bit of overreaction perhaps?
    You can't watch a movie on Orion unless you sit in a dark room. Like all see through AR glasses it has a much worse version of the projector problem – no blacks.
    An old ipad can do it. 10 years old VR headset can do it. But Orion can't do it yet.

    Brute forcing the FoV with silicon carbide is another big question mark. No one knows if this will ever be mass manufactured at normal cost. It could be a bigger problem than micro leds.

  • Cl

    Imo anything focused on AR should be in glasses form. Why use a bulky headset for that? Anything other than the tech not being there yet, I don't see a reason.

  • ApocalypseShadow

    Apple could go this way or they could go that way or they're thinking about what direction to go. Which amounts to absolutely nothing from this "insider."

    Why is this guy the go to guy for information? Others and I could have come up with these same guesses. Actually, already considered before the article.

    Also, Vision Pro is just a development headset sold to the public. It's not even Apple's push into AR or VR. When Apple does push, you'll know it. Because it will outsell most products out there as they seem to have a huge following of Apple buyers. I personally hate iPhone and everything connected to it. But I know they will sell that new product when they are ready.

  • Denny Unger

    Unless Apple adjusts its strategy and attitudes towards legacy VR/XR developers, they are unlikely to leapfrog Meta. They would need to make a substantial investment in developer bursary programs to kickstart their XR ecosystem growth. They would also need to reconsider natively supported tracked input with haptics to provide an onramp for 98% of the software the industry is currently producing. Ecosystem parity is key here and no one can afford to develop for AVP with its limited install base, omission of key hardware, and lack of meaningful developer outreach.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      TL;DR: Apple doesn't care about the current VR market, with Tim Cook stating very clearly and repeatedly that he thinks the (local) isolation inherent in pretty much every VR experience is the wrong approach. They can afford to ignore VR, as Apple has more registered developers than Meta has sold headsets, and about as many active iOS developers as Meta has people playing Gorilla Tag, the most popular Quest game by far. XR may need Apple to legitimize itself as the future of media, but Apple with its headset positioned mostly as a head worn iPad doesn't need the VR past.

      How fortunate then for Apple that they never particularly cared about legacy VR/XR developers or what they create, and instead focused on making it easier for developers in their ecosystem to extend/transition iOS apps to visionOS, or create new ones matching their eye/hand tracking interface paradigm. They already got game devs to switch from buttons and joysticks to touch screens, so they have some experience with these transitions and demands for "indispensable" input hardware. And now mobile generates more than 50% of all gaming revenue, most of it on iOS. Creating games/apps for the new Apple Vision platform will only make financial sense once it sees much larger adaption, requiring Vision HMDs priced more like a high end iPhone, which will take years.

      Until then they have AVP as a test bed for how the device is utilized by users/first movers. And for developers to experiment with the new medium, even if only a few outside of the (apparently very interested) enterprise market with inhouse use cases will see profit from visionOS projects anytime soon. The vast majority of Apple devs will wait some more to see where things go. Apple announced in 2022 that they had over 34mn registered developers, so about 1.5 Apple developers for every Quest 2 sold. Registered developers of course doesn't mean active developers, their number is much lower. Currently there are est. 2.8mn iOS developers, roughly one active iOS developer per 3-4 active Quest users. If only a tiny fraction of those adapt visionOS, it could outgrow the Quest developer base with mostly small teams, currently stuck with a small market, slow growth and low retention.

      Based on all that I somewhat doubt that Apple is actually worried about tracked input with haptics or 98% of what (now mostly Quest) VR developers are currently producing. They instead made sure that software created by their 2.8mn iOS developers by default runs on AVP without needing any changes. And then gave those devs a smooth path to gradually add XR features to their existing apps, so they can still mostly cater to their phone user base for sustained income. Something Meta is now also trying to achieve with their Spatial App Framework and allowing 2D on the Horizon Store, as they desperately need to reach at least some level of ecosystem parity in productivity apps.

      Meta cannot afford to get stuck in gaming, a niche covering only a small part of what people do with their mobile devices today. They are already at a disadvantage due to missing access to Google's PlayStore, with no apparent strategy how to either get existing apps or attract some of the est. 5.9mn Android developers to also publish on their tiny Horizon platform. Not an easy sell considering the much larger audience of potential buyers PlayStore provides with about 2.5bn monthly users.

      And as everyone incl. Meta was baffled by the AVP and didn't see the elegant interaction using eye tracking plus minimal gestures coming, and Apple also had an Orion like AR glasses project now postponed due to technical limitations, there is no way for Meta to know if Apple hasn't already leapfrogged them. With only a few people even inside hyper secretive Apple knowing about AVP beforehand, nobody has any idea what they've been cooking up.

      Meta is aware of this. Recent improvements for Quest gaming came mostly from hardware, with more speed thanks to Qualcomm's new XR2 Gen 2, pancakes improved from Quest Pro and now usable MR still waiting for more use in games. On the other hand, we witnessed Meta unexpectedly release lots OS updates with many useful improvements to the Quest UI, window management, multitasking and more following the AVP announcement, things people had been complaining about for years. And the first non-Meta Horizon OS hardware, not a enthusiast gaming Horizon HMD from Asus, but Logitech's MX Ink 6DoF pen targeting design and productivity work for (surprisingly affordable) half the price of a Quest 3S.

      • Arno van Wingerde

        That is one way to look at it. But Apple's registered developers aren't Apple property!
        If Meta plays its cards well and offers help on porting iOS apps Horizon OS to create VR versions of their 2D apps, things might go fast…

  • Hokhmah

    Although unrealistic the best that could happen right now for the AR market (at least for the next 5-7 years), Meta and Apple joining forces cause from the recent Quest/Horizon OS updates it's clear as day that Apple definitely is better in UI/UX and overall OS design while Meta is a few years ahead in terms of hardware R&D.

    Would most likely speed up the roadmap to mass production and affordable AR glasses. After we reach the kinda iPhone 3GS moment both companies and others can go back to business as usual cause at this point the AR market cake will become big enough for several players and competition.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Apple denied AVP existed until WWDC 2023. Following AVP's somewhat surprising focus on using existing iOS apps, Meta released a lot of new OS features, initiatives like their "Lifestyle App Accelerator" to fund porting/creating 2D apps, and a Spatial App Framework to allow Android app integration similar to visionOS, taking a number of hints from Apple's UI/UX development.

      AVP was developed in secret over a decade, based on lots of Apple internal tech like the M2 and iOS. Pretty much exactly seven years ago Oculus/Meta showed Santa Cruz, a still rough Quest prototype, which had started a year earlier as a hacked Rift CV1 with a massively underpowered patched-on Android compute device.

      Meta some time ago cancelled their attempts to create a home-grown OS and their own ARM chips for Quest, while Apple postponed their AR glasses project indefinitely due to unsolved technical challenges in 2023. No doubt Meta invest a lot in research and actually shows what they are working on, and Orion as an internal testing prototype targeting a 2030 release is very impressive. But how exactly do you know that "Meta is a few years ahead in terms of hardware R&D", when even most Apple employees don't know what their research departments are working on, and won't know until Apple releases it, or never if they cancel it instead?

  • Dragon Marble

    This is another one of those bad takes from general-tech media who covers VR from time to time but doesn't have deep knowledge or understanding about it. I highly recommend you read David Heaney's article: "Why Meta's Orion Prototype Doesn't Render Headsets Like Apple Vision Pro Obsolete".

  • Shad Daffucup

    Apple playing follow the leader with Meta now? What a joke. Tim Cook is not a visionary and they haven't released a single interesting product since Steve logged out.