Apple is rumored to be working on two versions of Vision Pro, however a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman alleges the Cupertino tech giant is aiming to beat Meta to the punch with a pair of AR glasses.

Citing someone with knowledge of the matter, the report maintains Apple CEO Tim Cook has put development of AR glasses as a top priority, as the company plans to release such a device before Meta.

“Tim cares about nothing else,” the source told Bloomberg. “It’s the only thing he’s really spending his time on from a product development standpoint.”

Creating the sort of all-day AR glasses Apple is aiming for is still a multi-year challenge though. Packing in high-resolution displays, a powerful chip and a high-density (but very small) battery for all-day power represents a number of technical challenges. And creating such a device at a consumer price point is arguably the biggest of them all.

Meta’s Orion AR Glasses | Image courtesy Meta

While Apple is reticent to go on record, Meta has been fairly transparent with its XR roadmap. In late 2024, Meta unveiled its Orion AR glasses, which the company hopes will lead to the productization of such a device before 2030, and priced “at least in the space of phone, laptop territory.” For now, Orion costs Meta somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 per unit, largely owing to its custom silicon carbide waveguide optics.

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And although Orion itself isn’t being productized right away, Meta is well on its way in the XR space, having not only produced multiple generations of Quest standalone headsets, but also its Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, which are laying foundation for its AR glasses of the near future.

The smart glasses, built in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, have been very successful too—so much so that Meta is reportedly preparing a next generation of the device which will include a monoscopic heads-up display. Granted, those aren’t augmented reality glasses, but rather still smart glasses. You can learn more about the differences between the two here.

Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, Image courtesy Meta, EssilorLuxottica

For now, Gurman maintains Apple is working on new versions of Apple Watch and AirPods which will be embedded with AI-enabled cameras, however the Fruit Company is still internally debating whether to counter Meta with a pair of smart glasses of their own.

According to Gurman, Apple has been developing such a device designed to work with Siri and Apple Visual Intelligence, although the company is unsure whether it will allow the glasses to actually capture media, owing to the company’s stance on user privacy.

This follows a wider leadership shakeup at Apple, reported by Bloomberg last month, which also saw Apple’s Vision Products Group (VPG) redistributed across the company.

Tasked with developing Vision Pro, VPG was initially created in 2023, which notably departed from its “functional” management structure introduced by Steve Jobs in the early ’90s. Essentially, this puts Vision Pro’s product development back in line with the company’s other hardware, including iPhone, iPad, etc.

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Scott Hayden
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.
  • xyzs

    Of course. AR Glasses is the smartphone final form evolution.
    Zuck understood that very early. Apple knows it too.

    In 25 years, grabbing a rectangular smartphone from pocket and type stuff with the thumb will be like having a Nokia 3310 today.

    Tech is far from achieving that goal today, but the goal remains very obvious and clear.

    • XRC

      Very prescient examples of daily ar glasses in Hulu's "The first" with Sean Penn about the mars landing.

      as someone using VR a while now (since early 90's) the AR challenge is not something I expect to see solved in an affordable consumer package until 2030's

      • xyzs

        Yep, 5 years will come faster than people think and by then, AR still won't be mainstream at all.

        For this to happen, they need to make huge improvement in MicroLED tech and manufacturing processes, and improve glass display regarding homogeneity/fov/dimming systems/varifocal systems/weight/look/privacy. Then improve battery efficiency a ton more, and shrink SoC and component into less than a few milliliters packages, that's a lot lot lot to do…..

        But when it here, it's an almost infinite cash flow.

        • Superconductors will play a HUGE part in creating
          the AR glasses that everyone thinks of when they think of "AR glasses".

    • Ondrej

      Originally Zuckerberg's goal for those glasses was 10 years = 2024.

      It's 2025 and technology to do it doesn't exist at all, not even in labs.

  • flynnstigator

    Apple needs to play to its strengths. Let Meta shoot first and learn from their mistakes. Apple has almost never been the first to market, they’ve just been the first to integrate new products and features smoothly into their ecosystem. Trying to change that now would be a mistake, IMO.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    TL;DR: The technology for attractive AR glasses may not be ready (for years), but Tim Cook is running out of time if he wants to introduce a revolutionary new product category during his reign at Apple, so it has to happen now.

    The technology may not be ready for AR glasses attractive to the mass market for years, but Tim Cook has a problem: he is already 64 years old and has headed Apple since Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. The only new product category that Apple launched since then is the Apple Watch, the development of which had already begun under Jobs.

    Cook is very far from the egomaniac that a lot of tech CEOs seem to be, but I'm pretty sure that he is still annoyed that many people see him as an unimaginative place holder. Which is historically very unfair. Jobs himself hired Cook in 1998 for his supply chain expertise just a year after he himself had returned to Apple. Since then Cook had a major impact on Apple's success by streamlining sales and production, getting Apple very favorable deals and allowing for their high margin. If Steve Jobs made Apple cool again, then Tim Cook made Apple rich again, leading it to become the first trillion dollar company.

    But "greatest accountant" isn't anywhere as desirable a legacy as "visionary". So I suppose that Cook, who is usually very good with money, is more willing to ignore the fact that Apple Vision, AR and/or smartglasses won't become a huge market and cashcow for Apple anytime soon, to push it into the market earlier. There were rumors that the AVP design team wanted to delay the introduction further, as they felt that the tech still wasn't ready yet, but Cook decided that 2023 was the time for Apple to enter XR.

    In the past Apple has often waited for a market to grow enough to ensure there is a large audience, and then enter with a product that doesn't necessarily introduce something revolutionary new, but takes what seem to be the most interesting features and puts them in a very polished products with the rough edges removed that makes it accessible for lots of users. But if he waits for this with XR, he'd probably be retired by the time the market is established enough.

    So we may have Zuckerberg as a CEO willing to spend billions on XR to establish Meta as a third major player in mobile devises and a leader in the metaverse. And Cook as a CEO willing to spend billions on XR to have a legacy of introducing another high-impact product category at Apple that will become the template that others will follow. Which will be good for XR users, as a) we get more devices that are effectively subsidized, because billions in development costs aren't priced into the device costs, and b) finally some serious competitors that cannot simply price each other out of the market.

    Even if they are addressing different parts of the XR markets and price range, they will be measured by the features the other one offers, hopefully leading to a lot faster development. Less than 500K AVP have been sold so far, minuscule numbers for Apple selling more than 200M iPhones each year. AVP still already had a lot of impact, less through its actual users and more by lighting a fire under Meta's ass, which kicked in a lot of improvements esp. in the Quest UI that had been the source of (a lot of) criticism for years. And by getting the market interested in XR again, resulting in a (software) redesign of Samsung's Project Moohan and AndroidXR, and numerous new 3.5K tethered and standalone HMDs being announced in the last few months.

    • Ondrej

      I disagree with this hypothesis.
      Cook already has a huge tech achievement: Apple Silicon.
      M-series chips are some of the most impressive in history of consumer electronics.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Apple Silicon started with the A4 in 2010, used in the first iPad and iPhone 4. It was their first in-house designed ARM SoC. The strategic move to create and use their own chips started in 2008 with the acquisition of P.A. Semi, packing 150 engineers including lots of chip design industry veterans.

        The M1 had (4-20) Firestorm and Icestorm cores that were first used in the (6 core) A14 on iPad 10, iPad Air 4 and iPhone 12/Pro. No doubt it was much evolved from the A4, and Apple extended the ARM architecture to handle x86 instruction flags otherwise expensive to emulate, something only needed for ARM MacBooks intended to run x86 apps.

        So you could say that ARM MacBooks and their very smooth transition thanks to Rosetta2 are Cook's achievement, but this was basically a repetition of the transition from PowerPC to Intel in 2006 with the original Rosetta emulation. Apple Silicon Macs are pretty much a logical continuation, and might already have been the plan in 2008 when Jobs announced that P. A. Semi's engineers would be working on SoCs for iPod, iPhone and other future devices. It just took a decade to catch up with Intel in desktop performance, and Apple initially stuck to Intel for the Mac Pro for that reason.

        The M- and A-Series are basically just product names for different performance/power consumption levels, but fundamentally the same design with differing chip configurations. Current iPads use A-chips, iPad Airs and Pros use M-chips. The current AVP uses an M2, and one discussed way for Apple to reduce cost and power consumption is switching a consumer version to a future A-chip.

  • Lucidfeuer

    Again we the completely stupid market aiming? We don't even have mass adoption of VR goggles and they're once again going to try for a market that is even less viable (because the technology is nowhere ready)? What of bunch of blind buffoon

    • Andrew Jakobs

      AR is a (completely) different market as VR.

    • Now I Can See

      That view is shortsighted. For someone calling them blind buffoons, you can hardly see past your own nose. AR is NOT VR.

  • taylor slut

    Hi. 'heads-up' is actually correct in this context. Thank you for your attempt.

  • philingreat

    “Heads-up” is the correct term. It comes from aviation, where a “heads-up display” allowed pilots to see information without looking down — keeping their head up.

    • Duncan Cragg

      HEAD up, you said it yourself! There’s only one head to keep up. “Head up” is what came from aviation.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        It has neither to do with the number of heads, nor is it an imperative directing commercial pilots to raise their heads. Technically it should have been called "non-blinding night vision radar display", but both head-up and heads-up display are correct, with the first being used about three times as often.

        en_wikipedia_org/wiki/Head-up_display

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      You are both right and wrong. The most common use is "head-up display" with 24.5M Google hits vs. 7.7M for "heads-up display", and that's how the matching Wikipedia page is title, where you'll also be redirected to if you look up "heads-up display".

      As in many other cases, both spellings are in use. Like lift and elevator or colour and color, there is a difference between British and American English, also referenced on the Wikipedia page:

      Oxford Dictionary of English, Angus Stevenson, Oxford University Press – 2010, page 809 (head-up display (N.Amer. also heads-up display))

      It comes from aviation, with most of the (early) development coming from the British RAF, which were also the first to use the term "head-up" display around 1958. The need had been triggered by the introduction of radar in the early 1940, and the problem wasn't the inconvenience of looking down, but the big contrast between the lit cockpit displays and the dark night sky. This made it hard to see the outside after looking (down) at a separate radar screen, so projecting the (dim) display into the night sky was suggested as a solution. HUDs made it to commercial planes in the 1970.

      • Duncan Cragg

        So the Brits invented the Head-Up Display, and that’s what (almost) everyone calls it to this day.

        Then, presumably because US folk say “heads up” in other contexts (?), there was some confusion along the way, and a quarter of usages are now this erroneous pluralisation, where instead of one head being “up” per HUD, you could have several! (Joking, obviously.)

        Now, simply because of those quite large numbers of erroneous usages in the US, the colloquial and modern language dictionaries (such as your ODE or Oxford Dictionary of English), that are based on current or recent and therefore volatile statistics, have picked up this minority phrase as a valid alternative. As you could say using two other newly-(re)defined words that you’ll also find in that kind of dictionary – the mistaken “meme” went “viral”. And since the pseudo-authoritative Wikipedia allows dictionaries like that to be used for references, the whole thing starts to get baked.

        Now, like many other examples, the “correct” usage is in danger of being reduced to merely a kind of shibboleth indicating that you actually care about these things (or perhaps more shallow, that you have grammar OCD).

        I personally prefer that modern and internet dictionaries and encyclopedias would take a more conservative speed of adoption, rather than themselves contributing to this language volatility. But I’m quite sure I’m in a very small minority there.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          "Heads-Up Display" isn't an "erroneous pluralization", it's a valid alternate spelling. Language doesn't work work in a way where one version is always correct, or the older one is correct. It instead changes, with lots of adaptions, and what can be wrong today can be considered correct in the future and vice versa.

          Your assumption that it was "head-up" because humans only have one head was just your assumption, but in no way a logical deduction leading to the term. As mentioned in my answer to philingreat, it is actually a rather bad name for what its main purpose was, with the head being up being soft of random. If for some reason radar had been used by a bomber laying on his stomach, looking down, the same technology could be called nose-down.

          • Duncan Cragg

            Yes, grammar and vocabulary and spelling evolve. I don’t dispute that. I’m simply saying that people shouldn’t do things to escalate that, to cause an increase in evolutionary speed or phrase volatility. Building a mutual and recursive self-supporting structure via statistical usage, colloquial dictionaries and Wikipedia isn’t helpful in that regard.

            I never used “having one head” to justify the etymology – that’s just a humorous mnemonic!

            > maybe pilots were told by their commanding officers to keep their “heads up” in night combat situations to not lose vision in critical situations, long before anybody thought about HUDs, and this is where the term generated from, with the US sticking to the pluralised form.

            I don’t think so, to be honest. Sounds like a “pseudo argument” as you call it.

            My own “pseudo-argument” is the one where it was invented singular and singular is what most people use. The “pseudo” bit may be in the way I’m guessing or hypothesising that in the US, the pluralised form took off because of its adjacency to an unrelated US expression, “heads up”, which means “pay attention” I think. Pilots able to keep their “head up” is another concept.

            That was a long digression at the end there. Very interesting, thanks. Not sure who has all these “serious misconceptions” around language and foo/bar though – is that a strawman?

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Both forms are valid. There was no intention from any side to deviate from some kind of original, this just happened for reasons we don't exactly know, which is something that happens rather often with living languages. And apparently the pluralized form is more common in Northern America, which is where pretty much all the XR head up displays have been developed, and most of the XR users are located, so it isn't all that astonishing that a lot of people on a forum like this are more accustomed to that form.

            The pseudo-argument part is that you tried to make the British form seem more proper. Which it is not. They are both equally valid. You can use etymology or statistics to explain why there are different forms, but not to rank them. And most modern dictionaries do exactly that, describing the current state of a language instead of trying to define rule sets. A few languages have "governing" bodies like French with the Académie Française that tries to maintain the cultural heritage and publishes an official dictionary of the language, but the consequence is that written (as taught in schools according to the academy's rules) and spoken French differ significantly.

  • kool

    You must be British, in America it's a heads-up display because pilots had huds first and you usually fly with a co pilot.

  • @nsmartinworld

    It works with Siri. Such a comfort.

  • Ondrej

    As long as these see through glasses cannot display blacks (and are only additive) they will not be able to replace smartphones.

    Meta Orion is a very expensive engineering marvel and yet it cannot compete with a 20 years old laptop or 10 years old low end phone in displaying a youtube video or a photo.

  • kool

    There’s only one head of the co pilot doesn’t have one. Why else would They have two sets Of instruments panels

  • VrSLut

    Head's Up is Head is up. Who cares if the punctuation was dropped at some point in time, the British?