Bloomberg: Apple spends $1 billion a year on XR, AR glasses won’t be possible for at least four years

(Nweon May 19, 2023) Bloomberg and The Information pointed out earlier that Apple initially hoped to develop an AR device in the form of lightweight glasses and planned to release it in 2023. However, due to technical difficulties, news came out in January this year that Apple had shelved the project indefinitely.

Now Bloomberg has further added relevant details and said that if Apple continues to advance the project and succeeds, we will all need to wait at least another 4 years before we can get a glimpse of any similar products.

According to people familiar with the matter, glasses-shaped AR devices were the product that CEO Tim Cook and former design director Joni Ive originally aspired to create. But later due to technical limitations, the company's expectations have been reduced to the current form of ski goggles, using a VR headset to realize the MR function that Cook has been looking forward to.

Due to the design considerations of the glasses form, the team realized early in the development that it was not feasible to create AR glasses with sufficient power. Engineers calculated that the glasses would have to provide all the performance of an iPhone, but use only one-tenth of the power to prevent overheating and causing discomfort. Obviously, this is an almost impossible problem to achieve.

The report pointed out that in order to ensure the future and strive for the company to continue to provide resources, Mike Rockwell, a former Dolby executive responsible for developing experimental head-mounted equipment, chose to stick to the ski lens display and Describe it as laying the foundation for future AR glasses devices. Currently, Apple provides $1 billion in financial support for XR every year, and thousands of people participate.

So even though the AR glasses project still hasn’t made any meaningful progress in 2019, Rockwell claimed in an all-staff meeting that Apple may release this kind of headset a year after launching the first one. Glasses.

However, the employees involved still know it in their hearts. This is a very difficult goal and almost impossible to achieve. A source close to the project described a long-running joke within the company: Engineers worked around the clock on the hopeless N421, all just to keep Cook happy.

It is worth mentioning that due to the difficulty of development, some people even doubt whether Apple Glass will eventually be launched smoothly, because currently only about 10% of XR resources are used for the glasses project code-named N421.

According to sources involved in the process, Apple ultimately delayed any product development for Apple Glass for several years and almost killed the project at one point. The report pointed out that if it can indeed be successfully developed, Apple will have to wait at least four years before launching any similar product.

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