Apple’s long, lonely game in the AR race

Meta’s most recent product announcements have grabbed attention, but the one thing they could not hide is that it’s still not possible to build a system as sophisticated as Apple’s Vision Pro at an affordable price, or Meta would have done it.

You could argue that at $1,299, the Meta VR Glasses the company introduced last week and promised to ship in spring 2027 could be as sophisticated, but they do betray some significant design compromises that Apple seems to have avoided. 

The most glaring compromise is the use of a puck to carry the processor and battery, so the glasses weigh just 100 grams. Even now, a recent Bloomberg report tells us that senior Apple decision makers have resisted use of an external puck to help reduce the weight and cost of future Vision Pro models, holding steady to the fully integrated device model typical of Apple’s products. (While Apple will have its reasons, I’m not certain that’s the correct approach, as the company could effectively sell two products, the headset and the puck, making both systems available on a biennial upgrade.)

There are other compromises as well — for example, Meta’s glasses seem to deliver a narrower field of view than the current Vision Pro.

At the same time, the competition between the two firms hints at the technological barriers Apple is trying to solve. After all this time since the introduction of the first Vision Pro, Meta still can’t match the field of view, and even with a puck rather than an integrated build, its alternative still costs a fair bit of cash, while the processor it plans to power the glasses with isn’t even available yet.

Think about that. It means Meta and its partners are still building a processor with which to match Apple’s. If that’s not a technical challenge, I don’t know what is.

The roadmap for visionOS

This isn’t about Meta bashing or Apple building. It’s about how Apple has always  openly described Vision Pro as a product from the future. Even earlier this month, CEO John Ternus said, “I think of it [Vision Pro] as like the early days of computers. It is the early days of a long journey. That’s how I feel about Vision Pro.”

Meta’s new product and the latest reports from inside Apple show that the future takes time to build. On the journey to doing so, the company now seems to be contemplating four potential paths:

A Vision Pro design using lighter, potentially lower-cost materials such as plastic or titanium.

A design that offloads components to a puck.

Smart glasses with audio, camera, and AI, which Apple hopes to introduce by the end of 2027.

Smart glasses with audio, camera, AI, and a video display, which feels like the most appropriate endgame for both Vision Pro and smart glasses products.

I don’t think the consequences of taking any of those paths should be seen as zero-sum options, but as priorities toward an eventual goal for pervasive spatial computing, combining always-aware contextual AI with wearable computing designed to deliver powerful augmentation across all parts of life.

The Bloomberg report suggests that Apple is in a state of flux regarding its next move with Vision Pro, complete with a reference to the work being on “life support.” I’d argue that Apple is in the lull before the spatial storm. What happens next is under review.

What amazing timing 

However, this must be contextualized against the depth of competition between Apple and Meta. The timing of these claims — coming so soon after Meta’s latest product reveal — is a gift to Meta’s marketing machine.

At Apple’s scale, it is entirely possible to pursue multiple parallel designs, so any perceived internal confusion may simply reflect different degrees of preparedness across all four (and possibly more) of these projects. Management may simply have been waiting to see what Meta did before accelerating any of these initiatives. 

While there have allegedly been some recent redundancies in the Vision Pro team, Apple’s new leader doesn’t seem to have gone cold on the product. It’s more as if he accepts that Apple is in it for the long haul. 

A long-haul destination

That long-term commitment allows Apple time to refine key components of its product plans, particularly around privacy. Apple wants to avoid the stigma of “pervert glasses,” which is why its work on ambient audio intelligence requires close scrutiny.

The decisions it takes to protect privacy there — including use of Secure Exclave — will I believe be emulated across the future visionOS product range. In the short term, the most telling insights we’ll see will be the pushback Apple and Meta face from global privacy regulators, for AR in Meta’s case, and for Audio Intelligence in the case of Apple.

Those decisions will set the framework both for Apple’s future AR products and the future of consumer/enterprise mass-market AR. 

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