Apple’s next mixed-reality headset is apparently years away. Years. If you already own one, you’re golden. If you’re waiting for the sequel? Check your calendar for 2028. Maybe earlier. Maybe never.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg’s top insider, laid it out in his newsletter. The current model stays supported, but the hardware pipeline is empty. For now. Apple’s brains are elsewhere. Chasing an AI pendant. Testing AirPods with cameras. These aren’t rumors, they’re in prototype phase.
The real goal? AR glasses. Lightweight. Discreet. The Vision Pro is just the training wheels.
Heavy Lifting
Wear the current headset and you see it all. Your living room, your dog, the screen floating above the cat. Mixed reality works. You can watch a film while your kitchen stays in focus. Or drop into pure VR—moon walks, shark tanks, anything the pixels allow.
Competitors aren’t sleeping. Meta’s Quest 3, the cheaper Quest 3S, HTC’s Vive. They’re there. Grand View Research thinks this market triples in growth by 2030. Why? Not just games. Factories. Training sims. Industrial repairs where the manual floats in the air.
Austin Evans likes the tech. Really likes it. He has six million people watching him try new gear. But he’s skeptical.
“It’s still a VR headset,” Evans says. “I remain unconvinced that the designwill ever really be comfortable enoughforlong-termuse.”
Notice the pause in that thought? He means it. Heavy things get set down. Expensive things gather dust. Evans bets the Vision Pro gets a few OS updates then gets shelved. Or shifted to business units. The tech survives. The product doesn’t.
Many of Apple’s top executives have written offthe current Vision Proas aproduct givenitsprice and weight.
Even Gurman hopes for a sequel. He knows it’s a bridge to the AR glasses Apple actually wants to build.
Not Fabulous Outdoors
CNET’s Scott Stein called it mind-blowing. At a mind-blowing price. He watched an NBA game. It worked. But step outside with this on your face? Bad idea. Dangerous. You become a ghost. People bump into you. Cars don’t stop.
So what’s coming? The June 2024 WWDC won’t have new glasses. Gurman predicts a focus on AI tools. Editing. Siri gets sharper. iOS, iPadOS, macOS—version 18, actually, though the rumor mill runs on hype. The software updates the present. The hardware waits in the wings.
You want AR glasses? Keep watching. Keep paying for Apple Intelligence features. The headset is just the prototype that proved the point. Whether you buy into that point, or walk away from the weight of it, that’s entirely up to you.
Is it worth waiting until 2028? Maybe.
