Apple to offer vision of mixed-reality future beyond the smartphone

• Published date: 05 June 2023
• Author: Patrick McGee
• Publication title: Irish Times: Web Edition Articles (Dublin, Ireland)

The iPhone maker is widely expected to present a headset resembling a pair of sleek ski goggles that will combine "virtual reality", in which the wearer is fully immersed in a virtual world, and "augmented reality", in which digital images are overlaid on the real world

The headset will be Apple's biggest new product since the iPad debuted in 2010. Its significance is expected to surpass the Apple Watch, which went on sale in 2015, given the potential for AR and VR to become a new computing platform that creates a rich canvas for app developers.

Keynote address

Monday's event will be held in-person at Apple's Cupertino headquarters. But as with last year it is expected to be hosted like a film premiere: attendees will watch a pre-recorded keynote address available to the public on YouTube.

This format is partly a legacy of Covid-19, when all such events went virtual and Apple started creating cinematic presentations that could pack in more content than a live event.

But a recorded presentation, which eliminates the risk of a demonstration going awry, also reflects the more cautious tendencies of chief executive Tim Cook, who has never relished the product showmanship of Steve Jobs.

The device is expected to cost $3,000 (€2,800) — 10 times that of the Meta Quest 2, the leading VR headset from Facebook's parent company, and three times the cost of Meta's higher-end Quest Pro headset.

It is not expected to go on sale during this US fiscal year, which ends in September — a period in which analysts foresee Apple revenues falling 2 per cent to $385 billion. But in the following year its sales should help Apple's revenues rise a projected 7 per cent to $411 billion, according to estimates from Visible Alpha.

Expectation on Wall Street about the expected launch drove Apple's shares up almost 2 per cent to an intraday high at $184.32. However, its market capitalisation remained below its $3 trillion peak of early 2022, as the number of shares in circulation has been reduced by buybacks.

As previously reported by the Financial Times, the headset is something of a compromise device. Apple's original vision, in 2016, was for lightweight AR glasses rather than an immersive headset. But industry experts say such technology remains several years away.

"There's a really wide range of technologies that need to come together for these kinds of devices and experience to be in a [compact form] where you and I can walk around for the full day with a pair of smart glasses on,"...