The business is getting ready to unveil the upcoming product in June.
Almost five years ago, Apple had a corporate retreat in Carmel Valley, California, to explore its next big product. The company’s longtime chief design officer, Jony Ive, dazzled the room of the top 100 executives with a concept movie that was as professional as an Apple advertisement.
The footage shows a man calling his wife in San Francisco while using an augmented reality headset while riding in a London taxi. Do you want to visit London? According to two persons who watched the video, the man requested. Following that, the couple discussed London as seen through the husband’s perspective.
The movie got executives enthusiastic about the potential of Apple’s upcoming, revolutionary product: a headset that would merge the virtual and physical worlds.
Nevertheless, as the business gets ready to release such a headset in June, enthusiasm within Apple has given way to cynicism, according to eight current and former employees who asked to remain anonymous because it’s against the company’s policy to talk about upcoming products. The device’s estimated $3,000 price tag, doubts about its utility, and worries about its unproven market are all causes for concern.
This dissension has been a startling change for a corporation whose employees have created products with the determination of a moon mission, from the iPod to the Apple Watch.
According to three persons with knowledge of the actions, some personnel has left the initiative because they have concerns about its potential. One employee said that others have been fired due to a lack of development on specific headset features, such as the integration of Apple’s Siri voice assistant.
Even Apple executives have expressed doubts about the product’s future. It has happened at a time when the business’s design staff has been seeing a wave of resignations and departures, including Ive, who left Apple in 2019 and stopped consulting the company last year.
A representative for Apple declined to comment on the company’s future product plans.
A standard for virtual and augmented reality is the Apple viewer. Leaders in the IT sector have hailed it as the next big thing in computing following the smartphone for more than a decade. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, stated to a group of college students last year that soon “Just as people now are asking, “How did people grow up like me without the internet?” they will be wondering how they lived their lives before augmented reality.
Apple is viewed as a potential savior due to its success in fusing new hardware and software to create ground-breaking devices, but the obstacles are formidable. The road to delivering augmented reality has been littered with bugs, false starts, and disappointments, from Google Glass and Magic Leap to Microsoft’s HoloLens and Meta’s Quest Pro.
The experience has been sobering for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which has invested billions of dollars in attempting to build a virtual reality business. It has sold about 20 million of its $400 Quest 2 headsets since 2020 and recently reduced the price of its premium Quest Pro from $1,500 to $1,000 due to weak sales.
Apple, in contrast, sells more than 200 million iPhones annually for an average selling price of over $800.
The difficulty of the problem has been much greater than anyone expected, according to Matthew Ball, author of “The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything.” Unlike the iPhone, which incorporated many existing technologies, virtual reality requires Apple and others to design new chips and wearable displays.
For Apple, attempting to define a new market is an abnormality.
There is still a lot to learn about Apple VR and XR, according to Carolina Milanesi, a consumer technology analyst at the research firm Creative Strategies. “Apple has always been fairly excellent at entering a market when it’s well established and transforming it,” she said.”
The visor has a ski-goggle appearance. According to two of the persons, it has a carbon-fiber frame, a fanny pack for battery backup, outside cameras to record the outside world, and two 4K monitors that can play everything from apps to movies. The device has a “reality dial” that users may move to zoom in or out on real-time footage of their surroundings.
Three of the interviewees stated that the scopes are anticipated to cost roughly $3,000 each. It is viewed as a step toward a future product, like augmented reality headgear, which would be more widely appealing but call for technological advancements.
According to a person familiar with the proposal, the company intends to sell prescription glasses for the screens to people who don’t wear contact lenses because the visor cannot be worn over glasses.
Apple has concentrated on making the device stand out in video conferences and while interacting with others as avatars in a virtual world while developing the device. The company chose the word “copresence” to describe the sensation of sharing a physical or digital place with someone who is situated elsewhere. It resembles what Facebook’s creator Mark Zuckerberg refers to as the “metaverse.”
According to Milanesi, Apple’s experimental headset strategy was more akin to the launch of the Apple Watch than the introduction of the iPhone. The Watch was initially marketed by Apple as an iPhone in small. The business started selling the watch more as a Fitbit-like fitness device after discovering what customers were doing with it.
It’s not what you would anticipate from Apple, Milanesi remarked. But Apple is a totally different kind of business.
