Kuo: Apple Unlikely to Reveal Mixed Reality Headset at WWDC With a 2023 Launch Still Expected
Apple is unlikely to announce its rumored mixed reality headset or its new AR/VR operating system at next week's WWDC with mass production of the device still some ways off, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
In a
pair of tweets on Tuesday, Kuo said he expected Apple's headset to launch in 2023, and that announcing it too early would see Apple's competitors "immediately kick off copycat projects" and release rival products before Apple's headset hits the shelves.
Kuo's thoughts echo the most recent report by Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman in which he played down expectations that Apple would make a "full-blown announcement" of its headset at WWDC.
Signs of "realityOS," the long-rumored operating system believed to run on Apple's mixed-reality headset, were first spotted in Apple source code earlier this year, and rumors of Apple announcing its headset sooner rather than later were stoked at the weekend when a trademark for "realityOS" surfaced, with a foreign filing date deadline of June 8, 2022, just two days after the main WWDC keynote.
However, both Gurman and a practicing lawyer have since said that the trademark filing date deadlines are actually a legal requirement and that their closeness to WWDC is very likely mere coincidence.
Gurman previously reported that the launch of the headset will likely be delayed until 2023 following a plethora of development problems, including issues with overheating from at least one chip on par with the M1 Pro, as well as camera and software challenges.
Mac-related announcements are reportedly more likely at WWDC this year, according to Gurman, with the launch of a new MacBook Air with M2 chip one possibility, supply chain issues notwithstanding.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Top Rated Comments
$3999.
You’re gonna love it.
It’s super important that they experience the new lock screen in person.
This will be a totally normal and even boring WWDC, that’s why they’re going out of their way to have press, influencers and some devs there, in a time when not even their employees are there in person most of the week.
Moreover, there will be plenty of opportunities to show off the VR headset in person during the year, it’s not like the pandemic and geopolitical tensions are unpredictable or something. They have every right and every reason to let this in person event go to waste.
I’m with Kuo on this one, keeping competitors from learning details they can already read in the plethora of published Apple patents about the headset (and probably hear from supply chain insiders) is more valuable than demoing it in person to the press or at least kicking off the development of apps for realityOS. There’s always WWDC 2023 for that, it would definitely be good for the headset to go half a year without third party software to speak of.
Again, you’ll hear nothing about realityOS and the Apple Vision headset next week.
Sorry but you can't make something as complicated as a breakthrough VR headset and vrOS when everyone is "working" from home or doing hybrid.
This is why Cook is so adamant about return to office.
Could your customer support rep work from home? Yea.
Could your VR headset team work from home? LOL.