TECH NEWS – This is a bit of a double dip, as it requires at least two Apple products, as the planned AR glasses alone would not be enough.

AR glasses from Apple are still years away, if we’re talking about something with a lot of computing power. Both performance and weight will be a challenge for the Cupertino-based company, so it’s no wonder that we’re now hearing that something else could precede the 2027 release, as Apple is quite prone to changing its plans at a moment’s notice. Just think of Apple’s cheaper Vision Pro, which we wrote about recently, and which could be years away from hitting stores.

Bloomberg editor Mark Gurman wrote in his Power On newsletter that Apple wants to simplify the computing power of smart glasses with an intermediary device: the iPhone, which is a much more affordable product than the Vision Pro headset ($3,500 base price), and the smartphone user base is sky high compared to the headset:

“I also continue to hear that Apple is seriously considering a device that offloads the computing components onto an iPhone and serves as an accessory for watching movies. That’s something similar to the glasses offered by companies like Xreal. The upside for Apple is that it would reinforce the iPhone as the center of its product ecosystem and offer something that could be a much more popular option than the $3,500 Vision Pro,” Gurman wrote.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has said that the technology to create a standalone smartglass is too elusive and uncertain today. Power consumption is a big part of it: it is impossible right now to deliver iPhone-level performance at 10% of the power consumption. So this is something we can only say is too early to talk about. Maybe in the next decade.

Apple is trying to offer tomorrow’s technology today (like Vision Pro). So it is understandable that they do such experiments.

Source: WCCFTech, 9to5mac