TECH NEWS – The Cupertino company’s high expectations are currently unattainable, so the much-talked-about smart glasses are still a long way off.

Large, bulky and expensive MR (mixed reality) headsets will eventually be replaced by smart glasses that are more comfortable to wear and less distracting. To make this happen, Apple is using focus groups to gauge what consumers think of the current market. The company has done this with AirPods, HomePods, and Apple Vision Pro, so it’s largely a tried and true approach.

Both Meta and Snap have already shown how they plan to release smart glasses, but they are probably a long way from the finish line. Apple certainly is: as Bloomberg editor Mark Gurman reported in the Power On newsletter. According to him, today’s devices are still “too crude,” and Apple is always among the first to adopt new guidelines to create new product categories.

“The company typically limits these focus groups to employees to keep its plans secret. With smart glasses, the company could approach the category from a number of directions. That includes essentially creating a version of its AirPods in eyeglass form. It could also push to finally make true AR glasses – taking the Vision Pro experience and squeezing it into a pair of glasses that people could wear all day. But we’re probably at least five years away from an AR experience that meets Apple’s quality standards. Meta and Snap have prototypes of such a product, and they are still rough around the edges. I’ve tried both, and they’re not as far along as some reviewers would have you believe. In other words, you’ll have to wait a while before there’s anything worth buying,” Gurman wrote.

That’s why a model that requires an iPhone could come first (we’ve written about this before), and around 2030 the technology could be refined to what Apple wants today.

Source: WCCFTech