There are many areas where, for years, the imminent arrival of Apple has been announced. Automotive, gaming, television and of course VR. Latest reports suggest that the company is close to having finalized a product to compete with offerings from Valve, HTC, Meta and Sony. In recent hours, reliable sources have told Bloomberg that Apple executives recently presented a headset with VR and AR capabilities to their board of directors.
Previously, several leaks had mentioned difficulties for Apple to move forward with this project, including some postponements and radical changes in the definition of the commercial targets of this product. Apple’s ambitions would be to have a device or a family of devices capable of having both virtual reality and augmented reality. This family is supposed to be the next pillar of the company’s hardware offerings, alongside the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Macs. A variation of the home-grown OS would thus be planned with an autonomous application store.
The Apple VR (and AR) headset really on track this time?
According to anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg, the headset presented by Apple executives, codenamed N301, would be a high-end device that does not need to be connected to a computer. It would be powered by Apple’s in-house chips such as the latest evolution of the M1 SoC with both a muscular processing power and a powerful graphics part. The presented version could be marketed well above 1000€ but an AR only version (N421) could lower the price. Apple could unveil this headset at the end of this year and launch it later in 2023. Obviously these solutions would compete with the products planned by META (Oculus).
