Apple could get into a new product category: smart glasses. A report surfaced on Thursday indicating that Apple is working on a chip to power glasses with built-in AI and cameras that could launch in the next couple of years.
With the company’s Visual Intelligence AI tool, a pair of smart glasses could identify objects for the wearer, get info on businesses, and explain to the user what it is they’re looking at.
Apple smart glasses on the drawing board
While developing its Vision Pro AR headset, Apple hoped improving technology would allow successive models to shrink in size until the product eventually evolved into lightweight smart glasses with powerful augmented reality capabilities. But the pace of technology development isn’t keeping up with Apple’s hopes, and it’ll be many years before it can release a Vision headset that resembles ordinary glasses. So it’s reportedly exploring another option.
“The company has made progress on the chip that it’s developing for smart glasses, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The move indicates that Apple is ramping up work on such a device, which would compete with the popular Ray-Ban spectacles offered by Meta Platforms Inc.,” Bloomberg reported Thursday.
This will apparently be a very different product from Vision Pro, which is a powerful wearable computer running the same type of processor used in Macs. For its smart glasses, Cupertino supposedly envisions a much simpler device that uses a chip similar to the ones used in Apple Watch.
Beyond that, the processor in development has allegedly been scaled back even farther to increase the battery life of the smart glasses. Still, it will need enough processing power to handle the multiple cameras that’ll be built into the wearable, as well as Visual Intelligence.
It’s possible the device could offload some of the load to a nearby iPhone. And the glasses could use AirPods to send audio to their wearer.
Two years away
A report from 2024 was the first to indicate that Apple had interest in smart glasses. The latest one seemingly shows that it’s moving ahead with product development.
As Bloomberg reported on Thursday, “The company aims to begin mass production of the processor by the end of next year or in 2027, indicating that the glasses — if successful — are likely to come to market in roughly the next two years.”
Don’t take this as a sign that Apple has dropped development on future iterations of the Vision Pro. It’s supposedly working on both product lines. The plan seems to be to simultaneously make the powerful but bulky Vision Pro smaller and more affordable while simultaneously taking simple smart glasses and adding functionality. They’ll likely meet in the middle somewhere down the line.