Apple to present vision of mixed-reality future beyond smartphones

Apple is expected to unveil its most important product in 13 years on Monday, when it shows off its “mixed-reality” headset, a device seven years in the making that will provide a glimpse of how the technology How the giant imagines the post-smartphone future.

The iPhone maker is widely expected to unveil a headset that resembles a pair of sleek ski goggles that combines “virtual reality,” in which the wearer is completely immersed in a virtual world, and “augmented reality”, in which digital images are overlaid on the real world.

The event will be held in person at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters. But like last year it is expected to be hosted like a movie premiere: Attendees will watch a pre-recorded keynote address available to the public on YouTube.

This format is partly a legacy of Covid-19, when all such events went virtual and Apple started creating cinematic presentations that could pack in more content than live events.

But a recorded presentation, which eliminates the risk of a demo being screwed up, also reflects the more cautious tendencies of chief executive Tim Cook, who never liked Steve Jobs’ product demonstrations.

The device is expected to cost $3,000 — 10 times that of the Meta Quest 2, the flagship VR headset from Facebook’s parent company, and three times the cost of Meta’s high-end Quest Pro headset.

It is not expected to go on sale until fiscal 2023, which ends in September — a period in which analysts expect Apple’s revenue to fall 2 percent to $385 billion. But its sales should help Apple’s revenue rise an estimated 7 percent to $411 billion next year, according to Visible Alpha estimates.

As previously reported by the Financial Times, the headset is a compromised device. Apple’s original vision, back in 2016, was for lightweight AR glasses, rather than an immersive headset. But industry experts say such technology is many years away.

“There’s a wide range of technologies that come together for these types of devices and need to be experienced in a (compact form) where you and I can walk around with a pair of smart glasses for an entire day,” Timo said. Can.” Toikkanen, CEO of Varjo, a Finnish maker of high-end AR/VR headsets whose enterprise products cost as much as $6,495.

“You need advances in optics, power management, thermal management (and computing power),” he said. “It’s a very complex range of products and it will take a long time to have all of that and then to shortlist them all.”

Tipat Chennavasin, co-founder of Venture Reality Fund, said it is unclear how long such technologies will take to mature.

“Everyone is saying it is three to five years away but they have been saying it for the last 10 years,” he said.

Industry experts say Apple’s headset is likely to be geared towards three audiences — enterprise clients, gamers and software developers — with only later generations of the product being geared toward mainstream consumers.

While the headset will be out of reach for most, it will be a bargain for some if it replaces flight simulators or surgical equipment costing more than $1 million, said Peggy Johnson, chief executive of Magic Leap, whose AR headset is launched happens to be $3,299.

“We have companies and sectors where we can provide value now — not five years from now,” she said. “There is a return on investment in these areas (but) it’s largely the public sector, it’s healthcare, it’s inside operating rooms and industrial settings.”

The $3,000 price point may also be a reasonable cost for extreme gamers who are already comfortable with spending hours in immersive environments.

Chennavasin doesn’t believe the Apple event will be anything like an “iPhone Moment for XR” — an acronym for Mixed Reality. Instead they think it will be an enabling technology for developers: a tool that will let professionals build apps for the next generation of glasses that will come out several years later.

“You need a MacBook to make iPhone apps,” he said. “It would be the same for AR glasses.”

A successful unveiling could propel Apple’s share price to a record high. Apple’s stock is already up 45 percent year-to-date and the company is valued at $2.85 trillion. That’s just 5 percent from its peak valuation of $3 trillion in early January 2022, a month before Russia invaded Ukraine and global markets tumbled.

The $3,000 price point would make the headset Apple’s second most expensive product after the Mac Pro desktop, which starts at $5,999.

The original iPhone cost $599 in 2007, and was widely mocked as a result. But today the average selling price of an iPhone is closer to $1,000 and Apple’s top-end models are closer to $1,500.

“I don’t think anybody imagined that we would be paying $1,500 for a smartphone,” said Julie Ask, an analyst at Forrester. “We now regularly pay more for smartphones than for computers.”