Apple’s getting serious about smart glasses

With Apple reportedly planning a major Vision Pro upgrade in 2025 and a more affordable model two or three years later, it's clear that headsets loom large in Apple's vision.

However, the longer term goal is to have smart glasses rather than hefty head-mounted hardware, and a new report says Apple is getting very serious about specs.

Bloomberg claims that Apple has launched an internal study of smart glasses products from the likes of Meta. The study, announced to employees over email, comes from Apple's Product Systems Quality team and is asking for participants for "an upcoming user study with current market smart glasses". In other words, a focus group, which is rather fitting.

What's Apple studying about smart glasses?

Apple is rarely the first to market with new product categories. From the iPod to the iPhone and iPad, we've seen Apple watch other firms take baby steps with new product categories and make their mistakes in public before Apple refines the concept and executes it better.

And studying other firms' products in great detail is part of that process – what works? What doesn't? What could be done better if you had Apple's engineering talent and software integration?

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, any Apple smart glasses are still several years away – if indeed Apple decides to make them at all. But the consensus in the industry is that smart glasses are the future of mixed and augmented reality.

As fun as a Vision Pro or a Meta Quest 3S is, they're not exactly practical for everyday wear.

If our future is spectacle-shaped, that means Apple is likely to compete not just on hardware and software, but on something bigger: privacy.

From Google Glass to Meta's Orion AR glasses, the idea that everyone around us is watching through their wearables is potentially scary – and as we've seen with Apple Intelligence and Apple products more widely, Apple sees privacy protection as a key selling point of its products.

I'm sure its focus group will be, er, focusing on that too.