Apple looks into the future and sees virtual reality
Last week, Apple gathered a group of its most senior executives — the so-called Top 100 — at its headquarters to show them its mixed reality viewer, a hybrid virtual and augmented device it patented in March 2021, and that could become the next category to be developed by the company, albeit with a huge difference compared to previous ones: Apple products usually enter a category where there are already numerous products and try to redefine it, effectively reinventing it and creating the definitive, generic version; but in this case, it is doing so practically from scratch.
So far, VR viewer advances have been few and far between. Even the category itself is hugely dispersed: we’re talking mostly about devices for gaming and, recently, for walking around in virtual worlds. Meta may be the best known company, but has only sold around 20 million of its devices since 2020, a pittance in terms of global adoption, and has recently aggressively cut its prices from $1,500 to $1,000 in a bid to boost sales. Microsoft’s HoloLens is the leading augmented reality device, the main buyer of which has been the U.S. military, and with a price tag of around $3,000, still hasn’t succeeded in positioning itself as the defining standard for anything.
Apple’s product, which has yet to convince a few of its own skeptical executives, seems to be along…
