Apple Is Just Two Months Away From Debuting Its First Reality Headset
Apple Is Just Two Months Away From Debuting Its First Reality Headset
Steve Jobs Theater at the Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California.
Apple
sets a date for WWDC 2023, where it plans to introduce its highly anticipated mixed-reality headset. Also: Spotify has no timeline to support AirPlay 2 and pushes back on complaints about not working with the HomePod. Meanwhile, Apple Pay Later
starts rolling out, and the company releases iOS 16.4.
Last week in
Power On: The best hope for the mixed-reality headset is to
fare as well as the Apple Watch — a dud that quickly turned into a hit.
The Starters
Tim Cook during a spring 2021 Apple event.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Apple Inc. has chosen June 5, 2023, as one of the most important days in its history. That’s the date it’s
planning to debut its first
mixed-reality headset, which it sees as the beginning of a post-iPhone era.
The headset will be a
risky, but potentially monumental launch for Apple. It will herald mixed reality as its next major product category, offering a glimpse of a future where people are interacting with the world via headsets and not pocketable touch screens.
The showcase at WWDC, the Worldwide Developers Conference, will likely include the headset itself, but also its onboard
xrOS operating system,
accompanying services, and — perhaps most critically — a software development kit and platform that will let developers write new types of apps.
As is usual for invitations to WWDC, the artwork alongside the announcement doesn’t do much to confirm Apple’s plans. But I still see some likely hints.
One WWDC 2023 graphic is clearly an outline of the Apple Park spaceship campus, which relates to the first day of the conference being held at the company’s headquarters. No surprise there.
Apple WWDC 2023 in-person event promotion.
Source: Apple
But the second graphic is more interesting. On its surface, it’s simply the outline of the rainbow structure on Apple’s campus. (You can see that structure behind Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook in the photo at the top.) But it also looks similar to the curved shape of the Apple headset facing upward.
Apple’s WWDC 2023 announcement.
Source: Apple
The format of the event also gives you a sense of how Apple likes to make announcements these days. It plans to hold a keynote presentation from the Apple Park campus that’s streamed online, likely followed by hands-on time afterward at the headquarters.
This has become Apple’s go-to approach in the waning days of the pandemic. Back when Covid was still raging, Apple aired its events exclusively online. Then, with WWDC 2022, it streamed the keynote on a giant display outdoors at its campus and let attendees get a hands-on experience with
the M2 MacBook Air. For the
iPhone 14 last fall, Apple aired the prerecorded keynote in the Steve Jobs Theater and then let attendees try the new phones indoors.
For this year’s WWDC, Apple is promising a “special all-day event” at its campus, followed by online sessions for developers during the rest of the week. But it’s worth noting that it’s keynote addresses are still pretaped videos rather than on-stage presentations. There’s a clear reason for that. Far more people watch the presentations now, and having a polished video means that Apple PR and marketing can uphold one of the company’s favorite tenets: “Leave nothing to chance.”
The last thing Apple needs is for a headset demo to fail on stage like the iPhone X Face ID unlock did in 2017. There are also stories from former Apple engineers about the original iPhone demo in 2007 that claim the entire device would have crashed if Steve Jobs didn’t follow a particular order of button taps.
Apple’s press release announcing the latest WWDC also underscored the
momentous nature of this year’s gathering. Susan Prescott, head of developer relations, called the conference Apple’s “biggest and most exciting yet” and said the company “can’t wait” to host “this very special event.” Now, it’s not uncommon for Apple to use that kind of hyperbole. But the company knows that everyone is anticipating this headset — including Wall Street — and it wouldn’t want to further stoke expectations if it couldn’t meet them.
Beyond the headset, I’m told that
multiple new Macs are in the works for launch around the middle of the year. The lineup could include fresh MacBook Air models and a Mac Pro with in-house Apple chips. The latest iOS and macOS beta versions will build in support for the new machines. We’ll also get a look at iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, tvOS 17 and macOS 14.
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