Since the beginning of 2015 there has been talk of a mixed reality viewer with the logo of the bitten apple. The development of this new product category for Apple would still be continuing in Cupertino and the arrival on the market would be scheduled by the end of next year. This, at least, is what several authoritative analysts say, who in the past had also predicted an arrival as early as 2022.
Causing these delays, as reported by The Information who published a long article made thanks to a dozen internal sources, most of which would have worked on the project, there would have been a series of obstaclestechnical challenges and leadership changes in the development team.
In 2016, for example, just a year after the start of development, a first prototype would be presented to Apple’s board of directors to try to get maximum support and investment. Although the experience of use for the members of the board of directors was not “overly impressive” it was nevertheless decided to support the development with more funding.
But the development team, led by Mike Rockwell, would have had to constantly struggle to seek help and support from other divisions of the company. Furthermore, starting in mid-2017, to keep the project confidential, the team had to work in offices in Sunnyvale, California, several miles of kilometers away from Apple’s headquarters.
In early 2018, however, one of the Rockwell team members would have requested the internal team that was in charge of the camera hardware to add a function that improved the speed with which the viewer’s cameras could capture images to project them in a display. The answer was that the headset was not a priority and had to wait at least until after the release of the iPhone XS.
The team would also consider the possibility of use interchangeable batteries, in order to increase the possibility of use, but the idea would have been discarded due to the considerable complexity. Over time, however, it would still have been able to optimize consumption in order to have an autonomy of “several hours, in line with similar products”, despite having an integrated battery.
While Apple CEO Tim Cook has always supported this project, he has never been as actively involved as Jobs did with the development of the iPhone. For example, he rarely visited the group in the Sunnyvale offices. Precisely for this “remoteness” of Cook, it would have made competition with other products such as Mac and iPhone more difficult.
Another challenge was the one with Jony Ive who had immediately expressed doubts about the augmented reality viewer. His team doubted whether consumers had wanted to wear a headset for a considerable period of time and believed that this technology alienated users from other people by cutting them off from the outside world. Hence the idea of ​​turning to mixed reality, less powerful, but more independent.
