A decade ago, I wore AirPods in my ears and people wondered what the heck I was doing. Nobody asks that question anymore: AirPods have become one of the greatest product success stories of the Tim Cook years at Apple, iconic white buds that I see people wear practically nonstop.
The Vision Pro was another story.
No everyday person was ever going to spend $3,499 on a mixed reality computer, but Cook’s pitch for the Vision Pro definitely tried to overcome a public discomfort with VR headsets, even to the point of projecting the wearer’s eyes onto the Vision Pro’s glass front. Having the user be present while wearing the Vision Pro was considered a serious priority. But for a number of reasons, the Vision Pro, even in its latest M5 iteration, just hasn’t crossed that acceptance threshold. It’s big, it’s unusual, it’s rarely seen in public (for good reason), and it’s expensive. It certainly never turned into AirPods.
But I think a lot about faces and tech. Apple has figured out a way to make AirPods work, and it even broke through an acceptance barrier of having our own faces be scanned as biometric authentication to unlock our phones. Face ID was no small hurdle when it debuted in 2017. When I reviewed the iPhone X, I had to explain this strange new world of face-focused logins. I shaved my beard to test its recognition.
The Vision Pro is impressive, but it never overcame social acceptance limits.
Now that Tim Cook is stepping down in September and handing CEO duties to Apple’s hardware chief, John Ternus, there will be plenty of expectations and opportunities for Apple. AI is a huge part of the challenges that still need to be solved. But also, among all of Apple’s ongoing personal tech explorations — our pockets, our wrists, our ears — Apple is still trying to figure out faces. Will it be under Ternus that Apple finally cracks the code?
I’m used to putting my face in the forefront of testing tech, because my own awkward journey is everyone’s. What I feel, good or bad, wearing earbuds or a VR headset or smart glasses, might be an echo of what someone else feels. And when it comes to smart glasses — a whole emerging landscape of AI-powered devices being sold by seemingly everyone except Apple (so far) — tech companies are pushing people’s acceptance threshold. Including my own.
Smart glasses are increasingly being seen as a privacy threat or a socially unacceptable device, since a number of Meta-focused reports of data privacy leaks and incidents of public recording in inappropriate places. The concerns are coming from two directions: Are camera-connected glasses covertly recording others without their consent? Also, are AI glasses safely handling the things we do record and share in ways that won’t expose that information to others?
Meta’s Ray-Ban Displays, released last year, push the boundaries of tech. But acceptance and function are still missing pieces.
What Apple could bring to smart glasses
Apple is likely on the cusp of announcing its own smart glasses, which could be Apple’s next big thing after its expected folding iPhone. They will be, by far, the biggest bet Apple has made on our faces. They’ll likely be priced far more affordably than the Vision Pro and aimed at a far wider market.
But Apple will also have to explain the why, and the benefits of them, and make them look good enough to overcome the social stigma of “pervert glasses.” Apple needs to either make them look amazing or make them so desirable, so functional, that people will wear them anyway. Or both.
Glasses look to be just one part of an expanding, AI-connected wearables category for Apple. Revamped AirPods, future iterations of Apple Watches, and possibly pins or pendants should be in the mix. And iPhones, which, while not wearable, are something we all carry around and always have at the ready. Reports of AirPods gaining cameras later this year that add AI-related features could be the first phase of Apple exploring new areas of face-worn AI acceptance. Apple’s Gemini-infused version of Siri, expected this year, will be a big part of it.
Google’s line of smart glasses is on deck for this year.
Apple isn’t the only one in the glasses race. Meta is already there, and Google’s up next. But of all these companies, Apple has the most hardware ready to be interconnected with glasses. And it already has its own vast network of retail stores to potentially set up demo or fitting stations.
Tim Cook has said that augmented reality is the future, and under his leadership Apple has made its tech much more a part of our everyday lives than it ever was under Steve Jobs. But where Apple chooses to go from here is still unwritten, and how AI can be our cognitive companion — and with what technology to enable that — is an ongoing question for assistive tech and for the very nature of what computing is.
Apple wasn’t wrong that spatial computing is a big piece of what comes next. But can Apple make glasses that don’t creep people out? We’ll probably find out soon enough.
