Apple Has Nixed Its AR Smart Glasses

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Apple has shuttered a project to build a first-generation pair of advanced augmented reality (AR) glasses. This marks the second moonshot project the company has shut down in less than a year after it abandoned the Apple Car project last February.
The so-called Apple Glasses were always a bit of a long shot. Reliable reports said that Apple had been working on them alongside a mixed-reality headset that eventually became the Vision Pro. However, as the Vision Pro neared release, insiders said that Apple had put the glasses on the back burner until such time as the technology was available.
The conventional wisdom was that if anybody could pull this off, it would be Apple. That unwavering belief led some fans to some seriously far-out rumors. Apple continued to struggle with the technology, and there was a project in the works code-named N421, but it never got past the preliminary “architecture” stage. By 2022, Apple had shelved the project to focus on bringing the Vision Pro to market.
In its place, we began hearing reports last year that Apple was going for something considerably less ambitious: a pair of smart glasses similar to Amazon’s Echo Frames and Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. Unlike the mythic Apple Glass, these would be device-connected and provide basic capabilities such as taking video, playing music, responding to voice commands, and overlaying some info from your iPhone or Mac onto the front lenses.

Apple hoped to use this to “salvage the billions of dollars spent on the Vision Pro’s visual intelligence technology” by incorporating some of it into a lower-cost — and more profitable — product, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said at the time.
Sadly, it looks like even that product is not to be. Today, Gurman reported that Apple has scrapped the project, codenamed N107, entirely after realizing that they wouldn’t be able to realistically make them work with an iPhone.
The decision to wind down work on the N107 product followed an attempt to revamp the design, according to the people. The company had initially wanted the glasses to pair with an iPhone, but it ran into problems over how much processing power the handset could provide. It also affected the iPhone’s battery life.
Mark Gurman
Gurman says the team switched the approach to linking up with a Mac instead, where it could benefit from faster processors and bigger batteries. However, that seems a far less helpful implementation, and Apple’s executives were not impressed.
The Mac-connected product performed poorly during reviews with executives, and the desired features continued to change. Members of Apple’s Vision Products Group, which worked on the device, grew increasingly concerned that the project was on the rocks. Sure enough, the final word came this week that the effort was over.
Mark Gurman
While the N107 device is dead, the technology could still be resurrected for a future project. Apple had already created “advanced projectors that could display information, images and video in the field of view for each eye” for the glasses, Gurman notes, plus custom microLED-type screens. It’s unlikely to abandon this work entirely, but as of now, there’s no longer a product on the roadmap.
If anything, the cancellation of this project may help Apple’s Vision Products Group (VPG) get back to focusing on the successor to the Vision Pro. There’s been “a lack of focus and clear direction within the team,” and this latest failure with N107 is “hurting morale,” employees in that group told Gurman.
The failure of the N107 glasses leaves Apple with one fewer avenue for finding a new hit product. So far, the Vision Pro doesn’t have mass consumer appeal.
Mark Gurman
What makes Apple’s retreat even more discouraging for Apple’s VPG team is that Meta appears to be poised to crack this nut. Last year, it unveiled the Orion AR Glasses. While those aren’t anywhere near release and presently cost $10,000 just to build, they’re still technically in the same category as the standalone smart glasses that Apple was aiming for — even if they don’t look anything like a product the iPhone maker would ever put its name on. Meta expects to have developer units available next year and launch a consumer version by the end of 2027.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]