Despite previous reports that have suggested that Apple’s first AR/VR headset could be a standalone device that packs in ultra-powerful Apple Silicon chips, it looks like the company’s initial attempt may be a bit less ambitious.
According to The Information, which has been able to glean information from sources familiar with the headset’s development, the first-generation model of the augmented and virtual reality headset will need to be tethered to an iPhone to drive its more advanced features.
This insight comes from the fact that Apple already completed work on the “Apple AR” SoC that will power the device last year, which has now begun trial production. However, The Information has learned that the AR SoC lacks many of the features that would be necessary to power the headset by itself, such as a neural engine and machine learning capabilities.
More significant are the details of the SoC, which isn’t as powerful as the ones made for iPhones, iPads and MacBooks. It lacks the artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities, known as Apple’s neural engine, which those devices include, one of the people said.
The Information
This suggests that Apple still intends to use a tethered iPhone to handle the heavy lifting, performing the necessary computing to drive virtual, augmented, or mixed reality images into the headset.
Meanwhile, Apple’s custom SoC inside the headset would handle wireless data transmission, energy efficiency and process the expected ultra-high-resolution video — possibly as high as 8K — to provide the most realistic visual experience possible.
That said, it also sounds like the new headset would function in a more limited standalone mode since sources say that the SoC also has its own CPU cores.
While the news is a bit disappointing, it’s not entirely surprising considering how Apple traditionally evolves its product lineups. For example, the original Apple Watch was also tethered very tightly to an iPhone before gradually evolving into supporting its own native apps, and then later gaining independent Wi-Fi and cellular capabilities, and later even an App Store.
We hope it wouldn’t take Apple’s AR/VR headset the same amount of time to evolve into a fully standalone device. However, it makes sense for the company to leverage the iPhone’s powerful A-series processor to handle more complex tasks to maintain its focus on the silicon that uniquely drives the AR/VR headset’s features.
When Is It Coming?
At this point, Apple has reportedly finalized all the chip designs, from the AR SoC to the wireless chips, image sensors, and display drivers. While some of these chips have entered trial production, Apple’s manufacturing partner, TSMC, is also said to have run into some manufacturing delays in producing some of them, particularly the image sensor, which is “unusually large.”
The complementary metal-oxide semiconductor image sensor is the chip that converts photons to electrons for digital processing into an image. Apple’s version is unusually large, similar to the size of one of the headset’s lenses, as it’s meant to capture high-resolution image data from a user’s surroundings for AR. TSMC has struggled to produce the chip without defects and has faced low yields during trial production, the person said.
The Information
Mass production of the chips themselves is said to be about a year away, although presumably, Apple is also continuing work on the other aspects of the headset design. Multiple sources have repeatedly pegged the first-generation AR headset as coming sometime in 2022. While it sounds like it will probably be toward the latter half of the year, there’s no reason to believe that Apple isn’t still at least aiming for that schedule. Whether it will accomplish that goal in light of global supply chain constraints is another story, of course.