Apple appears to be working on a new type of smart glasses, even though their augmented reality glasses may be dead or at least on hiatus.
Apple is still working on a smart glasses, according to Mark Gurman’s most recent Power On newsletter at Bloomberg (via 9to5Mac). This comes just a few months after another Bloomberg report claimed that Apple’s AR glasses were no longer being produced. The glasses under development, Gurman said, are more like Meta’s Ray-Ban partnership in that they will be filled with technology but will not provide actual augmented reality screens.
Apple Intelligence would power them, according to Gurman, and they could “analyze the surrounding environment and feed information to the wearer,” but it’s unclear how much of that it can do. Although it appears Apple is not yet fully committed to permitting photography on its glasses for privacy reasons, the Meta version of this idea is primarily influencer-focused and permits both Instagram live-streaming and glasses-based photography.
In any case, if we see the results of all this work at all, it will likely be at least a few years before then. Maybe the fantasy of smart glasses will live on.
