Apple may be forced to delay the debut of its mixed-reality AR/VR headset by at least a few months, potentially delaying its first major new product since the Apple Watch in 2015, Bloomberg News reports, citing “people familiar with the situation.”
Apple VR/AR headset concept by Antonio DeRosa
Mark Gurman, Takashi Mochizuki, and Debby Wu for Bloomberg News:
The headset — a high-end device that blends virtual and augmented reality — was targeted for an unveiling at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June, followed by a release later in the year. But development challenges related to overheating, cameras and software have made it harder to stay on track, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.
That could push the announcement until the end of 2022 or later, with the product hitting shelves by 2023, the people said.
The company hasn’t discussed the headset publicly, but the product has been years in the making and already delayed before… Apple had previously planned to introduce the headset in 2021 and ship it this year, according to other people with knowledge of the matter. The company has been developing the device since around 2015 and is counting on it to be the first of many headsets that could eventually replace the iPhone a decade from now…
Apple recently informed supply-chain partners that the device probably won’t be released until 2023, according to the people familiar with the discussions… Apple is planning to focus its 2023 developers conference on building virtual and augmented reality apps for the device, which will have an App Store, according to the people.
Technovanguard Take: Obviously, it’s important to get it right before shipping, lest you be Microsoft or Samsung.
Still, it’d probably get right much quicker with people back in Apple Park working together on the issues instead of hiding out from a bad flu that’s now morphing into a bad cold which, in general, really affects people who are significantly older than those who typically work at Apple and who possess multiple comorbidities. Those are the people who should be protected while the rest of the world actually goes about living the short lives they’re blessed to have instead of wasting their limited time on earth cowering in irrational fear.
As we wrote in response to “Apple indefinitely delays return of employees to corporate offices over COVID fears” on December 16, 2021:
At some point, some Apple employee, likely someone older who unfortunately has multiple comorbidities — maybe who smokes, has asthma, is overweight, or has other risk factors — is very likely going to contract COVID-19 and die. Some lawyer will be enlisted to try to sue Apple over it. This sad scenario is virtually unavoidable. Return-to-work delays atop return-to-work delays are simply kicking the unavoidable down the road; a waste of time.
In general, human-transmissible coronaviruses do not disappear. There is no such thing as zero-COVID.
COVID-19 is here to stay. It will very likely become endemic, yet pose less danger over time. People will acquire immunity via vaccines (effectiveness TDB) and naturally as they contract and recover from variants like omicron since the partially-effective vaccines permit not only transmissibility, but also breakthrough infections. Influenza and the four human coronaviruses that cause common colds (OC43, 229E, NL63 and HKU1) are, of course, also endemic, but a combination of annual flu vaccines and acquired immunity means that sane societies tolerate the unavoidable seasonal deaths and illnesses they bring without requiring lockdowns, masks, social distancing, indefinite return-to-work delays, etc.
At which point, if ever, will some people decide that wasting away their short lives in abject fear of a bad flu, very likely engineered by China and partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, in a hysterical self-defeating overreaction?
Adam Gopnik was writing about a different “disaster,” but, going on two years worth of “two weeks to slow the spread,” his words from August 2011 are a rather interesting read in late 2021 and something to bear in mind as you consume “news” media:
[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios — the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about — was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things…
That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preemptive paranoia. The real purpose not to get you to do anything, but to get you so scared that all you can do is keep the television, or radio, on. This is obvious, and yet there is something truly helpful, really instructive, about experiencing it again after a month of absence and silence. Two things that ought to be apparent all the time become briefly clear to you again. First, that the media, television particularly, are amplifying devices in which tiny kernels of information become vast, terrifying structures of speculation. The news business is one in which a minimum of news is really given the business.
And second, that the reasons for this are essentially non-ideological; frightened people need news for reassurance, and want to get a more heightened experience by being frightened still more, and the business the people supplying the fright are in (which we’re in too, of course) is not really that of dispensing information but of assembling enough listeners or readers, preferably still caught in that same spirit of credulous attentiveness, to offer to advertisers or keep subscribing. — Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 28, 2011
As we wrote back on March 9, 2020: The real virus is the panic.
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