Two well-known circuit analysts have poured cold water on the claim that Apple will unveil its mixed-reality headset at WWDC next week.
Ming-Chi Kuo, a highly respected scholar who has been described as “the most accurate Apple analyst in the world” – although AppleTrack’s 72.5% accuracy rating suggests it’s an exaggeration – tweeted a brief thread on Apple’s much-anticipated headset launch today. Based on the time required before the product enters mass production and the risk of competitors copying its features and OS design, Kuo concludes that it will not be released at WWDC next week or indeed sometime in 2022.
This follows Sunday’s discovery that two trademarks of the term ‘realityOS’ were submitted by a shell corporation last year and that these trademarks have an expiration date of just two days after this year’s WWDC keynote presentation. We know that reality OS is a term that Apple has used in-house for its virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) projects, suggesting an announcement related to the headset that night.
Maybe an announcement will still happen, but Kuo doesn’t think it will be a headset, and he’s often not right. An alternative launch plan was proposed yesterday by another well-known scholar, Robert Scoble.
Scoble is a veteran blogger and technology promoter who specializes in AR and VR and specializes in that field. (At this point it’s important to acknowledge that he was prominent enough until 2017, when he stepped down after allegations of sexual misconduct that his partner said were “true in most cases.”) Will not তিনি he predicted June of that year কিন্তু but offered some thought on how the company would prepare the ground for this launch in the next 12 months.
WWDC, Scoble predicts, will see the announcement of “a new development environment for a new kind of photorealistic 3D view, avatars and more.” The headset will be released in January 2023, he hopes, and will finally go on sale that summer.
This twin prediction (or anti-prediction) is a shock for Apple fans who have been waiting for the mixed-reality headset since 2017, hoping to finally see it. But it seems we are slowly moving closer to a release, and we need to learn more at WWDC 2022.
We’re excited to hear what Apple has to offer for the AR / VR field. To find out more, join us next Monday for our extensive coverage of WWDC 2022.
The original image is a concept image courtesy of Antonio de Rosa.