Oliver Haslam on March 9, 2019, 8:08 pm

Kuo: Apple To Start Its AR Headset Production This Year, Will Be Launched In 2020

There have been rumblings of Apple working on some sort of augmented reality headset for months, and that’s something that has gained more traction as more advanced AR features have been added to iPhones and iPads.

Now, well respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims that Apple’s new AR product will go into mass production as soon as the fourth quarter of this year.

In typical analyst fashion however, Kuo does hedge his statement by saying that it the unannounced headset will go into production by the second quarter of 2020 at the latest, giving the whole thing a more fuzzy, certainly larger timescale than we may have previously hoped for from the statement.

Kuo goes on to say that the first version of the headset, or glasses, will rely on the iPhone heavily, with all of the computational work carried out by the iOS device. The display will then be handled by the headset. That will, hopefully, make the headset easier to produce and importantly, cheaper to buy.

The belief is also that the new product will pair with an iPhone using similar methods to how the Apple Watch currently pairs, and that would certainly work if Kuo’s belief in a headset and iPhone relationship is accurate.

Ultimately we’ll have to wait and see whether there is any accuracy in Kuo’s new report, although they do appear to match up with previous Bloomberg reports from almost two years ago. A 202 launch was mooted back then, and while we’re still not sure whether enough people want AR products to make a whole product viable, we’re willing to be proven wrong.

(Via: 9to5Mac, Top image is Microsoft HoloLens with Apple logo on it)