Err. not really according to the rumors. That is more a 'telephone game' accounting of the situaution.
" ... The company's industrial design team cautioned that devices in the category were not yet ready for launch and wanted to delay until a lightweight AR glasses product had matured several years later. ..."
Apple CEO Tim Cook sided with operations chief Jeff Williams in pushing to launch a first-generation mixed-reality headset device this year, against...
www.macrumors.com
The AR/VR headset not being ready for launch is a goofy statement. That is true of every Apple product 4-6 months before the launch date. What really got overridden here is trying to extremely tightly couple the release of the AR/VR headset to the AR only 'glasses' project.
Those are designers looking for an excuse not to ship. There is no way to substantively different products should hobble on the launch of another when there is no inherent coupling between the necessary for use. What was likely really what was going on there is a fear that an actually shipping headset priorities would suck the life out of something that was much further out. Apple would need a more reasonably priced headset and that would squeeze out the 'glasses' project if there was a resource availability (people , money , time , specilized silicon, etc)..
... not surprising because ta-da ..... ( a couple of months earlier this rumor popped up)
Apple has paused development on the augmented reality Apple Glasses that it planned to introduce after its mixed reality headset, reports Bloomberg....
www.macrumors.com
There probably are some industrial designers at Apple would would like some 2-3 year in the future Apple silicon chips to allow them to paint the headset into a lightweighter/thinner corner rather than deal with what they have to work with now. Or work an a less elaborate design that doesn't have sky high manufacturing costs overhead. (so could be sold at a more affordable price).
Also once the AR/VR headset outlines some aspects of AR , then it will be even harder for an AR-only glasses to adjust those expectations later. Aspects of the interface are going to get grounded and harder to break free of.
Some folks assert that this is a Tim Cook problem, but Steve Jobs had a saying that "Great artists ship". This is one of those cases. They AR/VR/Glasses stuff has been 'cooking' in the super secret labs for about 6 years now. It is time to ship something. If only to get a feedback loop going from real end users to the dev teams. I think there was lots of debate internally about what users were going to want / not want etc about the problem and that just won't get really solved by hiding , buried in the basement at Apple HQ.
Apple can do a mostly AR ( not primarily focused VR) headset if they want , but it will be a fine line to walk.
And it is a farce that is just the marketing folks that are not eyeball deep into the 'Glasses or bust' mindset of some of the industrial design team.
"... Key figures including software chief Craig Federighi have also kept their distance from the headset during its development and have seemed wary of it. Apple's senior vice president for hardware technologies, Johny Srouji, is believed to privately be a skeptic of the device, comparing it to a science project. He has warned that designing the high-performance chips that the headset requires could distract from new
iPhone chips that drive more revenue. ..."
Key Apple executives including Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, and Johny Srouji have kept their distance from the company's mixed-reality headset...
www.macrumors.com
It as later come out that the AR/VR team have their own software teams so not particularly surprising that Craig Federighi is 'hands off' on something he isn't tasked with. However, if Srouji is 'sour' on the endevour then the Glasses/AR/VR project has major problems. Even more so if the industrail design is hyper busy designing the product into 'painted into a corner' problems that the Silicon is suppose to bail them out of.
If Apple can sell 500-600K Vision Pros at yearly run rate .... that is about $2B dollars. That would likely go a long way to settling qualms about whether specialized silicon for the AR space was worth putting money into. It probably won't make Apple's margin targets for their silicon projects but it would be a grounded start.
As a VR focused headset perhaps there was "nothing special". The folks that are price (and feature ) anchored on the VR stuff that has been tossed onto the market over the last 3-4 years. The Vision Pro isn't going huge unit volume with those folks.
However, as an AR headset. It is significant. But that is for the most part something different for the larger masses. It is expensive , but lots of folks sneared at the XDR display and Apple has sold a decent number of them. ( enough that it was worth the effort to do the product. They are not taking over the monitor market as a 'unit volume' king. ) . One of the problems that Apple has to get over is that there are a vast number of mainstream folks who think VR == AR ( don't really think there is much of a difference. Or have been conditioned to think that AR is 'artificial reality' as opposed to 'augmented reality'. )
The R1 chip is a big deal. ( but the R1 doesn't have direct impact on common developer apps. Those apps don't 'run' there or have low level access to muck around. )
