Apple apparently no longer sees the future through augmented reality-tinted glasses. According to a report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the company is ditching a project to build AR lenses that would have competed with Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, putting the company at risk of falling far behind its rivals following the commercial failure of the Apple Vision Pro headset.
The glasses project, codenamed N107, was never made public, but Bloomberg reports that the plan was to build tech-equipped glasses that looked like any other pair but offered augmented reality features that could display information visible only to the person wearing the frames. An initial version of the product would have connected to an iPhone, but that was scrapped once it turned out the processing power needs of the glasses stressed out the handset and rapidly drained its battery. Apple shifted gears to pairing the glasses to Mac devices, but it continued to fall short of expectations in testing. Reportedly, the company threw in the towel on the project altogether earlier this week.
By ditching the augmented reality glasses, Apple is tacitly admitting that it just cannot crack the VR/AR space. The Apple Vision Pro, introduced in 2023, is a technically impressive device with next to no use cases and an extremely cost-prohibitive price tag, retailing for $3,499. Apple spent most of 2024 revising its projected sales figures lower and lower, ultimately settling on an estimated 500,000 units sold, with little momentum to suggest the floodgates are just about to open.
Meta, meanwhile, seems to have cracked the code for AR glasses—at least when it comes to sales. The company’s Smart Glasses, a collaborative effort with Ray-Ban, sold over one million units in 2024, per details relayed in an all-hands call that was reported by The Verge. The fact that the glasses start at $300 likely helps, as it makes them much more accessible to consumers, though it seems likely Meta might be subsidizing the cost in order to boost sales. Reality Labs, Meta’s AR/VR division, lost $5 billion during the fourth quarter of 2024 while generating only $1.1 billion in sales during that same time, even with the glasses becoming a mild hit.
Still, Meta is going all-in on the wearables. CEO Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea that the company could sell “billions of AI glasses” in the future, which…sure if we’re just saying stuff, why not aim high? Whether it’ll ever hit that figure, it’s going to try. Meta is reportedly working on a pair of Oakley-style AR glasses for athletes and a Ray-Ban follow-up called Hypernova that will feature a heads-up display.
Apple, meanwhile, seems like it’s going to go back to the drawing board. The company has Vision Pro follow-up concepts in the works and an AirPods model equipped with cameras, per Bloomberg. But that sounds less like a company with a vision and more like one that is just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.
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