Intel has been falling behind with their processors when it comes to power consumption, performance and heat output, which is why Intel MacBooks in recent years have been hot and suffered from performance throttling. Modern iPhones and iPads have enough grunt to stand toe-to-toe with typical mid-range laptops, and that’s in a device with a small battery and no active cooling.Īpple has been having trouble with Intel CPUs in its devices for years now. These are based on the ARM architecture, which companies can licence to produce their own processors.įundamentally, it’s the same silicon architecture used by most mobile devices, but Apple has modified and beefed up the hardware to achieve performance levels that are pretty unbelievable. Just in case you haven’t been keeping track of what the folks in Cupertino have been up to, let’s talk about Apple Silicon itself before discussing what it could do for XR.įor years Apple has been producing their own custom system-on-a-chip packages for the iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices. While it might not seem to be immediately connected, if you think about it, Apple Silicon promises to elevate any headset they produce from a niche curiosity to a killer product with the potential to wipe VR giants such as Oculus from the map. This is interesting to me because what we did get in 2020 was the bombshell launch of the Apple M1 chip, found in the latest MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebooks. There has been no official announcement of an Apple headset, and yet leaks, rumours and other credible sources have said that Apple was on the verge of releasing a headset in 2020, but then decided to delay it until the 2022-2023 window. The Apple ARKit API made Google’s Tango hardware obsolete overnight and selected Apple devices shipped with a tiny built-in LiDAR scanner.Īll of these technologies that have made it into Apple consumer devices are most likely happy offshoots of R&D efforts towards a converged AR device.

We’ve also seen the early fruits of their labour as well. They’ve bought up companies with technologies that pertain to AR and VR in the past.

At this point, it’s a pretty badly kept secret that Apple is working on some sort of headset or even multiple headsets.

Virtual reality mac hardware