One of the fun things about covering tech over a long span of time is watching the rise of new platforms and devices—there was the internet, the smartphone...and now, the mixed reality headset?
Apple's expected unveiling of a computer headset on Monday has got many a pundit proclaiming the advent of the next big tech platform shift.
I'm as excited as the next person to see what Apple shows off at its WWDC conference next week. I'm sure I'll be swept up in the excitement of the gizmo, but I'll also be looking at it with a lesson from a past platform shift in mind.
People talked about smartphones for years before the iPhone's 2007 debut. The basic idea—a small handheld computer that you could whip out of your pocket to watch videos, find information, and communicate with—always seemed like an inevitability. If such a magical gadget existed and was affordable, who wouldn't want one?
The limitation was the technical feasibility. Lots of people tried with varying degrees of success—from the Sony Magic Link to the Palm Pilot to the T-Mobile Sidekick. But it wasn't until the iPhone achieved the perfect combination of features, design, price, and performance that smartphones became a must-have item and the world shifted from PCs to mobile devices.
Headsets have similar technological limitations. Dave Smith has a great piece today on the design and performance trade-offs that Apple has likely had to make with its forthcoming headset, and why that means you should keep your expectations in check.
But unlike with smartphones, I don't sense the same inevitability with headsets. Is there a genuine unfilled desire among the general public to strap a piece of electronic equipment onto our faces and to immerse ourselves in virtual worlds?
To true believers in AR, VR, and mixed reality, the answer to that question is yes, once the right product is available. That product probably looks more like a pair of sunglasses than the bulky, ski-goggle-like devices currently available from Meta, Sony Playstation, and soon, apparently, Apple. But it's not at all clear that the technology to achieve the holy glasses is any nearer than the technology to create a mass-market brain-computer interface (another tech dream product that seems far from inevitable to me).
I've seen enough wild innovations over the years that I'm not naive enough to say that the shift to a headset-based computing platform will never happen. But even with Apple—the catalyst for the last major platform shift—now throwing its weight and know-how into the game, I think that when the dust settles after Monday's big event, we'll realize we have Palm Pilots, not iPhones.
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Alexei Oreskovic
Data Sheet’s daily news section was written and curated by Andrea Guzman.
