I was most surprised to find out that wearable displays haven't been a top front and center strategic priority from day 1, and instead they were thinking about the stupid ass car thing:

>Apple CEO Tim Cook has been relatively hands-off from the product compared to others like the iPhone... The Information's sources say that Apple's mixed reality efforts began almost accidentally when the company purchased a German AR startup called Metaio to use some of its technology on Project Titan, its self-driving car project.

Which is just wild and highly contrary to my expectations. It's been obvious for ages that, while quite a ways from hitting the tipping point, wearable displays are the natural next big disruption in the personal electronics space following in the steps of the PC, notebooks, smartphones and tablets. A retinal scanning display will be able to hit the limits of human visual acuity while also being portable, which completely obsoletes every single other display we use and has massive implications for a lot of our basic modes of interaction. Suddenly there is no connection between "screen size" and device, where you are etc, it's just a matter of tradeoffs with how much power is behind it. With an industry standard even embedded devices could have virtual "displays" with lots of info. If you think about the form factor of nearly everything portable we use, it's "a display, with stuff attached to it" (either attached to the back in the case of phones/tablets or on a hinge to a rectangle that otherwise matches the screen in the case of notebooks). The display bit almost completely defines the basics of how portable it is, how it's used, and the limits on thermal dissipation and roughly how much energy it can have. But a wearable display once again abstracts the human-computer visual interface part from everything else, which means single rectangles are no longer required. Belts, smoother ovoids that can be more easily pocketed, and who knows what else all become possible ways to hold enhanced computation/storage beyond what the wearable itself can do. And as someone enters LAN range (or sits down and plugs in even) of more computation power (in the form of a desktop computer say, or networked computers) there could be seamless switchover. And it's not as if this is 50 years in the future either, the pieces have been steadily coming together. Products like the RETISSA [0] demonstrate the potential that a company with Apple's resources could get to work polishing. The opening up of 6 GHz spectrum and WiFi 7+ along with a long awaited new shift in networking means LAN data rates are there too.

To say there are implications for, oh, products like the iPhone, iPad, and Macbooks (or even iMacs) is a bit of an understatement. With enormous irony if anything Apple's heavily neglected desktop section might be one of the ones that'd best survive. But whomever gets it right and gets the ecosystem going has the potential to really mess up established players. Given how Apple accomplished multiple disruptions and has repeatedly stated they're alert to it and the importance of being willing to go after their own cash cows early before someone else does it, I'd sort of assumed in the background this was one of their key strategic projects even if it was like a 10 year one. It's fascinating to find that no, actually not!

And Ive's influence without the leash of Jobs to make sure form and function stayed linked really seems to have been pretty toxic. Whatever Cooks' other strengths keeping that reigned in doesn't seem to have been one of them. I guess the forces of organizational inertia are always incredibly powerful.

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0: https://en.retissa.biz/