A look at the challenges of developing a mass-market augmented reality headset as Apple reportedly prepares to launch its own mixed reality device in 2022
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc in Apple's long-gestating headset program. Bloomberg had already reported internal divisions at Apple over the AR/VR roadmap in mid-2020, with glasses pushed to 2023 at the earliest, and followed up in early 2021 with word that the first VR-first headset planned for 2022 was hitting development hurdles while leaning on gaming, video, and communication rather than full AR. Kuo's March 2021 note sketched the longer runway: a mid-2022 mixed reality unit around $1K, then AR glasses by 2025.
Christopher Mims' framing — that the hard part is the mass market, not the demo — anticipates what the later Wall Street Journal reporting confirmed: a seven-year development effort producing a product still experimental at launch, with the core tension being computing power versus wearability.
First-order effects
- Apple enters 2022 with a headset positioned as a stepping stone — VR-leaning, limited AR, premium-priced per Kuo's ~$1K estimate — rather than the mass-market AR device the category ultimately needs.
Second-order effects
- Rival headset makers get cover to keep iterating on niche, enthusiast-focused devices: if Apple itself ships an experimental product after seven years, the 'wait for the iPhone moment' framing holds across the industry.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, spatial computing arrives as a staged platform — headset first, glasses later, per the Kuo roadmap — with each generation trading compute for wearability until a genuinely consumer form factor emerges.
The trend: Consumer AR is arriving through a decade-long ladder of interim headsets rather than a single breakthrough device, with Apple's 2022 entry as the most-watched rung.