CUPERTINO: Apple on Monday unveiled a long-rumored headset that will place its users between the virtual and real world, while also testing the technology trendsetter’s ability to popularize new-fangled devices after others failed to capture the public’s imagination.
After years of speculation, Apple CEO Tim Cook hailed the arrival of the sleek goggles — dubbed “Vision Pro” — at the the company’s annual developers conference held on a park-like campus in Cupertino, California, that Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs helped design.
“This marks the beginning of a journey that will bring a new dimension to powerful personal technology,” Cook told the crowd.
Although Apple executives provided an extensive preview of the headset’s capabilities during the final half hour of Monday’s event, consumers will have to wait before they can get their hands on the device and prepare to pay a hefty price to boot. Vision Pro will sell for $3,500 once it’s released in stores early next year.
The headset could become another milestone in Apple’s lore of releasing game-changing technology, even though the company hasn’t always been the first to try its hand at making a particular device.
Apple’s lineage of breakthroughs date back to a bow-tied Jobs peddling the first Mac in 1984 — a tradition that continued with the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010, the Apple Watch in 2014 and its AirPods in 2016.
The company emphasized that it drew upon its past decades of product design during the years it spent working on the Vision Pro, which Apple said involved more than 5,000 different patents. The goggles will be equipped with 12 cameras, six microphones and variety of sensors that will allow users to control it and various apps with just their eyes and hands. Apple also developed a technology to create three-dimensional digital version of each user to display during video conferencing.
If the new device turns out to be a niche product, it would leave Apple in the same bind as other major tech companies and startups that have tried selling headsets or glasses equipped with technology that either thrusts people into artificial worlds or projects digital images with scenery and things that are actually in front of them — a format known as “augmented reality.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been describing these alternate three-dimensional realities as the “metaverse.” It’s a geeky concept that he tried to push into the mainstream by changing the name of his social networking company to Meta Platforms in 2021 and then pouring billions of dollars into improving the virtual technology.
But the metaverse largely remains a digital ghost town, although Meta’s virtual reality headset, the Quest, remains the top-selling device in a category that so far has mostly appealed to video game players looking for even more immersive experiences. Cook and other Apple executives avoided referring to the metaverse in their presentations, describing the Vision Pro as the company’s first leap into “spatial computing” instead.
The response to virtual, augmented and mixed reality has been decidedly ho-hum so far. Some of the gadgets deploying the technology have even been derisively mocked, with the most notable example being Google’s Internet-connected glasses released more than a decade ago.
After Google co-founder Sergey Brin initially drummed up excitement about the device by demonstrating an early model’s potential “wow factor” with a skydiving stunt staged during a San Francisco tech conference, consumers quickly became turned off to a product that allowed its users to surreptitiously take pictures and video. The backlash became so intense that people who wore the gear became known as “Glassholes,” leading Google to withdraw the product a few years after its debut.
Microsoft also has had limited success with HoloLens, a mixed-reality headset released in 2016, although the software maker earlier this year insisted it remains committed to the technology.
Magic Leap, a startup that stirred excitement with previews of a mixed-reality technology that could conjure the spectacle of a whale breaching through a gymnasium floor, had so much trouble marketing its first headset to consumers in 2018 that it has since shifted its focus to industrial, health care and emergency uses.
Daniel Diez, Magic Leap’s chief transformation officer, said there are four major questions Apple’s goggles will have to answer: “What can people do with it? What does this thing look and feel like? Is it comfortable to wear? And how much is it going to cost?”
The anticipation that Apple’s goggles are going to sell for several thousand dollars already has dampened expectations for the product. Although he expects Apple’s goggles to boast “jaw dropping” technology, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said he expects the company to sell just 150,000 units during the device’s first year on the market — a mere speck in the company’s portfolio. By comparison, Apple sells more than 200 million of its marquee iPhones a year. But the iPhone wasn’t an immediate sensation, with sales of fewer than 12 million units in its first full year on the market.
Since 2016, the average annual shipments of virtual- and augmented-reality devices have averaged 8.6 million units, according to the research firm CCS Insight. The firm expects sales to remain sluggish this year, with a sales projection of about 11 million of the devices before gradually climbing to 67 million in 2026.
Before taking the wraps of its new goggles, Apple kicked off the event by announcing that the latest models of two high-end computer lines, the Mac Studio and Mac Pro, will be powered by a company-designed chip that has already been available in less expensive Macs.
The Mac Studio will sell for $2,000 and the Mac Pro will be priced at $7,000. As it typically does at this conference, Apple provided a peek at the next iPhone operating system, iOS 17. That software, which will include more personalization and location-sharing tools for phone calls and texting, is expected to be released as a free update in September.

NEW YORK: Little Amal, a 12-foot (3.7-meter) puppet of a Syrian refugee, will journey across the United States this fall, visiting key places in America’s history to raise awareness about immigration and migration.
The puppet of the 10-year-old girl will visit the US Capitol, Boston Common, Joshua Tree National Park and the Edmund Pettus Bridge among other sites during a trek which starts in Boston on Sept. 7 and ends Nov. 5 along the US-Mexico border.
“There is something in the act of welcoming a stranger which redefines you,” says Amir Nizar Zuabi, the artistic director. “I think that’s part of what we’re trying to create when walking into places that have a beautiful, complicated, defining history.”
Stops are also planned for Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, the Tennessee cities of Nashville and Memphis, New Orleans, the Texas cities of Austin, Houston, San Antonio and El Paso, as well as the California cities of Los Angeles and San Diego.
“Obviously there’s a lot of specific points in our American history that we felt that we needed to address and that’s the reason why we’re starting in Boston,” says Enrico Dau Yang Wey, lead puppeteer and co-associate artistic director. “The reason why we’re finishing in San Diego is that there’s just such a thin line between the United States and Mexico.”
Little Amal demands empathy, the puppet of a vulnerable, naive girl who is in a strange place after surviving a long ordeal alone.
“She’s just a symbol of millions of children,” says Zuabi. “Just having a community breathe together and walk with Amal for a stretch in the streets becomes a very, very meaningful act.”
Organizers are reaching out to community artists and leaders at each of the 35 stops — including places revered in Civil Rights Movement history like Selma, Alabama, and recent scenes of gun violence like Uvalde, Texas — to create more than 100 special events anchored by each place visited.
“We work very closely with our local partners and try and understand what is the story they’re trying to tell and try to co-create an event that resonates in this place to this community,” says Zuabi. “I think that’s part of why this project becomes so emotional for many people.”
Little Amal was created by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, who made the award-winning puppets for the hit show “War Horse.” She requires four puppeteers at each visit, three to move her head and limbs and one to collect items people give her. A total of nine puppeteers will make the coast-to-coast trek with Little Amal.
“A lot of the ways we think about refugees, about immigrants, about migration, are formed and informed in American,” says Zuabi. “In a way, that’s a discussion we want to join and learn and listen.”
Last year, the puppet made a 17-day circuit through every corner of New York City, including joining a reading of the book “Julián Is a Mermaid” at the Brooklyn Public Library and a drum circle in Harlem. This June, she will be in Toronto.
The puppet completed a 5,000-mile (8,050-kilometer) trek across Europe in 2021, from the Syrian-Turkish border to northwest England, traveling through 12 countries — including greeting refugees from Ukraine at a Polish train station and stopping at refugee camps in Greece — and meeting with Pope Francis.
Wey describes Little Amal as a “miraculous thing that pulls people together suddenly” to create a “collective sense of empathy and a collective sense of awe.”
“Every time it’s different and every time you learn a little bit more. It’s one of those things where we learn on the job,” he adds. “I have to get a new pair of walking boots.”