Apple is finally going to release a pair of smart glasses – but only at the end of next year.

“Company engineers are ramping up work on the glasses – a rival to Meta Platforms’ popular Ray-Bans – in a bid to meet the year-end 2026 target,” writes Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the best Apple watcher in the business. “Apple will start producing large quantities of prototypes at the end of this year with overseas suppliers,” he quoted people in the know.

Seeing through Apple’s lenses

“Apple’s glasses would have cameras, microphones and speakers, allowing them to analyse the external world and take requests via the Siri voice assistant,” writes Gurman.

“They could also handle tasks such as phone calls, music playback, live translations and turn-by-turn directions. The approach would be similar to that of Meta’s current glasses and upcoming devices running Google’s Android XR operating system.”

He says Apple’s “ultimate goal is to release a pair of spectacles with augmented reality, which uses displays and other technology to superimpose digital content on views of the real world”.

But that kind of sci-fi-like gadget is years away.

Altman and Ive sitting in a tree…

This has been a big week for AI-related hardware announcements. On Wednesday, OpenAI bought former Apple design chief Jony Ive’s startup, io, for a whopping $6.5-billion with the aim of creating a bunch of AI gadgets.

This acquisition could add $1-trillion to OpenAI’s value, its CEO Sam Altman said in a company meeting, which the Wall Street Journal reported on. OpenAI is currently valued at $86-billion.

Altman said employees have “the chance to do the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company here,” on a “family of devices,” the paper wrote, as both men offered “hints” of what the AI gadgets will do.

“The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.”