Apple and Augmented Reality

I think Apple will introduce “Augmented Reality glasses” within a couple of years.

Apple’s stock has been on a downtrend since October 2018. They have hit a wall with the iPhone sales. What’s worth noting here is, their App store business is growing quite impressively. The app store alone made a revenue of ~$265B in 2018. And Apple makes 30% profit on the digital services sold through the App store.

Apple’s acquisition strategy screams a strategic interest in AR technology. They have been quietly acquiring companies around AR, Holographics, surface mapping(Metaio, Flyby media, Mapsense, Faceshift, Akonia, indoor.io), VR(VRVana), Computer Vision(regaind.io, spektral), Speech processing(VocalIQ) etc.

What makes this timing even better is, iPhone’s real-estate has improved significantly in the last 5 years in terms of hardware, battery, camera and compute power. Apple can leverage these abilities for AR. And, what happens when you introduce a new device? A whole new market place of digital apps get invented enabling commerce and thereby feeding more cash into the services business.

Whether Apple will achieve product-market fit with a new device and regain its lost momentum depends on whats brewing inside the space ship right now.