Why can’t your iPhone power the Apple Watch headset?

In Mark Gurman’s unreleased document he claims Apple is “considering” making the latter’s non-professional Seeing headset “dependent on a tethered Mac or iPhone.” However does it really make sense to power the Seeing headset with an iPhone?

Gurman has a very strong monitor record when it comes to reporting on Apple’s moves, and he also didn’t hide many details of Seeing Pro before it was officially hidden and even Apple It was also said to exist by. However, like every leaker, sometimes he makes mistakes or at least misunderstands what his assets are telling him. And I believe this untouched claim is an example of that.

Starting with an idea is an attractive idea. Replace the Apple Seeing Professional’s external battery with your iPhone and it will provide not only energy but also computing, making the headset both lighter and cheaper. However upon closer inspection, there are a number of reasons why this definitely couldn’t work, and it’s just a wicked idea even if it were.

thermal and battery

Cloudlessness is the key factor Not there. height efficiency. Apple Seeing Pro has been using M2 chipset since last 2022. The untouched iPhone 15 Pro has a 6-core GPU that’s more or less 60% as strong as the M2, so it’s possible that the iPhone 17 Pro, which should be close to the same generation as the cheaper Seeming headset, could match the distance. This may actually limit it to only the untouched and largest iPhones, although that’s on par with Apple’s route.

The truth is that units without a cooling fan like smartphones cannot maintain their peak efficiency for maximum accumulation minutes. As they reach peak efficiency, they begin to overheat, and eventually they become so hot that the device must deliberately reduce the maximum clock speed to avoid destroying the processor or stopping working. Does matter. Sure, Apple could come up with a “case” that your iPhone would slide into with a cooling fan. However, because it’s not actually on the phone, it’s a battle of the losses, and will force the consumer to remove their case every time they want to switch to a headset.

As a result, every standalone headset since the Oculus Quest, including the Apple Seeing Pro, features at least one cooling fan. That’s why hand-held consoles like the Nintendo Transfer and Steam Deck do this too. Without it, they couldn’t do the work they do for 20 minutes or more in one generation.

Although this ailment can be magically resolved through a life cooling device, an iPhone’s battery is three times smaller than the one attached to an Apple Seeing Professional, which weighs almost twice as much as an iPhone. The Preseon A-series chipsets are more energy eco-friendly than the M2, nowhere near as much as the A-series by 300%. So unless Apple went with the extremely elegant solution of getting both an external battery and If the iPhone is tied down, there won’t be enough battery to power the Seeing headset for more than a single charge.

and even though He Can be solved somehow, would the public really want their iPhone’s battery to drain in less than two hours, thereby reducing its status? This can be a powerful disincentive to headset use.

Although glasses can paint

None of this means that Apple can’t ditch the XR software operated through your iPhone in an era too. However, said software will not work on VisionOS in the near future, and thus it will not be a Seeing headset.

Gurman additionally wrote that Apple has “renewed efforts to develop AR-only glasses”. In January 2023, he reported that Apple had suspension glasses “indefinitely” because the generation was not committed to coming to a generation any time soon and it was curious about building a Seeing Professional and later a cheaper Seeing headset. About two and a half years later, Apple may have found a way to develop that function.

I think the recently reported “ideas” about iPhone usage are much more likely to be in the context of those AR glasses than a seeing headset. Explicit AR presentations are much smaller than VR panels and do not consume as much energy, partly because they are the simplest additive, and these technologies do not require the prime bandwidth passthrough cameras to constantly pattern and process. Additionally, explicit AR technologies seek to render only digital objects or interfaces, not entire digital environments, and reduce their energy requirements.

Approaching the glasses mode problem with real AR functions will require offloading at least some of the computations somehow. Meta’s first AR glasses will reportedly feature a Wi-Fi compute puck (or even have its Wave Engineer glasses perform many of the duties for your telephone), so Apple’s already on your patch. Why wouldn’t a person take maximum advantage of the computing software he has installed?

However Seeing headsets are not AR glasses. They are full-fledged “spatial computers”. And – barring a few leaps – thermals, battery, and practicality dictate that this kind of software will not be operated through any generation of iPhone.