Long before Apple’s Vision Pro headset made its debut, there was rampant speculation that the company’s wider augmented reality (AR) efforts were part of a larger project toward building the then-mysterious device. Now, it seems that at least one of those technologies was built with Vision Pro in mind.
I recently interviewed Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, and Steve Sinclair, senior director of product marketing for Apple Vision Pro, to find out how the company courted developers while prepping the headset. In the course of that interview, Sinclair shed some light on how Vision Pro intertwined with the company’s ARKit developer framework.
Throughout my talk with Prescott and Sinclair, both made repeated references to ARKit, Apple’s framework for building AR experiences. Prescott said it was “foundational” for allowing people to build content for Vision Pro. When discussing how Apple adapted existing tools for its headset, Sinclair stated that “ARKit on iPhone and on iPadOS allowed us the opportunity to learn from developers and from ourselves on how best to implement these things on a platform like Vision Pro.”
Was ARKit specifically built with Vision Pro in mind, I asked, or did its development come about separately and subsequently?
“We’ll just say in conjunction” was Sinclair’s response.
Sinclair’s answer seems to imply that, at a minimum, Vision Pro was a consideration in the development of ARKit, if not the main driving force behind its creation.
When Apple revealed ARKit as part of iOS 11 in 2017, it explained that the tool would allow developers to “build detailed and compelling virtual content on top of real-world scenes for interactive gaming, immersive shopping experiences, industrial design and more.” Looking back, that seems like a description ripe for Vision Pro as much as it does the iPhone or iPad.
We already know that Vision Pro has been in development since at least 2007, the date Apple provisionally applied for a very early headset patent. In the intervening 16 years, there have been many other technologies that Apple ostensibly made for different devices that could also have been created with Vision Pro in mind.
LiDAR, for instance, has been heavily promoted as a way to enjoy AR experiences using an iPhone or an iPad Pro, but it also features prominently in Vision Pro. Numerous patents registered over the years, from extending a Mac’s display into virtual space to in-air MacBook keyboards, could all have been disguised Vision Pro technologies.
That’s unsurprising given Apple’s famous tight-lipped reticence, and it’s interesting to see the suggestion that ARKit has always had a secret secondary purpose. What other seemingly innocuous techs could find their way into future Apple devices? Only time will tell.
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Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.