A forgotten Apple patent from 2008 suggests that the company has been working on the Vision Pro for a very, very long time. Spotted by Macworld’s Dan Moren while he was browsing the Internet Archive, the old article only shows one diagram from the patent but it looks extremely similar to the display panel of the Vision Pro.
The device is also described as a wearable display with intelligent sensors that can “simulate the experience of being in a virtual environment.” It even mentions that the sensors would be able to track head and eye movements. While the tech Apple wanted to put inside it at this point must have been quite different from the product we have now, it’s surprising just how similar the shape and design of the headset are.
It’s well-known that Apple and many other tech companies file patents like there’s no tomorrow, so when people saw this back in 2008, there was a good chance they thought that it would never happen. But there are plenty of long games played in this industry — Meta’s Orion project, for example, is already 10 years old, and it’s still a fair few years away from becoming a consumer product.
The patent doesn’t necessarily mean Apple was developing the Vision Pro way back in 2008, however. It could have been more of a thought experiment at that point and patented for potential future uses. If it did consider making the device, it wouldn’t have taken much research to realize that achieving the size, weight, and cost goals would have been practically impossible at that time.
As for the future of this product, rumors have circled about both a 2nd-generation Vision Pro and a lower-end version of the current device. We don’t really know what Apple is working on right now or which it’s planning to release first but, either way, weight and price are where consumers most want to see improvements.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.