Apple hosted a special ‘Meet with Apple’ developer session this week that was focused on its spatial computing platform, visionOS. After months of questions about its commitment to XR, the company reiterated that it remains invested in the space.
The News
“We want to ensure that we’re obviously very committed to the platform,” said Yuri Imoto, a product manager at Apple’s Spatial Computing division. “We’re very excited actually. In a relatively short amount of time, spatial computing has evolved pretty rapidly.”
Imoto further underscored the platform’s growing importance to surgery, healthcare, education, training, and immersive film—areas all covered in the day-long developer event.
One of the bigger announcements to come from the event was the unveiling of Blackmagic’s new pro-level ambisonic microphone, which includes an internal processor that natively convert signals from its 108 microphone array for direct use in Apple spatial content.
“I think this is all testament to say that we are pushing forward spatial computing, and Apple is committed to this platform.”
Notably, Apple’s most recent XR headset release was in October 2025 with its M5 hardware refresh of Vision Pro. Despite bringing improvements to processing performance, visual clarity, refresh rate and comfort, it was largely an incremental upgrade, and not a next-gen offering in its own right.
Over the course of the last year though, the company has seemingly focused on improving visionOS’ user experience across the board, both for casual users and enterprise. To boot, Apple has been pumping out a load of spatial content, including immersive documentaries, live MLB baseball games, as well as introducing third party support for unique tracked controllers and accessories for Vision Pro.
My Take
The company is very careful to say they are committed to spatial computing and the visionOS platform, although I wouldn’t conflate that to mean it’s also specifically backing its Vision Pro hardware efforts.
Apple are developing their own smart glasses and AR hardware in addition to mixed reality devices, all of which could support some flavor of visionOS in the future—much like AndroidXR does now.
While unsubstantiated by Apple (of course), a report from Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from earlier this summer indicated that a prospective Apple Vision Pro 2 release has been pushed back or delayed to late 2028 or 2029 at the earliest, as the company is focusing on releasing smart glasses by late 2027, effectively bringing competition to Meta and Google/Samsung’s own efforts.
So, I’d expect that as smart glasses and AR take the center stage at Apple, visionOS will continue to evolve in those directions as Apple further appeals to professionals, and nor consumers, to continue buying its current Vision Pro M5 release.
