I remember CES 2010, sort of. There was an innovative tablet/netbook hybrid by Lenovo I saw there, called the IdeaPad U1 Hybrid. I remember it, but you probably don’t. That’s partly because, weeks later, Apple announced the iPad, after expectations of it had loomed over CES like a cloud. The tablet landscape shifted quite a bit after that. It looks like it’s happening again.
A day ahead of the official kickoff of CES 2024, which is expected to have lots of AR and VR news as always, Apple announced the launch date for the Vision Pro. Details were dropped about the headset that clearly were designed to overshadow anything announced in Las Vegas, including possible details on Samsung’s upcoming mixed-reality headset made in cooperation with Google and Qualcomm.
A tactical move, surely. But it’s also a sign of how unsettled the AR/VR landscape still is, a decade after my first demo of the Oculus Rift at CES in 2013.
Phones are familiar commodity devices now, but in 2007, Apple pulled a similar stunt by announcing the iPhone at MacWorld while CES was happening elsewhere. It laid the groundwork for a redefinition of what phones felt like, and what they did.
The iPad’s announcement in 2010, while initially feeling derivative of the iPhone, ended up doing the same for tablets — and in January, shortly after CES, too.
Apple doesn’t seem to have any event planned at all for the upcoming Vision Pro. Instead, after announcing the headset last year at Apple’s WWDC developer conference and having a few demos there and later in the fall, it looks like the advanced piece of hardware will be available for preorder on Jan. 19 with no other in-person event to accompany it.
VR already exists, and some of the hardware has even been somewhat successful. The Meta Quest 2 and Quest 3 have found their way into a ton of…
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