Apple products that initially didn’t make sense to everyone have sometimes been hits in part because they become exercise gear. The go-to example here is the Apple Watch, but in 2005, Apple released the iPod Shuffle, a music player so small, Apple (jokingly) warned people not to eat it. I sure didn’t want one, but exercisers did, and it ended up being a huge hit that some outdoorsy people still use today.
Apple has something like that in mind for its glasses product, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
And that’s probably good thinking on Apple’s part, because Gurman also says Apple is worried this whole product family creeps people out. Glasses with tiny cameras on them are perceived as a spy tool for perverts, and to some degree that’s because glasses owners have taken extraordinary steps to make sure the people around them don’t know they’re being filmed or photographed.
Gurman usually cites anonymous sources, but in this case his source appears to just be his own observations of Apple’s hiring plans. Nonetheless, he is famously well-connected, and confidently states that Apple is “working on turning its future glasses and headsets into health and fitness devices.”
According to a job ad, Apple is seeking someone to “define the future of health, well-being and fitness experiences across vision products” who [has] “helped build consumer health, wellbeing, or fitness products.”
But it doesn’t sound like Apple knows exactly where all the fitness-related possibilities are on this product yet, because it says this person will have to convert “ambiguous opportunities” into “product direction.”
There was, Gurman says, a plan to make the Vision Pro a fitness product at one point, not just to provide say, an always-visible display of the user’s heart rate and calories burned, but to use its sensors to track the body in motion. In the end, that involved exercising while wearing over a pound of gear on your head alone, and since the Vision Pro reportedly gave people neck strain after a single, normal session, that idea has apparently been tabled until the release of a lightweight Vision product.
Gurman doubts this feature will ship with the first version of Apple’s glasses, and says we’ll more likely see it on the second generation release of this still unannounced and not-yet-officially-happening Apple glasses product.
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