Hololens, all the Daqri products, Meta are all in the HMD space with products that are selling. The AR HMD space is WAY PAST where the mouse and GUI were when they introduced it on the Macintosh. They could even buy Magic Leap if they wanted but could probably do better themselves. I mean I live this stuff. If Apple wanted to do AR glasses right, they could.
>I mean I live this stuff.
That's the selection bias issue. Most people don't and don't care for these technologies.
Over the last 20 years Apple has had the same kind for advice to get in to all kinds of fads that never went anywhere and technologies that were way before their actual mass market stage.
Just like the mouse and smartphone markets didn't exist previously.
You do realize that all of the majors are focusing heavily on AR right? As in, most of WWDC was dedicated to ARKit, nearly the entire Zuck Keynote was about AR etc...?
I was asked for what the next revolutionary technology would be that Apple could break out with, I gave it. It's staring everyone in the face and has been desired for the better part of 60 years - through thousands of iterations that never worked because processing, integration etc... weren't there.
Miss it at your peril.
"Any and all" major challenges strikes me as kind of a recipe for (slow) disaster, unless Apple decides to set up a quasi-independent Apple Research division dedicated to moonshots. That would be kind of cool, to be sure, but it strikes me as something that isn't really in line with the kind of company Apple's been the last ~19 years.