Apple’s Plan for Headwear Shapes Up - DTNSB 5050
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This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 30th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on context, and just try to help each other understand. Today we let you know what we think of Apple's reported strategy for smart glasses and headsets. That's an interesting one. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with The Big Story. ♪

Apple

Apple sees head-worn devices, you know, like VR headsets, smart glasses, that type of thing, as its next major trend. At least that's what Kuo says. It has three Apple Vision headsets, like the Apple Vision Pro in development, as well as four variants on the idea of smart glasses.

Now, that makes seven products. So five of those seven actually have timelines associated. The other two are still earlier in the process. Let's go through what Quo says they are. The first is a minor upgrade of the Apple Vision Pro that just has a better chip, runs on an M5 chip. That one's supposed to come in Q3 this year. That doesn't seem like much more than a chip upgrade and not a big surprise.

A lighter and cheaper version that everybody's been wondering would come, often referred to as an Apple Vision Air, is a couple of years out still. Kuo says it's Q3 2027, and that one would run on an iPhone processor. Top end, but an iPhone processor, not an M-series processor. And then a second generation of the Vision Pro is supposed to come in the second half of 2028, and that would have a whole new design.

Let's talk about the glasses. Apple's first competitor to Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses won't arrive until Q2 2027, so you're not going to see these anytime soon. It's expected to have multiple frame options, multiple material options, you know, so you can get the glasses that have the look you want. And then the innards will have things like gesture recognition, voice control, photo and video recording, but no display.

The first of two smart glasses with a display, the Kuo refers to as XR for extended reality, will come in 2028.

And then finally, there's a tethered product that you'd plug into your Mac or your iPhone and use as a display. That one has been paused because they can't get it light enough. They've got some weight challenges. Kuo thinks the display-enabled smart glasses will probably remain a niche product for the next couple of years. So Apple being later than that is not a big deal. And then he thinks Apple will probably leapfrog what's out there with tech and design improvements, which is a thing Apple has done in the past.

Rob, if Quo is right, what do you think Apple's headwear strategy sounds like to you? I think on the designs with the displays, it probably sounds right. And it probably sounds about right for the timing that it would take Apple that long to get it out. For the ones that are going to basically compete with the Ray-Ban Metas, I actually looked it up. Those things have been out for 20 months. And we're talking about an additional two years before Apple has a competitor to it.

if there were any company other than Apple, I would say that that takes way too long for them to come out. But Apple being the behemoth that it is, they can, they can release it and just, they automatically have a huge market of people who are going to get it simply because they have an Apple logo on them. So, um,

So the question that comes up is why two years for the ones that compete with the Ray-Ban Metas? And it makes me think about where Apple is with their AI. Well, they probably don't have any AI coming out for a while. So it could take them that amount of time to actually put the AI in the glasses to make them do the things that you would want them to do with Apple's polish and finish. Yeah.

Yeah. I always think back to other cases of Apple doing this, right? For comparison. So when the iPhone came out, everybody thought that the trio and some of the BlackBerrys, as you know, were pretty cool, right? And it's like, oh man, these are great. You know, what would Apple do that's better than these two? Yeah.

And then we saw the iPhone. It was like, oh, it's significantly better. I think we're in a similar position with those Ray-Ban Metas and Meta is going to be expanding to other SL or Luxottica brands like Oakley where people go, hey, they look pretty good. So what Apple has to do again is come out with glasses where you go, wow, those look even better.

And I'm not sure, and no one ever is before they come out, but I'm not sure what the margin for improvement is and what the tech could do even beyond the AI. Like I'm with you on Apple intelligence or maybe they just plug into open AI or something like that. Like that has to work, but the look and the functionality has to be a leapfrog too. And maybe I'm just old, but I'm having a harder time imagining AI

how it could be as much of an improvement over the metas in two years, assuming meta continues to improve as the iPhone was over the trio. Apple's, you know, initial improvement over those, those initial handhelds that were out, you know, years ago, those devices are still pretty new and fairly niche. People have been wearing glasses for a couple hundred years. Yeah. The form factor, right? Yeah. That's a, yeah. Yeah.

So that's one of the things that makes me wonder. I'm like, ah, you're pushing it. But if there's any company that can do it, Apple has a track record of coming out and showing people things that have already existed. And you actually think that Apple created the thing because they do it so well. Yeah. So if any company can do it, I'll give Apple a pass on 2027 before you actually compete with something that's been out for almost four years. Yeah.

We'll have to see. That camera's going to have to be so small that you can't even tell it's there for it to be a big change in the form factor, right? And then the functionality is going to have to wow you somehow. Yeah. Right.

Kuo also noted that Apple plans to launch a more affordable 13-inch Mac that runs on an iPhone A18 Pro chip. That would bring the price down. This sounds like an Apple version of a Chromebook, honestly. Colorful case options, stuff like that. He thinks we could see it hit later this year or at the latest early next year. And in other Apple news unrelated to Kuo, Mark Gurman over at Bloomberg says two unannounced features are coming to iOS 26 later this year. Live translation by AirPod

And one that hits close to my heart because I'm here in a hotel room in Austin, syncing captive Wi-Fi across Apple devices. So when you go log on to that hotel Wi-Fi or your coffee shop Wi-Fi, you'd only have to log in once, maybe on the phone. And then when you open your MacBook, it'll be like, oh, you're on the same Apple account. Great. We'll just bring those credentials over to you. That is a really, really cool feature. And I want to have to imagine that there's a whole lot of folks that would be really interested in even less expensive devices.

because it's not like the lower end ones are terribly expensive now. So if you can actually shave off another $150, $200, a lot of people will be really happy about that. Yeah, and going back to the colorful options thing, which Apple has done from time to time in PCs, you know, desktop PCs in the past, that would be interesting too. DTNS is made possible by you, the listener. Today we want to thank Alo, a.k.a. Adam L., Tony Glass, and Philip Less. ♪

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There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs. We have several bits of Google related news to let you know about and thanks to Motang for posting these on subreddit. Android faithfuls, Michelle Roman wrote on Android authority that Gmail for Android is testing a mark as red button with notifications. So you don't have to open the

app, Rahman also reports that Android 16 is getting the ability to push notification warnings if a connection attempt requests a unique identifier or forces an unencrypted connection. This would alert you of something like a stingray was trying to hijack your cellular connection and spy on you.

Phones would need to have new hardware in the modem to support this, but the groundwork is being laid in Android to support it when they do. In other Google news, Google VO3 is now available for everyone on Vertix AI and Google Cloud. And Google has agreed to buy half the power coming out of a nuclear fission reactor from Commonwealth Fusion Systems outside of Richmond, Virginia. Fusion reactors don't create the toxic waste that fission reactors do.

but they are just coming out of the research phase. Commonwealth's test reactor called Spark won't come online until next year. And the full reactor called Arc is scheduled for sometime in the 2030s. Google did write a check now, so hopefully that test reactor works. Yeah, Google's making a big bet. Fusion reactors working as expected would be huge for our power needs. And the fact that we're seeing multiples of these starting to do test reactors is kind of...

a big deal if they work, but there's a few people out there who are skeptical that they're going to work as promised. And I guess Google's one to be,

willing to bet that it's gonna so so they'll write a check just so they can get that that 200 megawatts of power out of there one if it does work out google is an ai company and things we know about ai companies is they they require enormous amounts of power so if there is a way to get a and i'm doing the air quotes where people cannot see me right now you know you know it's

This is a relatively clean type of energy. It's nuclear powered. And there's, you know, there's issue with that. But I think everybody thinks of like Three Mile Island meltdowns. And we really have not had that since then.

So this is something that Google is, they're taking, I don't want to say they're taking a flyer on it, but it's like, you know what, let's go ahead and put the money in now, make you see if this stuff works. And if it does, we are first in line to get enormous amounts of capacity. Because Fusion is much cleaner than Fission. Fission's what we have now. That's Three Mile Island. And that's the one where you split the atom apart.

to get the power out and then you have radioactivity leftover. With fusion, you push the atoms together and so you don't have anything leftover. There's still some byproduct of it, but not nearly the toxicity and the difficulty of disposal that you have with fission. So it would be huge if we can get fusion

And it's going to cause a lot of confusion amongst people, too, because they're going to hear fusion but think fission, like you said. So a long road for that, much less the fact of whether it works as promised as well. Well, here's the latest on the provision of the U.S. budget bill regarding prohibitions on states in the U.S. regulating AI. This is part of the big budget bill, but it's that one provision that was saying for 10 years states couldn't regulate AI. Now, when we last mentioned it, the provision said

was allowed to stay in the bill because it doesn't actually make state regulations illegal. It withholds federal funding for broadband infrastructure if states keep regulations. And the Senate parliamentarian said, yeah, that's a budget item. You can put that in the budget bill. The U.S. provides $500 million to states for broadband programs. Now, not every state receives that money, but most of them do.

And so if they want to keep receiving it, they'll need to abide by this prohibition. The bill is now in its final form in the U.S. Senate. It then is going to have to go back to the House before being sent to the president to sign into law. The term of the prohibition was reduced. It's no longer 10 years. It's now five years. And it also added a couple of exceptions. I'm going to read these from the text of the proposed bill.

There would be an exception for a law or regulation pertaining to unfair or deceptive acts or practices, child online safety, child sexual abuse material, rights of publicity, protection of a person's name, image, voice, or likeness, and any necessary documentation for enforcement, as long as they don't place an undue or disproportionate burden on AI systems.

So they're saying you can still get your funding if you're regulating AI for these purposes, child safety, copyright stuff, that sort of thing. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee had opposed the act because it would have affected that state's act that makes it illegal to mimic musicians' voices without consent. Remember, Nashville is in Tennessee.

So she's trying to protect the music industry there. The new version of the prohibition explicitly exempts that Tennessee Act, which, by the way, is known as the Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security, a.k.a. Elvis Act.

It could still get pulled out or changed before the Senate passes it back as multiple governors and some ruling party senators still oppose it. And of course, it could face changes or removal in the House before it gets sent to the president. But the general sentiment is we're probably seeing this bill getting sent to the president by July 4th.

Yeah, it was it was pretty much dead on arrival in its previous iteration. I think that they've put enough stuff in here. They by cutting it in half from 10 years to five years, that is going to get a lot of folks on board. They just weren't on board before. But I think you're right that this gets it closer to actually being something that will get through the house.

maybe one more round. They don't have a lot of time. The 4th is Friday, so they don't have a lot of time. But I would imagine that you're going to see something go to the House to get signed and ultimately gets to the president's desk. And then we'll see if any states want to say like, no, we don't want the funding. We'll keep the regulations.

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A couple of safety issues to mention today. Anchor issued its second recall of power banks this month. You may remember earlier this month there was a recall for certain models of power banks sold in the U.S. between June 1st, 2016 and December 31st, 2022. This new recall is for several models sold in

multiple markets around the world. So if you want to check if you have an affected model and get instructions for what you need to do to get a refund or dispose of it, go to anchor.com, look for a page called product recall submission form, and we'll have a link in our show notes to that as well. Also security company rapid seven found a security flaw in the

I've got one of those as well as 59 printer models from Fujifilm, Toshiba, Ricoh and Konica Minolta. Partial patches have been issued, but to fully mitigate the vulnerability, you need to make sure you have changed the default admin password on the printer, which all of us did as soon as we got our printers. Right. So we're all good. Right. I just changed mine to password time. Nobody will ever guess that the default one, two, three, four to password. Smart.

YouTuber Christian Perry Fractic Simpson posted a video of details of his share purchase agreement for the assets of Commodore Corporation. The agreement supposedly requires a payment in the low seven figures to be paid to complete the deal. While Simpson and friends have raised some money, they still are looking for angel investors. Lots of folks from the Commodore heyday back in the 80s are on board to work on the new organization should it come together, including the father of the Commodore 64, Albert Charpentier and Michael Tomczyk.

a.k.a. Vic Czar of the Vic 20. This is a fun idea, and it's a great way to get the angel investing to do it, to be a popular YouTuber with popular videos, and then this goes viral, and then we talk about it, and everybody's talking about it. And I think everybody likes the idea of, you know, Commodore reuniting the old folks and the nostalgia of the brand and all that to be more than just slapping a name on something. You know, maybe they can make something interesting and new. It's still pretty much nostalgia.

though. It's definitely nostalgia, but it's getting me. My first computer was the TI-99 4A, but my cousin got the Commodore VIC-20. So you know that my second computer was the Commodore 64. It was for the games in addition to being able to code. But I remember that time fondly. It was, you know, it was, it was really the, the TI-99 4A started it followed by the 64 that really got me into tech, into computers that has lasted for 40 some odd years.

You and I share that lineage. My first was a TI-99-4A and then I got the Commodore 64 and I have fond memories of both. So I love this too. Microsoft CEO of AI Mustafa Suleiman says the company has developed a new language model that can diagnose disease four times more accurately than a panel of human physicians. Microsoft tested the model with 304 case studies from the New England Journal of Medicine. So these were difficult cases.

They assembled them in a test called the sequential diagnosis benchmark. And then the Microsoft language model broke those cases down into a step-by-step sequence that they would need to follow to create a diagnosis. Then here's the key part.

That model consulted other models like GPT from OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, Lama, Grok, and mimicked how multiple human experts team up on a case as a group of experts. Suleiman called it chain of debate models.

which is a play on chain of thought where a model rethinks multiple times to make sure it gets the right answer. They call the system the MAI Diagnostic Orchestrator. You might see it as MAI-DXO. It achieved 80% accuracy on these difficult cases compared to 20% from a human panel that was not familiar with the cases.

It also selected less expensive tests and procedures, which would have reduced the cost of treatment had this been real by 20%. Microsoft has not said how it might or might not implement this research project, but if it wanted to deploy it to people, it would need to conduct a clinical trial on actual patients that were being treated by a human and do comparisons there in the real world.

So when we talk about AI, generically, we're pretty much talking about LLMs. But this is this kind of AI that I'm really, really excited about because, you know, clinical trials and things like that, they take enormous amounts of time. And if you can model this stuff and you can you can decrease the amount of time that it takes to get better outcomes, that is a good thing for people.

Yeah, no, this is a really good one. And I hope it works, right? I'm sure it's proper to be a little skeptical about how it will work. Probably that accuracy percentage goes down when it hits the real world and all the nuances of real world cases, but could be really helpful. I don't think it necessarily has to replace as doctors as much as be another member of the team the way it's using a virtual team to create its diagnoses as well.

Scientists at the University of California at Davis have developed a device that can translate brain signals into sounds, including words, without much latency. Most brain-computer interfaces do this by translating brain signals to text and then turning them into speech. They put 256 microelectrodes into the area of the brain that controls vocal tract muscles. The signals were sent to a neural decoder, which was trained to detect pitch and voicing. Then it was fed to a vocoder to synthesize speech.

Latency was reduced from minutes in previous systems down to about 10 milliseconds. That's almost instantaneous. The error rate was a bit more than 43 percent, but reached 100 percent when you had a transcript. The scientists are now working with a company from Austin called Paradromics, which has a system with more electrodes. They want to receive FDA approval to do clinical trials.

Yeah, this is incredible. We've been seeing brain-computer interfaces just continue to get better and better and better. And in the past, it had been trying to figure out how to have a person imagine a word and then translate it, and that was impressive that they could do that. This is saying, what if we just try to detect how they would form their mouth when they spoke if they can't speak?

and then turn that directly into speech and it's instantaneous. So again, need to get that error rate down. But when you know what they're saying, you can tell what they're saying is what that transcript part that you talked about said. And I think this is incredibly promising. And I'm glad that there's a company that wants to push this one toward clinical trial. I hope they get the approval. Absolutely impressive here. Just to put it in perspective, you go from several minutes to the blink of an eye. The

So, you know, this is pretty darn impressive if they can get that air rate down. Gartner Group says that its communication with companies indicate that 60% of agentic AI projects that are under development right now at companies will remain in development by the end of 2027. The rest will be canceled for 2020.

concerns about cost, concerned about how valuable they are, whether you can control the risks or not. Gartner also projects that by 2028, 15% of daily work decisions will be made by these kinds of agents. 33% of enterprise software apps will include an agent.

Gartner says successful agents offer enterprise-wide productivity. So if you're looking for how can we make sure our agent is successful, don't look on individual boosts. Look at how it's going to affect the entire productivity across the enterprise. And Gartner says the best chances are automation of routine workflows and information retrieval.

This tracks because right now, many companies are pouring money into this just to see what they can do. A year and a half from now, they're going to absolutely be concerned about what is it actually doing effectively and saving us money. So, yeah, this stuff makes sense here.

Joby has delivered its first production electric takeoff and landing aircraft to Dubai as part of this plan to launch air taxi service there by 2026. Test flights will begin soon on planned routes with commercial service to begin by the end of this year or early next year. With wide availability following those tests, Joby aircraft are all electric in seat five, including the pilot. They can reach 200 miles per hour and travel 150 miles on a single charge. I mean, I think this is significant because we are actually getting one of these aircraft that we've been talking about forever delivered.

Uh, in the air. I mean, I know it's not in the air yet, but it actually got delivered. Uh, I think Joby has like five in production right now that are out there being tested, but this is, this is going to one of those stories that we heard like Dubai is going to do this air taxi service someday. Like, okay, they actually have a vehicle they could do it with. So, uh, that's, that's significant.

They've got a vehicle. It looks like it's coming really, really soon. And we are probably months away from living in the time of the Jetsons. Months, if not years, but maybe months. We have a live stream show as well, folks. If you like watching live TV, you can catch DTNS Live. Watch it at 4 p.m. Eastern at youtube.com slash Daily Tech News Show. Or you can catch it later. You can watch it there on YouTube or as a podcast. Just look for DTNS Live.

Of course.

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It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too. Ah, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Mark has some thanks. Yeah, we talked with Bart Bouchats last week about alternatives to Pocket, and a lot of people wrote in thanking us for these. Mark was one of them. He says, thank you, Bart Bouchats. Ranked.io is exactly what I've been looking for to keep track of sites instead of leaving 80 tabs open on three different devices. This was an excellent recommendation. It is pretty cool.

How are you, Tom? How many tabs do you generally leave open on your devices? I've got 20 in this browser window and maybe a good 10 or 12 in other browser windows that are minimized at the moment. I'm not that bad, but this might be able to help both of us out. Yeah, it just might. It just might. Thank you, Bart. And thank you, Mark.

Well, folks, we'd love to know what you're thinking about. If you've got some insights into any stories, share it with us at feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Yeah, big thanks to Mark for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business if you're not already a patron. If you are, thank you. And if you're not, go take care of that. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Talk to you soon. The DTNS family of podcasts.

Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

Six-time Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee Jean Smart returns to Broadway for 12 weeks only in a world premiere play about a writer whose words are her only way out. Call me Izzy. Get tickets at callmeizzyplay.com. Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too. Ah, really? Thanks, Capital One Bank guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. member FDIC.