I guess I really like the hip battery, because it lowers the rotational weight of the headset and allows for a larger battery without the same tradeoffs. It would make the headset lighter than all the competition that uses headset mounted battery. Apple could say "lightest XR headset on the market" while still packing it with tech. Apple loves superlatives like that. Maybe not ideal for a consumer device, but for a pro device a hip pack seems fine to me. Of course, my brain does not work the way apple does so it making sense to me is not an indicator that it is really true.
This probably depends on all the other variables involved, most of which we don’t know.
I cringed at the idea of the hip-battery idea but here are two things that came to my mind when I entertained it:
- If this is a productivity device, not for dancing around, then the USB-C battery pack could be optional. The device could be plugged in via cable when you’re at your desk.
- That braided mag-safe cable feels more like a nice piece of rope. It wouldn’t have to be that shitty tangly experience.
None of our brains work the Apple way - they have a thorough process. They implement the results.
There are other battery-less headsets that exist, though. Plus, if Apple is just going to offload part of the device elsewhere, why not just put the processor in your hip too? Hell, why not just run it off a Mac Mini and a Thunderbolt cable? Going halfway with the cable-based headset seems like a recipe for redundancy.
> There are other battery-less headsets that exist, though.
Sure but not battery-less standalone headsets as far as I know. I mean obviously they have to have a battery somewhere to be standalone, but I am not aware of other standalones that have a hip battery. I am however not an expert, but anyway we know that their big competitor Meta doesn't have a hip battery so the headset could be lighter than theirs.
> why not just put the processor in your hip too
You have all these cameras that have to be in the headset, plus the screens and other basic electronic components. To put compute on the hip you have to have a high bandwidth low latency connection to the hip pack, then back up to the headset. You already have to have an interface pcb in the headset to collect and compress the data to send over this high bandwidth interface, and the cable has to be expensive, etc. Whereas sending power up a cable is trivial. It may be that when looking at all these tradeoffs, remote compute is a net loss, but remote power is easy.
I'm pretty sure the whole computer is on the hip. It makes sense. There's no way they could get the headset light enough otherwise. Even the best wired headsets are too heavy currently. It should be 200-300 grams to be comfortable.
They would need to take all the tracking camera feeds, compress them and send them over a high bandwidth low latency interface, do the compute, then send the result back up to the displays. That all requires a bunch of interface electronics, which may eliminate the savings from moving the CPU to the hip.
Maybe you can plug it in. But then you'd be tethered to the computer.
However, Mac might not have low enough latency / high enough bandwidth for best experience. My thinking is that it will be an ultra-optimized highly integrated device designed to do just AR/VR, and that's also why it can beat all competitors which interface with standard PCs. I have a very high-end VR headset and GPU, and it just isn't good enough. Apple has to make some miracles here.
