Apple’s Vision Pro mixed-reality headset, announced at WWDC earlier this month, is still a long way from launch: the company has said only that it will become available in the U.S. at some point in 2024, with unnamed countries to follow later that year. But it looks like the first hardware element of the Vision Pro launch could appear as soon as this fall.
According to the prolific and widely respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the iPhone 15, expected to launch in fall 2023, is likely to feature an upgraded ultra wideband (UWB) chip designed to ensure seamless integration with Vision Pro. Apple introduced the U1 chip in 2019 with the iPhone 11 and has subsequently included it in all iPhone models since as well as the Apple Watch Series 6, 7, and 8, and the Ultra.
“The ecosystem is one of the key success factors for Vision Pro, including the integration with other Apple hardware products,” Kuo explains. The iPhone 15, therefore, “will likely see an specification upgrade of UWB, with the production process moving from 16nm to more advanced 7nm, allowing for improved performance or reduced power consumption for nearby Interactions.”
This might seem a little odd since the iPhone 15 will hit stores with at least three months of 2023 remaining, and the headset is unlikely to appear until at least halfway through the 15’s lifecycle. But Apple will need its current-gen products to work well with Vision Pro from day one, and the improved UWB chip is likely to bring additional benefits other than integration with the headset: more accurate AirTag tracking, for example, or reduced power consumption.
It might also be tempting to try to draw clues from this prediction as to the launch timeframe for Vision Pro; at the very least, it strongly suggests that Apple expects the headset to land before the iPhone 16 appears in September 2024, and probably quite a long time before that. But the consensus was already that Apple would try to push out Vision Pro next spring, so this isn’t really new information. (And in any case, delays can always afflict a completely new product line, as has happened to Vision Pro over the past few years. Even if Apple plans to launch in the spring, the headset could end up getting pushed back for reasons beyond its control.)
Kuo adds that a further Vision-oriented upgrade will appear on the iPhone 16 in late 2024, with an upgrade to Wi-Fi 7.
