Last week Meta showed off its 100-gram VR Glasses, pulling off the weight by moving the heavy computing into a separate puck on a cable. This week, a new report suggests Apple is looking hard at exactly the same idea for its next headset — and not everyone inside Cupertino is convinced.
According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, writing in his Power On newsletter on Sunday, Apple is testing a redesigned headset internally codenamed N224, and one of the designs on the table offloads both the computer and the battery into a tethered puck connected to the headset by a cable. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s essentially the architecture Meta just brought to market — and the one we covered when the Meta VR Glasses launched at Connect.
Why a puck?
The appeal is simple: weight. Today’s Vision Pro is a genuinely heavy thing to wear — the headset itself is around 750–800 grams, and that’s before you count the 353-gram battery pack it already tethers to. By moving the compute and battery off your face entirely, the part you actually wear can shed most of its bulk. Meta’s glasses weigh roughly 100 grams on-face; Vision Pro is some 650–700 grams heavier. That’s not a small gap — it’s the difference between something you’ll wear for ten minutes and something you’ll wear for an evening.
The internal disagreement
Here’s the interesting part. Gurman reports that some senior Apple decision-makers actively dislike the puck idea, seeing an external, cabled box as a compromised user experience that doesn’t feel very “Apple.” They’d rather keep everything in the headset — a cleaner, all-in-one design — even though that’s a far harder engineering problem to solve at a comfortable weight.
That tension is the whole story in miniature. Apple built its reputation on self-contained, no-compromise hardware. A puck on a wire is pragmatic, but it’s the kind of trade-off Apple usually refuses to make. Gurman says the company is weighing around four distinct concepts in total, including one that keeps the current egg-shaped Vision Pro form but slims it down using lighter materials like plastic and titanium rather than resorting to a puck at all.
Don’t hold your breath
A reality check on timing: Gurman describes the N224 project as being on “life support,” and doesn’t expect any resulting device to launch before late 2028 or early 2029 — if one ships at all. So this is a look at Apple thinking out loud in its labs, not a product you’ll be buying soon.
Our take
At AugmentedReality.com, what makes this genuinely exciting is the direction of travel it reveals. For a couple of years the immersive-hardware conversation has been stuck on a single frustrating fact: the good stuff is too heavy to live with. What we’re watching now is the entire industry — Meta first, and apparently Apple close behind — converging on the same answer. Get the weight off your face, and immersive computing stops being a novelty you demo and starts being something you’d actually wear through a film, a workout, or a working afternoon.
That Apple is even testing the puck approach is a quiet validation of what Meta shipped last week. When the company famous for refusing compromises starts seriously evaluating one, it’s a strong signal that the lightweight, tethered-compute path is where premium immersive hardware is genuinely heading. The internal pushback is real — and honestly, we’d love to see Apple crack the all-in-one version, because that’s the dream device — but the fact that the debate is happening at all means the hard weight problem is finally being treated as the thing to beat.
Bloomberg’s Gurman even summed up the mood with a line that would have been unthinkable a year ago: Meta’s VR Glasses, he suggested, are “exactly what the Apple Vision Pro should have been.” Whether Apple’s answer arrives in 2028 or slips away entirely, the target is now clear — and lighter, more wearable immersive tech is coming into focus faster than the timelines suggest.