This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on June 3rd, 2023. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

On Monday, the tech world’s worst-kept secret will be revealed. Apple presents its new headset — its first major product launch in nearly a decade. Can Apple breathe life into yet another dormant market?

On a sunny Sunday morning, Sergey Brin sits eating at a popular brunch spot in Potrero Hill, San Francisco. The Google co-founder attracts little interest from the other diners — they’re used to seeing tech billionaires.

This morning, however, there is one thing that makes Sergey Brin stand out. He is wearing Google Glass — the company’s new smart glasses. They consist of a pair of thin metal frames, with a large, visible camera on one side. They look, to say the least, strange. But it’s the mid-2010s, and the promised future of what will come to be called MR — mixed reality — is beginning to take shape. MR is conceived as a kind of digital layer over the real world. But does that mean everyone will walk around with cameras on their faces?

Fast-forward to mid-March 2023 and we have our answer.

The enterprise version of Google Glass is shut down entirely. The consumer version was even shorter-lived. Nobody seems to want to wear this type of product. Or at least there haven’t been sufficiently compelling reasons to do so.

That is the challenge Apple is now taking on. They are launching a new kind of hardware to wear on your head, to access a type of digital experience you’ve never tried before. It may be difficult.

Rumors suggest the product will be called “Reality Pro.”

On Monday, Apple’s annual developer conference WWDC begins. Attending it is almost a pilgrimage for developers who work with Apple’s products. The purpose is to introduce new hardware and software that the company wants developers to work with. This is the time of year when Apple is most accessible through presentations and meetings. Everything suggests Apple’s new MR headset will also be unveiled on Monday.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the company has been working on the product for seven years. In that time, Apple has watched both the failure of Google Glass and Meta’s major push with its Quest headsets — and the lukewarm reception of the “metaverse.”

The concept of a “physical face visor that delivers digital experiences” is therefore not new. But Apple has rarely been first with this kind of product. The iPhone, for example, was not the first smartphone on the market.

The difference has been Apple’s impact when it does launch.

A clear example is the success of Apple Watch. No competitor in the category even comes close. Samsung — which released its first smartwatch the same year as the Apple Watch — has less than half the market share.

Apple’s presence in a market has a tendency to both legitimize it and attract attention and investment. The ability to build apps for the iPhone launched an entire economy of hundreds of thousands of companies working on the platform. This effect extends beyond Apple’s own products. Google, with its Play app store, has undeniably benefited from Apple’s presence, even as a day-to-day competitor.

For one particular competitor — Mark Zuckerberg at Meta — Apple’s entry into the MR market could be bittersweet.

Zuckerberg’s much-questioned metaverse vision may get a boost in attention. At the same time, he faces stiff competition from a longtime rival in this new territory as well.

Being late to the market doesn’t mean all the problems have been solved, however. The underlying and unanswered question remains: what are we actually supposed to do with these headsets? Use them for work? Play games? How Apple addresses that question is the most interesting aspect.

Rumors suggest the product will be called “Reality Pro” and that you’ll be able to make video calls, read books and play games with it. That’s all well and good, but all of this is already possible today with other devices — and done well.

The rumored price tag gives us some indication of how Apple is thinking. The product is said to cost around 32,000 kronor — not exactly a signal that it’s ready for the mass market. It will instead be a product that developers can begin experimenting with, and one that is almost certainly far more advanced than anything the market has seen before. Anything less would be surprising, given Apple’s history.

And time is on their side. As the world’s highest-valued company, they can afford to wait for the right use case to emerge. Can Apple awaken — and redefine — this market too?