52 Macworld • January 2022FEATURE
scratcher if Apple
didn’t bring its
high-end iMac
up to the Liquid
Retina XDR
standard in the
MacBook Pro.
It’d be nice if
it bumped the
display size up a
bit further than
27in, just as the
21.5in iMac went
to 24 inches, but
rumours seem
split on that.
Of course, the high-end Mac
mini and the Mac Pro are also still
waiting for the Apple silicon chips
to power them. It seems likely that
we’ll see them by the end of 2022, as
Apple puts the bow on its two-year
processor transition.GETTING META
Apple’s talk on augmented reality
has been a constant over the last
several years, but it has continued to
focus on improvements to software,
and we’ve yet to see a big push
on the hardware end. Meanwhile,
companies like Microsoft and Meta
(née Facebook) have been making
these technologies an increasing partof their strategies and, in the case of
the latter, their very identities.
Rumours of an Apple headset
have been circulating for some time
now, and they’ve started to coalesce
on next year as a time when they
might finally see the light of day. The
most persistent is about a device
that does ‘mixed reality’, with both
AR and VR functionality.
But Tim Cook has also spoken
much more positively of the
experience of AR than of VR, and
Apple is always going to put its own
spin on things. The company will have
its work cut out for it to explain why
this device is one that the average
consumer is going to want – although
perhaps that’s a low-bar, given MetaA new HomePod that can compete with Google’s and
Amazon’s offering is long overdue.