A Brief History of Apple AR Smartglasses Rumors: New Update Says They're Coming This Year

To kick off 2021, the Apple rumor mill is spinning yet again. This time a familiar item is on the menu: an augmented reality device.

If this tune sounds familiar, it should. The same sources also promised that 2020 would the year of the Apple AR wearable.

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Specifically, back in 2018, generally reliable Apple-focused analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed that the company would debut its smartglasses in 2020. For that reason, just ahead of the AirPods Max back in December, some hoped that Apple might drop a surprise pair of AR specs on the public.

Alas, that was not to be. But in a new report on Monday, surfaced by the folks over at Macrumors, Kuo now claims that "an unspecified augmented reality device" is indeed still in the offing from Apple and will make its appearance sometime this year.

But before you huff skeptically and brush this latest report off, keep in mind that back in 2018, just months before Kuo's original report later that same year, fellow Apple analyst Gene Munster claimed that the release year for Apple's wearable would instead be 2021.

With that in mind, it's starting to look like the evidence is building for an AR wearable coming this year from Apple, likely just in time for mobile culture to rev back up after the coronavirus vaccine goes wide and the public begins (hopefully) mingling as they did before.