Steve Mann literally spent decades wearing a computer.
In the early 1980s, while still in high school, he wired a computer into a steel-frame backpack, attached a camera viewfinder to a helmet, and built his own wireless links so the devices could communicate. He called it WearComp. He wore versions of it almost every day for 40 years.
Mann built the future as one device you had to wear. Apple is building it as a system you're already wearing.
What Mann was building was a wearable computer that never stopped paying attention to what you see, hear, and do. Cameras saw what he saw, sensors recorded what he touched, and it all communicated in real time with a portable processing unit. He had digital eyeglasses in 1984, and ten years later was streaming live video from his head-mounted camera to the web wirelessly. In 1998 he built a smartwatch videophone and later wore a camera pendant.
Sound familiar? It should.
Gurman recently reported that Apple is developing smart glasses, a camera-equipped pendant, and AirPods with infrared cameras, all orchestrated through the iPhone.
Nobody in the 90s was going to strap on a steel-frame backpack. Mann's setup was heavy, custom-built, and required its wearer to look like an astronaut. The technology wasn't ready and neither was the world. That changed. Apple doesn't have to convince hundreds of millions of people to start wearing something on their wrist and in their ears. They already do. Meta's partnership with Ray-Ban suggests that smart glasses that look like regular glasses have real demand.
The closest competitor to what Apple is reportedly building is Samsung and Google with Android XR. But their playbook involves multiple companies building multiple layers of hardware and software, all trying to work together seamlessly. Apple has a structural advantage. It designs the hardware, writes the software, and sells directly to the same people who already wear its products every day.
Mann proved the idea. Apple is betting people will only adopt it if they don’t notice it at all.