Apple is moving closer to what could become its next major hardware category, with plans to launch its first smart glasses in 2027 as the company sharpens its focus on AI-powered wearables following the lukewarm reception of the Vision Pro.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is actively testing multiple frame designs and could unveil the product as early as the end of this year, ahead of a commercial release in 2027.

The product marks a pivot for the iPhone maker after years of pursuing an ambitious mixed-reality roadmap built around headsets and eventual augmented reality eyewear. The Cupertino giant now appears to be prioritizing a lighter, more practical wearable that can be worn all day, a direct response to growing consumer interest in AI-first devices and the early traction seen by Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses.

The latest design testing reportedly includes four frame styles: a large rectangular frame, a slimmer rectangular version similar to the glasses worn by CEO Tim Cook, a larger oval or circular frame, and a smaller oval or circular design. Apple is also evaluating multiple finishes and colorways, including black, ocean blue, and light brown, suggesting the company is placing a strong emphasis on aesthetics and everyday wearability.

That is an important departure from the Vision Pro strategy. The Vision Pro was technologically ambitious but struggled to achieve mainstream appeal due to its high price point, bulkier form factor, and limited real-world use cases. By contrast, these glasses appear designed to fit into Apple’s more familiar playbook: enter an existing category late, refine the user experience, and make the device desirable as both technology and fashion.

Practically, the glasses are expected to resemble Meta Platforms’ Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses far more than the Vision Pro. Unlike a true augmented-reality device, the first-generation Apple glasses are not expected to feature displays embedded in the lenses. Instead, the product is likely to focus on camera, audio, and AI-driven contextual assistance.

According to reports, users will be able to take photos and videos, answer phone calls, play music, and interact with a long-awaited upgraded Siri. That positions the device less as a computing platform and more as an AI companion built around ambient intelligence.

However, the bigger story here is Apple’s evolving AI hardware strategy. The glasses are expected to rely heavily on a next-generation Siri that can understand what the wearer is seeing through onboard cameras and microphones. This means the product could support functions such as object recognition, landmark identification, contextual reminders, live translation, and navigation prompts delivered through audio.

In effect, Apple is trying to give Siri “eyes and ears.” This matters because it extends Apple Intelligence beyond the iPhone and Mac into always-on wearable computing. Rather than forcing users to open an app or take out a phone, the glasses would allow AI interactions to happen in real time and in context.

That is precisely the direction in which the broader industry is moving. Meta has already established an early lead in this segment. Its Ray-Ban Meta glasses have emerged as one of the few AI hardware products to find genuine consumer traction.

By comparison, Apple’s entry is likely to be more tightly integrated with the iPhone ecosystem, which could become its biggest competitive advantage. The glasses are expected to work closely with the iPhone for processing, connectivity, and user identity, allowing Apple to preserve battery life and keep the hardware slim.

That ecosystem integration may also help Apple avoid the pitfalls that hurt standalone AI hardware products such as the Humane AI Pin, which struggled because it attempted to replace the smartphone rather than complement it.

Reports over the past year suggest Apple has scaled back parts of its headset roadmap and redirected engineering resources toward smart glasses. That indicates the company sees AI wearables, not premium headsets, as the more immediate commercial opportunity.

The first version may be display-less, but it is likely to serve as a stepping stone toward Apple’s longer-term ambition of full augmented-reality glasses. The broader implication is that Apple is shifting from a vision of immersive computing to practical, AI-enhanced everyday wearables.

The product is expected to become one of the company’s most important launches since the Apple Watch, not because it replaces the iPhone, but because it deepens how users interact with Apple’s ecosystem throughout the day. In that sense, these glasses may be less about hardware innovation alone and more about Apple’s attempt to define the next interface for AI.

X has launched a pointed offensive against accounts that overwhelm the timeline with rapid-fire reposts, stolen content, and cheap clickbait, delivering a sharp cut to their monetization rewards.

Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, announced the changes Saturday in a post that left little doubt about the platform’s frustration.

“All aggregators had their payouts reduced to 60% this cycle,” he wrote, adding that they face another 20% reduction in the next pay cycle.

The company is also trimming payments to “habitual bait posters who use ‘BREAKING’ on every post.”

Bier made the reasoning explicit: “It became abundantly clear: flooding the timeline with 100 stolen reposts and clickbait everyday crowded-out real creators and hurt new author growth.”

He was careful to draw a line between speech and compensation. X will never infringe on speech or reach — but we will not compensate for manipulation of the program or our users,” he said.

The move came after a fresh wave of conservative news accounts publicly complained they had received emails notifying them of demonetization. One of the most vocal was Dominick McGee, who posts as Dom Lucre and boasts 1.6 million followers.

McGee, who first gained prominence peddling conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, fired back: “BREAKING […] I was the first creator demonetized on this platform and I was for an entire year. I got it back and just lost it without any insight. How could this be possible? I am one of the hardest working creators on X.”

McGee, who once told The New York Times he was earning roughly $55,000 a year from the platform before earlier demonetization spells, accused X of listening too closely to outsiders.

“The complaints of people that have no goal in creating on this app,” he complained.

While conceding that constant “BREAKING” labels amount to clickbait, he insisted his output was mostly legitimate.

“I post hundreds of times and very few are BREAKING,” he said.

Community notes on his account told a different story, linking to a tally of 91 uses of the word in the past week alone.

Others worried they had been swept up in the dragnet. PoliMath, an analytical account with a paid partnership to the prediction market Kalshi, posted: “I think I appreciate what Nikita is trying to do there but I just had my lowest payout in a long time so I’m a little nervous that I somehow got caught in this ‘aggregators’ bucket.”

He added that he is “not an ‘aggregator’ by any stretch of the imagination.”

The timing of Bier’s announcement amplified an already heated debate about X’s health as a content and traffic engine. Data analyst Nate Silver recently lamented how difficult it has become to drive meaningful visitors from X to external websites, while highlighting the platform’s heavy tilt toward right-wing voices.

“I suppose I had some intuition for how bad it was, but jeez, this is what you get when the ecosystem is broken,” Silver wrote.

Bier pushed back, calling Silver’s data inaccurate. Elon Musk weighed in more bluntly, dismissing the posts as “bullshit.” Yet multiple independent analyses have echoed Silver’s core observation that traffic patterns and audience composition have shifted markedly since Musk took over.

For X, the payout adjustments represent a calculated trade-off. The platform’s creator revenue program has been central to keeping power users engaged and encouraging posting volume. But executives clearly concluded that the deluge of low-effort aggregation and alarmist headlines was crowding out original voices, stifling new talent, and ultimately damaging the user experience.

By refusing to subsidize what it views as manipulation, X is betting that a cleaner, higher-quality timeline will prove more valuable in the long run — even if it means some of its most prolific posters take a financial hit.

Amazon is quietly writing one of the most important business playbooks of our time, a cascading virtuoso of what I have called the One Oasis Strategy and its extension, the Double Play (click here to read how I explained both in Harvard Business Review).

At the center of Amazon’s rise was a simple oasis: ecommerce. That marketplace of books first, then everything became the gravitational center of the company. But Amazon did not stop at selling products, it built systems to make that oasis work at scale. In doing so, it created internal capabilities of compute, storage, and logistics that were not originally designed as products, but as enablers.

Then came the first great leap: Amazon turned its internal infrastructure into Amazon Web Services (AWS). What began as a support system for ecommerce became a global cloud computing platform. That is the essence of the Double Play: build an internal capability to win your primary market, then externalize that capability as a standalone business. AWS did not just support ecommerce; it became Amazon’s profit engine.

Now, Amazon is executing a second-order Double Play; a Double Play on top of a Double Play. To optimize AWS, Amazon designed its own chips – custom silicon like Graviton and Trainium – to reduce dependency on third-party suppliers and improve performance-per-dollar. Again, the chips were not the business; they were tools to strengthen the oasis (now AWS, not ecommerce). But history is repeating itself.

As Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has noted, demand for these chips is so strong that Amazon is considering selling them externally. What started as an internal optimization layer for AWS could become a massive standalone semiconductor business, potentially a $50 billion enterprise if operated independently. This is where Amazon’s strategy becomes symphonic.

First layer: ecommerce as the oasis.
Second layer: AWS as the Double Play from ecommerce.
Third layer: custom chips as the Double Play from AWS.

Each layer is born to serve the previous one. Each layer, once mature, becomes a market-facing business. This is not diversification; it is cascading innovation, a stack of capabilities where every internal necessity becomes an external opportunity.

In physics terms, Amazon is conserving and compounding business momentum by continuously creating new growth vectors from internal systems, enabling multiplies in size and growth velocity.

Lesson: Do not chase many businesses. Build one powerful oasis. Then engineer capabilities to serve it. And when those capabilities mature, externalize them. That is how to engineer a new basis of competition and become a category-king company in your industry.

Comment: “Your “Double Play” framework (applied to Amazon) is elegant but somewhat revisionist, and appears to reverse-engineer intentionality from outcome. ”

My Response: Not revisionist – you missed the core of my thesis, which is this: the Oasis is the best product or unit of a business. As long as you keep investing to make that oasis better, in a winner-takes-all world, you gain superior leverage to compound your positioning. That One Oasis becomes the anchor of dominance.

And as it strengthens, it creates the pathway for the Double Play, a concept I borrowed from baseball where you further monetize the capabilities built around that focused investment.

The products you referenced, like Fire, were not designed to enhance ecommerce. They were orthogonal bets; Amazon exploring its own mobile device strategy. They were not extensions of the Oasis.

But if you think about an oasis in a desert, the analogy becomes clearer. Communities thrive around a well-nurtured oasis because it sustains life. In the same way, when a company identifies and deepens its One Oasis, every surrounding capability begins to draw strength from it.

My use of the term One Oasis is deliberate. It is a call for discipline for companies to focus on building the best product, not just making scattered investments. Beyond the Harvard piece, I have expanded this framework extensively in the Tekedia Mini-MBA, where the full depth of the concept is explored. You can watch this video