Apple stock rose to an all-time high on Monday in the run-up to a presentation of its most important product in more than a decade: a “mixed-reality” headset, seven years in the making, that will provide a glimpse of how the tech giant envisions a post-smartphone future.
The iPhone maker is widely expected to present a headset resembling a pair of sleek ski goggles that will combine “virtual reality”, in which the wearer is fully immersed in a virtual world, and “augmented reality”, in which digital images are overlaid on the real world.
The headset will be Apple’s biggest new product since the iPad debuted in 2010. Its significance is expected to surpass the Apple Watch, which went on sale in 2015, given the potential for AR and VR to become a new computing platform that creates a rich canvas for app developers.