Apple’s Strategy for Glasses Is Starting to Appear
Hello everyone. Welcome to a new week.
This past Friday, Apple rolled out its usual PR “red carpet” for its newest products, anchored by the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max. It was John Ternus’s first product launch as Apple CEO.
In what has become something of a tradition, several executives including Ternus, Greg Joswiak, and Deirdre O'Brien were on hand to launch the new products at the Apple Fifth Avenue flagship store in NYC. Molly Anderson, head of Apple’s industrial design team, also participated in Apple’s press push with Steve Lemay, head of human interface design. This may be the first time a head of Apple ID has done official on-the-ground PR for an Apple product launch. Jony Ive made a handful of unofficial visits to Apple Stores at launches to check things out.
Timed to coincide with the iPhone 18 Pro launch, Apple also held a three-day photography exhibition, “What Holds Us,” in NYC highlighting photos taken with an iPhone 18 Pro by Alex Prager, Jack Davison, and Jimmy Chin. The exhibition will be shown in London and Shanghai.
Meanwhile, back at Apple Park, Tim Cook was hosting Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Cook will reportedly also be attending this week’s White House state dinner for China President Xi Jinping.
My expectation is that Apple will be right back at it with possibly an even larger PR push for the iPhone Duo launch. The Duo will launch in 70 countries including China and India on October 23rd. The iPhone 18 Pro launched in 65 countries.
Let’s jump into today’s article.
Apple’s Strategy for Glasses Is Starting to Appear
Audio Intelligence was one of the more intriguing new features and technologies unveiled at Apple’s September event. As we discussed last week, Audio Intelligence isn’t just about taking high-level notes from a work meeting. Instead, that’s a use case that helps ground the feature’s applicability in 2026. Audio Intelligence is about making sense of our surroundings by uncovering an (audio) interaction layer that has never been leveraged.
The approach Apple is taking with Audio Intelligence on Apple Watch jumped out at me. Instead of creating or storing audio recordings, a Secure Exclave found on the Apple Watch S11 chip manages raw audio without permanent recordings being kept. Such a privacy-focused approach has massive implications for how Apple is thinking about other features powered by Apple Intelligence. One example is Visual Intelligence on a pair of lightweight glasses.
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