I bought a Meta Quest once. It did not go well. I put it on in the privacy of my own office and attempted to set it up and ended up on my floor remembering why I had spent over $500 on this headset.

Pennsylvania

It’s inescapable Pennsylvania is pretty evenly divided between what is Pittsburgh and what is Philadelphia those two trends transcend more than just geographic locations they are an ethos in themselves take Sheetz for example Sheetz is primarily a Pittsburgh thing and Wawa Philadelphia and of course you have your sports teams and you have your culinary excesses cheesesteaks firmly belonging to Philadelphia as well as pretzels. But nestled between the two of them is the whole center of Pennsylvania, which is home to State College and Harrisburg and together the entire population is not even half of Philadelphia. Pennsylvania remains one of the most interesting states because it is constantly a swing state and has been for my entire lifetime and decades before that it has the ability to sway national opinion. It’s often a microcosm for what the nation is thinking a bellwether if you will, it is often said that where goes Pennsylvania so goes the White House and that primarily has been true when Joe Biden won the state in 2020 he won the election when Kamala Harris lost in 2024 she lost the election when Trump won in 2016 he won the election and when he lost the state in 2020 he lost that election.

The Pittsburgh Pennsylvania tug-of-war is often an identity crisis sorting out what is Ohio and what is New Jersey we never really consider what is New York or Maryland they don’t talk about us and we don’t talk about them, but it is too very distinct extremes fighting for the heart of the hourglass center of the state.

Our MacGuffin

For the purposes of these essays, we’re going to chase a particular MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is a narrative device used to describe an artifact that the characters are deeply invested in but largely incidental to what the story is actually about. Think the Ten Rings or the Infinity Stones in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; think the ivory in Heart of Darkness; think Operation Genoa from the TV series The Newsroom.

Ours is a triad of devices working together a smart watch, paired with smart glasses that defer to a phone for processing. From a narrative perspective I’ll use the Apple Watch, Apple’s speculated upcoming competitor to Meta’s Ray Ban / Oakley smart glasses and an iPhone Pro.

For most users of the Meta Ray Bans, the wristband is necessary to infer intent through kinetic movement, without the intrusion relying on voice, gaze, or ambient surveillance. We could safely assume that Apple will want to rely on a piece of their ecosystem that can already do this and more: their Apple Watch.

Since we can’t defy the laws of physics, the amount of processing that smart glasses will need is going to create heat, it would be obviously foolish to attach that amount of processing to a person’s face and eye sockets. Most prototypes have shown an external puck for this purpose. An external hardware is a necessary and my personal speculation is that Apple will more than likely rely on another piece of hardware that you likely carry daily: the iPhone.

There’s one last assumption we’ll work under. Meta’s current line of devices is monocular (meaning their display is in a single lens), for these discussions we’ll assume Apple will use both lenses.