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In Mark Gurman’s latest report, he claims that Apple is “considering” making upcoming non-Pro Vision headsets “rely on a connected Mac or iPhone.” But does powering a Vision headset with an iPhone really make sense?

Gurman has a very good track record when it comes to reporting Apple’s moves in advance, and he even revealed a lot of details about Vision Pro before it was officially revealed or even acknowledged to exist by Apple. But like all leaks, sometimes he gets things wrong, or at least somewhat misunderstands what his sources are telling him. And I believe this last statement is an example of that.

It’s a tantalizing idea at first glance. Swap the Apple Vision Pro external battery with your iPhone and it can provide not only power but also computing, making the headset both lighter and cheaper. But on closer inspection, there are a number of reasons why this probably can’t work, and it’s just a bad idea even if it could.

Thermal elements and battery

To be clear, the main question here is not peak performance. The Apple Vision Pro has been using the M2 chipset since late 2022. The latest iPhone 15 Pro has a 6-core GPU that’s roughly 60% more powerful than the M2, so it’s possible the iPhone 17 Pro that’s due out around the same time as the cheaper Vision Headphones, could fill the gap. This will of course limit it to only the latest and greatest iPhone, but that’s normal for Apple.

The real problem is that devices without a cooling fan like smartphones cannot maintain their peak performance for more than a few tens of minutes at most. When they reach maximum performance, they start to heat up and eventually become so hot that the system must deliberately reduce the maximum clock speeds to avoid damaging the processor or stopping it from functioning. Yes, Apple can include a “case” that your iPhone slides into with a cooling fan. But since it wouldn’t actually be inside the phone, it would be a losing battle and force the user to remove their own case every time they want to use the headphones.

That’s why every standalone headset since the Oculus Quest, including the Apple Vision Pro, has at least one cooling fan. It’s also why handheld consoles like the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck do. Without it, they simply wouldn’t be able to do what they do for more than 20 minutes at a time.

Even if this problem could be magically solved by some future cooling system, the iPhone’s battery is three times smaller than the battery attached to the Apple Vision Pro, which weighs almost twice as much as the iPhone. Although the A-series chipsets are more power efficient than the M2, they are nowhere near the order of 300%. So unless Apple goes with the terribly inelegant solution of having both an external battery and connected iPhone, there won’t even be enough battery to run a Vision headset for more than an hour.

And even if that can somehow be solved, do people really want to drain their iPhone’s battery in less than two hours, reducing its health? This would greatly discourage the use of the headset.

But glasses might do the trick

None of this means that Apple can’t one day release an XR device powered by your iPhone. But for the foreseeable future, the said device will not run visionOS and therefore will not be a Vision headset.

Gurman also writes that Apple “has renewed its efforts to develop AR-only glasses.” In January 2023, he reported that Apple had “indefinitely” shelved the glasses because the technology wouldn’t be ready anytime soon and was focused on building the Vision Pro and the upcoming cheaper Vision headset. Two and a half years later, Apple may have found a way to make this work.

I believe the recently reported “consideration” of iPhone usage is much more likely to refer to these AR glasses than the Vision headset. Transparent AR displays are far smaller and consume less power than VR panels, in part because they’re just an add-on and these systems don’t need to constantly sample and process high-bandwidth cameras. Additionally, transparent AR systems only need to render virtual objects or interfaces, not entire virtual environments, further reducing their power requirements.

Achieving a glasses form factor with true AR capabilities will require offloading at least some computing anyway. Meta’s first AR glasses will reportedly use a wireless computing puck (and even current smart glasses overload your phone with many tasks), so why wouldn’t Apple use the computing device it’s already put in your pocket?

But the Vision headset is not AR glasses. They are full-fledged “space computers”. And—barring some kind of breakthrough—thermal performance, battery life, and practicality dictate that a device like this won’t be powered by the iPhone anytime soon.