After Tim Cook’s rare candor in this week’s interview, we have more reason to believe that Apple’s long-awaited Apple AR headset will arrive sooner rather than later.

Ming-Chi Kuo, in a note to investors seen by 9to5Mac, predicted that Apple would enter the augmented reality hardware space in early 2023. “Huge potential demand in the Chinese market and Apple AR/MR, which, in January 2023, will also contribute to the further rapid growth of the headset sector,” he wrote.

A January launch will obviously require an event that Apple doesn’t usually hold until March or April. The last time the company launched a major product was in January 2010, when Steve Jobs showed off the iPad. The iPhone previously debuted at Macworld in San Francisco in January 2007.

Rumors about a mixed reality headset that is expected to combine elements of AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) have been around for some time, and it is important to note that Kuo was making predictions about the launch and was clearly wrong. .For example, back in March 2019, he said that it would be released in 2020. And in 2021, Kuo said the headset would arrive in 2022, which now seems unlikely.

But we’re not quite entering Gene Munster’s Apple TV territory just yet. First, Kuo is still far from Munster’s record in terms of sheer persistence: if we’re still getting those predictions in 2025, we can talk. Secondly, as The Verge points out, this latest forecast is much more accurate than any of the previous ones, which suggests that it is getting up-to-date information, and not just making assumptions based on trends.

Apple itself, in a rare moment of relative openness from CEO Tim Cook, has sparked rumors that the product will be with us in the near future. When asked directly about AR headsets, Cook told the interviewer, “Stay tuned in and you’ll see what we have to offer.”

We certainly intend to stay tuned, and you can too, by saying in addition to our Apple headset super guide.