Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset, announced at WWDC earlier this month, is still a long way from launch: the company has only said it will be available in the US at some point in 2024, with unnamed countries coming later in the year. . But it looks like the first hardware element of the Vision Pro launch could arrive as early as this fall.

According to the prolific and widely respected analyst Ming-Chi KuoThe iPhone 15, expected to launch in fall 2023, will likely feature an upgraded ultra-wideband (UWB) chip designed to seamlessly integrate with the Vision Pro.

“The ecosystem is one of the key success factors for Vision Pro, including integration with other Apple hardware products,” explains Kuo. As such, the iPhone 15 “will likely see an update to the UWB specification with a manufacturing process shift from 16nm to the more advanced 7nm, allowing for better performance or lower power consumption for nearby interactions.”

This may seem a little odd, since the iPhone 15 will go on sale at least three months before 2023, and the headset is unlikely to appear until at least the middle of the iPhone 15’s life cycle. But Apple will need its current generation products to work well with Vision Pro from day one, and the improved UWB chip is likely to bring additional benefits beyond headset integration, such as more accurate AirTag tracking or lower power consumption.

It might also be tempting to try to extract hints from this forecast about the timing of the launch of Vision Pro; at the very least, this strongly suggests that Apple expects the headset to arrive before the iPhone 16 arrives in September 2024, and likely long before that. But the consensus was already that Apple would try to release the Vision Pro next spring, so that’s not entirely new information. (And in any case, delays can always affect a completely new product line, as happened with Vision Pro over the past few years. Even if Apple plans for a spring launch, the headset may be pushed back for reasons beyond its control.)

Kuo adds that another Vision-focused update is coming to the iPhone 16 in late 2024, with an upgrade to Wi-Fi 7.