Just weeks after Vision Pro launched, Google halted development of its own augmented reality (AR) device.

Google announced its Iris AR glasses a little over a year ago , and it's been quiet since then. Those specs promised real-time audio transcription, like closed captioning for real life. But now, according to Business Insider, Google has killed the project . The timing seems a bit coincidental. Could it be that Google saw Apple's Vision Pro mixed reality headset and realized it wasn't anywhere near that level of performance? Or could it be that they decided to make a full-on AR headset instead?

“I think [Google] will follow Apple and come out with an XR device in the next few years, but that remains to be seen,” Lorne Fade, co-founder and COO of virtual reality training company VR Vision, told Lifewire via email.

Before the iPhone launched in 2007, smartphones were everywhere. From the Blackberry, with its physical keyboard, to oddities like the Sony Ericsson P800 and P900, which required a stylus or sharp fingernail to use. Then, in a single move, Apple redefined how phones would look and work. Back then, it was far from a given that a phone would be a slab of multi-touch glass with a proper computer operating system running on it. Since the iPhone, it’s been hard to find anything else.