Popular Science has crowned Apple's Apple Vision Pro as 2024's greatest innovation, in a report that also honors everything from a transparent TV to AI-formulated vegan cheese.
It's expensive to buy — and to build, too — and Apple hasn't sold very many, plus developers are cautious about supporting it. But despite all of this, Popular Science has crowned the headset the innovation of year, topping its report of 50 greatest innovations of 2024.
"In reality, 2024's big breakthrough came from Apple in the form of its long-rumored Vision Pro headset," says PopSci online. "The device has its own hurdles to clear, but after just a few minutes of using it, it was clear that it's something different, important, and honestly pretty amazing."
"While AR headsets have existed before, this one gets our award because of how much potential it shows," continues the publication. "Still, we're curious to see what Apple does next, because a consumer-friendly price on an experience like this could be a true game changer."
In comparison, PopSci rubbishes what it said we all expected to be the year's greatest innovations. Those were the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI pin.
But in the technology field, it also Sony's A9 III for being the "first consumer mirrorless camera to eradicate wiggly images." Apparently that's a thing.
So is processor design, as Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series of chips gets an award over Apple Silicon, AMD, and Intel designs. It's specifically because Qualcomm eschews efficiency cores and instead only provides high performance ones.
"[We're] we're hopeful this new chip will be the key to all the weird form factor Windows PCs we've been wishing for," says the publication.
But it's the transparent TV and the vegan cheese you want to know about. The television set is the LG Signature OLED T which can slide away a layer of contrast film to leave "only the lit pixels suspended on a clear (at least mostly clear) panel."
The cheese is plant-based blue, brie, and feta cheeses formulated by Al, and sold as vegan cheese by Climax Foods.
"California-based Climax Foods built a training set of metrics for cheese characteristics such as scent and stretchability," says PopSci. "Then, they used AI and educated guesswork by cheesemakers to develop plant-based formulations that hit the same benchmarks as dairy cheese."
This may be the first time any judging panel has had to weigh up whether to award cheese or a headset the title of greatest innovation of the year. But it's not the first award that the Apple Vision Pro has had.
