Dustin Curtis, writing on his blog: About ten days ago, when I went to update a few apps in the App Store on my Mac, I was met with a curious error: "Your account has been disabled in the App Store and iTunes." The internet is filled with stories from people whose Google accounts were locked for unexplained reasons, causing them to lose all of their data, including years of email, so I was somewhat concerned. But I'd never heard of similar cases involving Apple's services, and I wouldn't expect such behavior from a customer-focused company like Apple, so I figured it was a glitch and made a mental note to try again later. The next day, Music.app stopped working: "You cannot login because your account has been locked."

Now I was genuinely worried. I checked my phone and neither the App Store nor Apple Music would work there, either. A few minutes later, Calendar popped up an error â" it had stopped syncing. I immediately tried to call Apple Support from my Mac, but Apple's Handoff feature had been disabled as well. The first person I spoke to at Apple spent a while researching the issue and then told me there was nothing she could do but escalate the issue, and that I should expect a call "hopefully" within the next day. I asked what the problem might be, and she seemed as confused as I was. Although some Apple services were still working, like iMessage (thank God) and Photos, I was terrified that more services would suddenly become inaccessible or that I would lose the considerable amount of data I have stored in iCloud.

A couple of days later, I became impatient and contacted Apple Support again. This time, the representative mumbled something about Apple Card before saying that he also had no power to help me. Apple ID was a different department, he said, and they could only be contacted by email. He emailed them. I continued to wait. The next time I tried to use my Apple Card, it was declined. Strange. I checked the Wallet app, and the balance was below the limit. I remembered the Apple support representative mumbling about Apple Card, so I did some digging through my email to see if I could find a connection. As it turns out, my bank account number changed in January, causing Apple Card autopay to fail. Then the Apple Store made a charge on the card. Less than fifteen days after that, my App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, and Apple ID accounts had all been disabled by Apple Card. Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, which is fighting a legal battle with Apple, offered some commentary on this: "It's terrifying how much leverage Apple has over consumers and developers by integrating everything, locking us all in, and exerting total control. Normal companies respect the natural boundaries that exist between platforms and services. Apple does not! For Apple, every choke point they create is both a profit center and a lever to exert control. After blocking Fortnite updates from over a billion iOS users, Apple threatened to block Sign in With Apple -- which they forced us to adopt -- affecting Fortnite players on 7 platforms."

When Amazon made a unilateral decision in early February to stop accepting documentaries and short films via Prime Video Direct (a policy that also covers "slide shows, vlogs, podcasts, tutorials, filmed conferences, monologues, toy play, music videos, and voiceover gameplay"), the announcement also served as a quiet purge. Amazon also has been dropping long-running documentary titles from the service, with stakeholders receiving no warning or context for the decisions. From a report: Filmmakers and distributors are aghast, but Amazon Prime Video Direct seems to be egalitarian in how it treats its partners. Whether you're an individual filmmaker or an established specialty distributor, no one can ask an Amazon Prime Video Direct representative for more information; there's no one to ask. All inquiries are submitted via trouble tickets, and everyone receives the same boilerplate response via their Amazon Prime Video direct dashboards: "Unless otherwise indicated," the message says, "removed titles (or titles not selected for licensing) may not be resubmitted or appealed."

"The selections are so random, it feels like a machine is doing this and not humans," said one executive working on films impacted by the decision. "The lack of any human response adds to the frustration. It reminds me of when politicians want to cut PBS funding." Despite Amazon's dystopian approach to customer service, Prime Video Direct has been in a process of evolution from the start. When it launched in May 2016, it was positioned to lure content creators away from YouTube with bonuses and a more premium experience. Anyone could upload content to Amazon either as titles included free with Prime subscriptions (and earn a royalty) or as digital purchases or rentals. Given Amazon's massive reach, and multiple ways to make money, it was positioned as a fierce competitor in the battle for video ad dollars.

Spotify is introducing its audio service in 80 markets across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean in coming days, expanding the company's potential market by some 1 billion people. From a report: The steps announced Monday will nearly double Spotify's geographic footprint and add regions where streaming music is in its infancy. The company already operates in 93 countries or territories. Spotify is seeking to build on its head start as the leading audio service in the West to become the dominant player globally. While the company already has more than 345 million users, fewer than 20% come from Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where most of the world's people live. The Stockholm-based company has been slower to expand globally than Netflix or Google's YouTube, partly because of the complexity of securing music rights. But its timing coincides with growing potential in markets across Africa and Asia. Where the music industry was once U.S.-centric, many of the most popular acts in the world right now hail from India, Nigeria, South Korea and Latin America.

An anonymous reader share a report: Spotify is going hi-fi. Well, "HiFi." It's taken longer than competitors like Tidal and Amazon Music, but today, the leading subscription music service announced a new lossless streaming tier that will allow listeners to get the most from their digital music library. The news came at the company's Spotify "Stream On" virtual event. Spotify HiFi will be available later this year and "will deliver music in CD-quality, lossless audio format to your device and Spotify Connect-enabled speakers, which means fans will be able to experience more depth and clarity while enjoying their favorite tracks." Spotify has done small tests of higher-quality streaming in the past, but now it's going to launch the feature more widely -- with the caveat that it'll be available only "in select markets." Pricing is yet to be announced. Higher-quality streaming has apparently been among the top requests from its customers; as it stands today, Spotify tops out at 320kbps audio.

118 episodes of Jim Henson's classic TV series The Muppet Show are now streaming on Disney+, writes the AV Club — but 18 episodes now begin with a content disclaimer... The text of the disclaimers, which cannot be skipped past and include little 12-second timers so you know that you have to sit through them, explain that the episodes feature "negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures," and while "these stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now," Disney has decided to leave them in order to "acknowledge the [content's] harmful impact, learn from it, and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together..."

The disclaimer-worthy stuff includes Johnny Cash performing in front of a confederate flag in his episode and the brief appearance of a puppet dressed as a stereotypical Native American (referred to as an "Indian") in the Jim Nabors episode.
MovieWeb adds: Putting a disclaimer on the show is not a new practice at Disney+. The streamer had previously put disclaimers at the start of several classic animated movies, warning viewers about "outdated cultural depictions." Last month, Disney+ took it a step further by pulling many of these movies from kids' profiles, such as Dumbo, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and The Jungle Book. The titles are still available to watch on adult profiles with a disclaimer.
To celebrate their arrival on Disney+ the Muppets spliced themselves into posters parodying other TV shows, including The Mandalorian.

But MovieWeb also notes reports that two Muppet Show episodes from season 5 also had to be removed — and another episode heavily edited — due to trouble securing the music rights, "something that also prevented most of the series from getting released on home video for years."

In the year 2000, Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Late Friday night, the AV Club described Metallica's appearance at the opening ceremonies for the (now online) version of Blizzard Entertainment's annual event BlizzCon: The opening ceremonies were being broadcast online, both through the official BlizzCon page, YouTube, and Twitch. And you know what happens when licensed music gets played on the internet, don't you, folks? That's right: Copyright issues!

Per Uproxx, the audio of James, Lars, and the boys' performance apparently went out as per usual on YouTube and the BlizzCon page — although the whole thing appears to have been excised from the YouTube upload of the event. But on Twitch... On Twitch, things did not go so well. Which is to say that, even though it was being hosted on the company's official twitchgaming channel, the performance was ominously preceded by a chyron noting that "The upcoming musical performance is subject to copyright protection by the applicable copyright holder."

And then this happened....

Can we prove that someone at Twitch intentionally picked the dorkiest, most Zelda forest-ass music imaginable to have Metallica rock their little hearts out to, instead of broadcasting their extremely copyrighted music (and thus having to deal with the possibility of issuing one of their ubiquitous DMCA takedown notices to themselves)? Obviously not.... On the other hand, we can prove that it is extremely funny to watch this happen, especially — as many people have pointed out — since Metallica is at least partially responsible for the restrictive character of many online musical streaming laws that dominate the internet today, after their high-profile campaign against Napster way back at the dawn of the MP3.
In other news, Diablo II is being remastered and re-released later this year.

YouTube outlined a string of new features coming to the internet's biggest video platform, including enhancements to YouTube TV and the rollout next month in the U.S. of YouTube Shorts -- its tool for creating short-form vertical videos a la TikTok. From a report: YouTube TV, Google's pay-TV service, will introduce an add-on option that will let subscribers watch shows in 4K, stream programming to an unlimited number of devices at home, and download content for offline viewing. Other features on YouTube's roadmap include the expansion of a new ecommerce feature to let viewers buy products directly from creators' channels; a way to let fans purchase "applause" for their favorite channels; automatically adding video chapters to relevant videos that don't have creator-uploaded chapters; and more personalized mixes on YouTube Music.

Apple commentator Jason Snell writes: Why does this product still exist, and is there anywhere for it to go next? Gruber and Thompson [two other columnists] suggest that perhaps the way forward is to lean into an identity as a low-end gaming console. Maybe amp up the processor power, bundle a controller, and try to use Apple Arcade to emphasize that this is a box that is for more than watching video. The thing is, that's really been the story of the Apple TV for the last few years, and so far as I can tell, it's basically gone nowhere. Apple isn't Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft when it comes to gaming. Apple's track record with gaming products isn't solid, to say the least. It's hard for me to see this succeeding -- but it doesn't mean Apple won't try. The other possibility that I've come up with is to merge the Apple TV with some other technologies in order to make something more than just a simple TV streamer. Gaming can be a part of that, yes, but there needs to be more.

Broader HomeKit support, perhaps with support for other wireless home standards, would help, as would a much more sophisticated set of home automations. And if Apple really wants to continue to play in the home-theater space, I've been saying for years that there's room for an Apple SoundBar, that could integrate the big sound of HomePod with the Apple TV software to create a solid music and video experience. Then there's the final possibility: No more Apple TV. Removing it simplifies Apple's product naming scheme (Apple TV is a hardware box, an app, and a streaming service, but not yet a dessert topping), and allows the company to focus on other things -- perhaps including other home-themed products that might be more up its alley. I don't think Apple is going to kill the Apple TV, even though I might recommend that it do so. If I had to predict a next step, I'd go with Gruber and Thompson: Apple TV Arcade, an updated, premium-priced box that will lean into games and other features that competing TV boxes don't offer. I'm not optimistic that it'll be successful, but it does seem like something Apple would try.

Instagram says it's making changes to its algorithm and how it recommends Reels to users. One of the biggest new changes is that it will no longer promote Reels that have a TikTok watermark. The Verge reports: The team now recommends that Reels users post vertical videos that use music found in Instagram's library or sounds that they find on Reels. They also suggest "starting a trend" that others can participate in, like dance crazes, as well as "entertaining" and "fun" content. Reels that are mostly covered by text, are blurry, have a watermark or logo, or have a border around it won't be recommended as frequently.

"We're building on what we've learned from Explore to recommend fun and entertaining videos in places like the Reels tab, and personalize the experience," says spokesperson Devi Narasimhan in an email to The Verge. "We are getting better at using ranking signals that help us predict whether people will find a reel entertaining and whether we should recommend it." Narasimhan says Instagram user surveys demonstrated that people have a "less satisfying" Reels experience when content is recycled from other apps or is blurry, so it'll start deemphasizing that content in its recommendation software. This makes it less likely to be discovered by people who aren't following the person who posted it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last Friday, a man entered the Beverly Hills police department, only to be treated to a mini DJ set that could potentially get his Instagram account banned. Sennett Devermont was at the department to file a form to obtain body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt was unfair. Devermont also happens to be a well-known LA area activist, who regularly live-streams protests and interactions with the police to his more than 300,000 followers on Instagram. So, he streamed this visit as well -- and that's when things got weird.

In a video posted on his Instagram account, we see a mostly cordial conversation between Devermont and BHPD Sgt. Billy Fair turn a corner when Fair becomes upset that Devermont is live-streaming the interaction, including showing work contact information for another officer. Fair asks how many people are watching, to which Devermont replies, "Enough." Fair then stops answering questions, pulls out his phone, and starts silently swiping around -- and that's when the ska music starts playing. Fair boosts the volume, and continues staring at his phone. For nearly a full minute, Fair is silent, and only starts speaking after we're a good way through Sublime's "Santeria."

Assuming that Fair wasn't just trying to share his love of '90s stoner music with the citizens of Beverly Hills, this seems to be an intentional (if misguided) tactic to use social media companies' copyright protection policies to prevent himself from being filmed. Instagram in particular has been increasingly strict on posting copyrighted material. Any video that contains music, even if it's playing in the background, is potentially subject to removal by Instagram. Most people complain about these rules. Beverly Hills law enforcement, however, seems to be a fan. "Under most circumstances, civilians are legally permitted to openly film on-duty police officers under the First Amendment," the report notes. "And while the interaction between Devermont and Fair is pretty benign, BHPD's recent behavior suggests that at least some cops believe they can prevent themselves from being filmed or livestreamed by playing copyrighted music, which would have serious implications for more serious incidents of police misconduct."

In a statement emailed to VICE News, Beverly Hills PD said that "the playing of music while accepting a complaint or answering questions is not a procedure that has been recommended by Beverly Hills Police command staff," and that the videos of Fair were "currently under review."

Amazon is developing a new Echo device with a large touchscreen that attaches to the wall and serves as a smart home control panel, video chat device and media player, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the plans. From a report: The company's Lab126 hardware division is designing the device to be a digital command center, showing users upcoming calendar events, controlling accessories like lights and locks, and playing music and video. It would include Amazon's Alexa voice assistant and microphones and a camera for video conferencing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. The product would compete with professionally installed smart home control screens from the likes of Control4 as well as Apple's iPads framed into walls and even Amazon's own Echo Show used with a third-party wall mount. Amazon is considering multiple variations, with screens of either 10 or 13 inches in size. A 10-inch display would be on par with the current Echo Show, while a 13-inch model would be Amazon's largest device with a display. The company plans to launch it either at the end of this year or the end of 2022, the people said. Prices ranging from $200 to $250 have been discussed internally, though the plans are still early and could change or be scrapped altogether.

The Internet Archive: The Internet Archive has reached a new milestone: 2 million. That's how many modern books are now in its lending collection -- available free to the public to borrow at any time, even from home. "We are going strong," said Chris Freeland, a librarian at the Internet Archive and director of the Open Libraries program. "We are making books available that people need access to online, and our patrons are really invested. We are doing a library's work in the digital era." The lending collection is an encyclopedic mix of purchased books, ebooks, and donations from individuals, organizations, and institutions. It has been curated by Freeland and other librarians at the Internet Archive according to a prioritized wish list that has guided collection development. The collection has been purpose-built to reach a wide base of both public and academic library patrons, and to contain books that people want to read and access online -- titles that are widely held by libraries, cited in Wikipedia and frequently assigned on syllabi and course reading lists.

"The Internet Archive is trying to achieve a collection reflective of great research and public libraries like the Boston Public Library," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, who began building the diverse library more than 20 years ago. "Libraries from around the world have been contributing books so that we can make sure the digital generation has access to the best knowledge ever written," Kahle said. "These wide ranging collections include books curated by educators, librarians and individuals, that they see are critical to educating an informed populace at a time of massive disinformation and misinformation." The 2 million modern books are part of the Archive's larger collection of 28 million texts that include older books in the public domain, magazines, and documents. Beyond texts, millions of movies, television news programs, images, live music concerts, and other sound recordings are also available, as well as more than 500 billion web pages that have been archived by the Wayback Machine. Nearly 1.5 million unique patrons use the Internet Archive each day, and about 17,000 items are uploaded daily.

According to Billboard, SoundCloud is preparing to introduce a new payment system that would allow fans to pay artists directly. From the report: The move would make SoundCloud the first major music streaming service to embrace a direct payment model, a strategy that has been popular with Chinese streaming services like Tencent Music's QQ Music for years, and one that subscription services like Patreon and OnlyFans have built their businesses around, as musicians and fans around the world clamor for bigger digital music distributors to do the same. A source close to the company says SoundCloud is still exploring several alternative streaming payout models and will announce its plans before the end of the first quarter of 2021. SoundCloud declined to comment.

The new model will be a big shift for SoundCloud, which currently utilizes a "pro-rata" model, the same method used by all major streaming services, pooling subscriber revenue and doling out earnings to the artists who brought in the most streams, directing most of the revenue to the world's biggest acts. SoundCloud's 175 million monthly users now have the option to pay up to $10 a month for the company's on-demand streaming service SoundCloud Go+, but their payments aren't distributed to artists based on who they personally listen to, and they can't "tip" or steer their subscription fees toward their favorite acts.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Play Music stopped working at the start of December, but the files you uploaded to the cloud locker and other data remain available for export. That will be changing later in February when Google deletes all information associated with Play Music. Besides all the songs you've uploaded to the cloud locker since the service's inception in 2011, Play Music data includes purchases, playlists, stations, albums/songs saved to your library, and likes/dislikes.

Spotify has been granted a patent with technology that aims to use recordings of users' speech and background noise to determine what kind of music to curate and recommend to them. The company filed for the patent in 2018; it was approved on January 12, 2021. From a report: The patent outlines potential uses of technology that involves the extraction of "intonation, stress, rhythm, and the likes of units of speech" from the user's voice. The tech could also use speech recognition to identify metadata points such as emotional state, gender, age, accent, and even environment -- i.e., whether someone is alone, or with other people -- based on audio recording.

Just months after their first passenger testing, Virgin Hyperloop today unveiled its vision for the future hyperloop experience. Yahoo Finance reports: The newly-released concept video takes the viewer step-by-step through a hyperloop journey, from arriving at the portal to boarding the pod. Virgin Hyperloop worked with world-class partners across disparate industries -- including Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) for the portal designs, Teague for the pod designs, SeeThree for the video and animation, and Man Made Music for the score and sonic identity -- to design a comprehensive, multi-sensory passenger experience that surpasses that of any other form of mass transit.

Far from a dystopian future where dark colors, stark lighting, and screens abound, Virgin Hyperloop's counter narrative is a more optimistic view of the future: a greener, smoother, safer, and more pleasant mass transit experience. "We leveraged decades of experience designing how people and things move across various modalities -- taking some of the best aspects from aviation, rail, automotive, and even hospitality to create a new and better passenger experience that is distinct to Virgin Hyperloop," said John Barratt, CEO & President, Teague. "Recessed seat wells provide a greater sense of space, while the raised aisle is a touch of the unexpected and unique. Bands of greenery and wood textures subvert the aesthetic of typical mass transit materials with something optimistic and fresh. All lighting in the pod -- including the unassuming information displays -- are dynamic and adjust based on traveler activity and journey milestones."

"Through proprietary research and a design thinking approach to creating sound and sonic solutions for Virgin Hyperloop, Man Made Music was able to address a myriad of potential challenges for this new mode of transportation, from how to evoke a sense of privacy and space to an enhanced sense of safety and calm," said Joel Beckerman, Founder and Lead Composer at Man Made Music. "We respond to sound quicker than any other sense, so sound actually drives the multi-sensory experiences. The sonic cues of the Virgin Hyperloop identity system serves as a guide for passengers throughout their experience while instilling confidence, safety, and clarity -- you 'feel' it rather than 'hear' it. Just like a great movie score, it tells you the story. We know when we've got it right when you don't notice the sound at all: the interface is humanized in ways that are both fresh and familiar."

Yesterday, Clash announced it was acquiring Byte, a short-form video app launched by Vine cofounder Dom Hofmann. The announcement comes "at a time when TikTok itself now appears to be here to stay," reports CNN. From the report: Dubsmash, another TikTok competitor with a similar algorithmic feed serving up entertaining videos, was acquired last month by Reddit. Meanwhile, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, which launched a TikTok clone called Reels days after then President Donald Trump said he would ban TikTok, recently admitted "TikTok is ahead." He also hinted at a need for Instagram to simplify or consolidate its video product offerings.

Clash was one of the many competitors that seemed poised to benefit from TikTok's troubles. Like TikTok, Clash lets users upload short videos set to music and offers an algorithmic feed serving up content it thinks you'd like. Byte offers a similar experience, except with hidden follower counts and likes. [...] The Byte app will "continue to have the same great in-app experience" Clash said, but it will add new ways to monetize and other features. Clash said it's working on ways for its creators to earn money directly on the platform, including from viral videos and top fans giving payments on a regular basis, which it hopes will help it stand out in a crowded market.

"It was weird to own a Zune in 2005," remembers a new article in the Verge. "It is even weirder to own a Zune in 2021 — let alone 16 of them. And yet, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly shows off his lineup on a kitchen table." They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes, and each can be identified by that telltale black plastic D-pad just below the screen. He owns the entire scope of the brief Zune lineup — from the svelte Zune 4 to the chunky Zune HD — and among the microscopic community of people who still adore Microsoft's much-derided MP3 player, no collection of dead tech could possibly be more enviable.

Woods picked up his Zune foraging habit during the pandemic, while he was furloughed from his job working security at Best Buy. "I taught myself to solder, began buying up dead Zunes, and repairing and flipping them for a profit," he says. "At some point I ran across some rare ones and couldn't bring myself to part with them."

He counts a particularly rare model bearing the Halo 3 logo and another with the Gears of War seal, but to fully understand the depths of Woods' obsession, you need to look past the gadgets and into the great beyond. Click through his post on the r/Zune subreddit, and wander into his veritable shrine of forgotten Zune detritus. Woods owns multiple Zune-stamped traveling cases and boombox docks. He has a Zune-branded stress ball as well as a Zune tinderbox, complete with matches that are dyed in the brand's customary burnt orange and fiery purple. My personal favorite: a Rubik's cube that, when solved, reveals the Zune's polyhedral insignia on all of the white squares, as if to say the answer to one of history's most vexing logic puzzles is, eternally, Zune.
The article also suggests the Zune exemplified Microsoft's inherent "squareness" at the start of the 2000s. "The product was entirely functional, sure, but for reasons that remain difficult to articulate — the video game insignias, the oversized trackpad, their baffling bulkiness — it was also about a million times less chic than the iPod. (That same inscrutable problem flags Bing, Cortana, the ill-fated Windows Phone, etc.)

"But today, almost a decade after Microsoft terminated the brand, there is a small bastion of diehards who are still loving and listening to their Zunes." And one of them has even added a 128GB SSD to their Zune's motherboard.

As of December 8, Apple has been requiring developers to provide privacy label information to their apps, outlining the data that each app collects from users when it is installed. Many app developers have included the labels, but there's one notable outlier -- Google. schwit1 shares a report from MacRumors: Google has not updated its major apps like Gmail, Google Maps, Chrome, and YouTube since December 7 or before, and most Google apps have to date have not been updated with the Privacy Label feature. The Google Translate, Google Authenticator, Motion Stills, Google Play Movies, and Google Classroom apps do include privacy labels even though they have not been updated recently, but Google's search app, Google Maps, Chrome, Waze, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Home, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Assistant, Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Google Slides, Google One, Google Earth, YouTube Music, Hangouts, Google Tasks, Google Meet, Google Pay, PhotoScan, Google Voice, Google News, Gboard, Google Podcasts, and more do not display the information.

On January 5, Google told TechCrunch that the data would be added to its iOS apps "this week or the next week," but both this week and the next week have come and gone with no update. It has now been well over a month since Google last updated its apps. "To lightly paraphrase former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: If your data harvesting is something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," adds schwit1.

Apple's first crack at a headset is designed to be a pricey, niche precursor to a more ambitious augmented reality product that will take longer to develop, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: The initial device has confronted several development hurdles and the company has conservative sales expectations, illustrating how challenging it will be to bring this nascent consumer technology to the masses. As a mostly virtual reality device, it will display an all-encompassing 3-D digital environment for gaming, watching video and communicating. AR functionality, the ability to overlay images and information over a view of the real world, will be more limited. Apple has planned to launch the product as soon as 2022, going up against Facebook's Oculus, Sony's PlayStation VR and headsets from HTC, the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing private plans.

Apple's typical playbook involves taking emerging consumer technology, such as music players, smartphones, tablets and smartwatches, and making it reliable and easy to use for everyone. This time, though, Apple isn't looking to create an iPhone-like hit for its first headset. Instead, the company is building a high-end, niche product that will prepare outside developers and consumers for its eventual, more mainstream AR glasses. The plans suggest that Apple's first headset will be far more expensive than those from rivals, which cost about $300 to $900. Some Apple insiders believe the company may sell only one headset per day per retail store. Apple has roughly 500 stores, so in that scenario, annual sales would be just over 180,000 units -- excluding other sales channels. That would put it on par with other pricey Apple products, such as the $5,999 Mac Pro desktop computer.