y2an

I would look to the AirPods Max for inspiration and clues for an over the head design. Much larger than anyone would have expected. Sturdy band construction. Replaceable ear cushions. Narrow target audience at launch. What if they build on this - target audience at launch is among the Max community and the AR/VR device integrates with the Max somehow in place of the ear cushions. Maybe just a loop behind the head and the display to the front. No need for an additional headband as the Max already provides that in spades. 

Overlooking all the years before she became their Apple Analyst where she forecast fear and gloom…

How is this related to “moving further into finance”? This is an improvement to the security of cards used from Wallet.

What I do see though in this and a number of other quietly made moves by Apple recently is deliberate actions towards removing actual or perceived advantages Apple holds for themselves. I would call this preparing for confrontations with regulators by being able to show their intent to give third parties fair and equal access to features. 

mattinoz said:

Do they need a special block for that?
Once you take analogue out it seems a lot of the signal processing could happen in GPU. If they can make that work an Ax could be just the Mx Soc with the extra cores dedicated to being soft modem. 

If you’ve nothing better for the GPU to do, probably. But they need to exact top performance from the GPU to be competitive at the high end, support gaming, etc., so stealing cycles from the GPU would not make sense. Plus a lot if this is not signal processing, it’s protocol handling. It’s a highly specialised real-time activity.

A useful article would include links to the patents in question.