Apple’s One-Eyed Gadget That Never Was
Picture a single polished lens, rimmed in brushed aluminum, hanging from a thin chain with the same quiet styling as a MacBook. Not a headset. Not a pair of smart glasses. One eye, dressed up like a next-generation Apple accessory. In 2013, tech sites were obsessing over wearable computers for the first time, and somewhere in that noise, a cartoon imagined Apple answering the moment not with better software, but with a monocle.
Why Would Anyone Pick a Monocle Over Working Tech?
Here’s the odd part: Google Glass was not a concept drawing. By April 15, 2013, Google had already started shipping its Explorer Edition to the first 8,000 testers, chosen from a pool of people who had applied in February 2013 through a Twitter and Google+ campaign tagged #IfIHadGlass. For $1,500, those Explorers got a camera that shot 5-megapixel photos and 720p video, plus a display that behaved like a 25-inch (64 cm) screen viewed from 8 feet (2.4 m) away. That’s a working augmented reality headset, already strapped to real faces, doing things a monocle cannot physically do. So why would the funnier comeback to “fix Google Glass” be “throw out the tech and bring back a 19th-century eyepiece”? The joke suggests the real complaint was never about function.
The Joke’s Real Target: The Mac Monocle Cartoon
The actual origin is small and traceable. On April 30, 2013, the design blog Core77 ran a post written by Tony Ruth, built around a cartoon by Chicago-based illustrator Tobias Lunchbreath. The idea, credited to Lunchbreath and laid out by Ruth: if you want hip-looking computer hardware, you shop at Apple, so why not let Apple build the AR viewer too, shaped like a monocle instead of a pair of safety glasses, and, as the post put it, substantially less stupid looking than Google Glass? Neatorama reposted the bit on May 1, 2013, under the headline “Google Glass? No, Thank You. I Want a Mac Monocle!” None of this was a leak or an insider rumor. It was satire aimed at two reputations at once: Google’s name for shipping clever tech that looks a little awkward on a human face, and Apple’s name for making hardware people are proud to be seen carrying. Nobody needed the joke explained. Everyone already had an opinion about both companies.
Monocles Were Already Having a Moment
Part of why the gag worked is that the monocle wasn’t pulled out of a costume trunk at random. The original post noted that monocles were “becoming fashionable again,” riding alongside the early-2010s wave of dandy-leaning, vintage-flavored style, the kind that also brought back waxed mustaches and pocket watches as ironic accessories. That’s an observation about a cultural mood, not a measured statistic, but it’s exactly what made the joke land as weirdly plausible instead of just weird. Readers in 2013 had probably already seen someone wear a monocle unironically, or close to it.
No, Apple Never Actually Designed This
To be clear: there is no Apple patent for a monocle, no prototype, no leaked render, no shelved internal project with that name. The “Mac Monocle” exists exactly where it was born, in a cartoon on a design blog and a write-up that reposted it the next day, and nowhere else. If you’ve ever heard this floated as a real rumor out of Cupertino, that’s a misreading of a joke that was never pretending to be anything else.
The Rule You Already Know, Even If You’ve Never Said It
Google Glass had the specs: a working camera, video, a real display, a real $1,500 price, and on May 15, 2014, Google even opened it to the general public at that same price. The hardware hadn’t changed. But it had already become something people joked about more than something they wore. Apple, meanwhile, built a chunk of its identity on the opposite skill, making people want to be seen holding its products before the product has even proven what it can do. The “Mac Monocle” never had to work. It just had to look better than the real thing, which, for one cartoonist’s joke, was the whole point.