Apple caused some hearts to race when it attached a $3,500 price tag to its recently unveiled Vision Pro “spatial computer,” but AT&T CTO Jeremy Legg noted that price could drop if Apple decides to take advantage of 5G-based mobile edge compute (MEC) models.

Legg, speaking at this week’s Collision Conference, stated that the Apple Vision Pro device was “so incredible in terms of the tech that’s in it because they put all the chips and the cameras and everything right on the device. The upside of that is you have the computing local. The downside is that they’re very expensive because you’ve got to use a lot of technology embedded into the device itself.”

This could be aided by the use of MEC technology that can allow devices to offload local processing and compute needs to a cloud or local data center.

“I think there’s going to be a mix of these things over time,” Legg added of the ability to mix the on-device and off-device computing and processing requirements of such equipment.

Apple has so far released very little information on the connectivity aspects of the device, with most assuming Wi-Fi will be the connection medium for internet-based content. This could place a big emphasis on the ability for Wi-Fi to provide a stable connection method for applications that will likely require very high speeds and extremely low latency.

Apple does have optional embedded 5G support in its iPad tablets and, of course, in all of its iPhone smartphones, but does not currently include cellular as an option in its traditional laptop computers. The Vision Pro device runs on a specific operating system, visionOS, that Apple said is “built on the foundation” of its other operating systems, but “was designed from the ground up to support the low-latency requirements of spatial computing.”

Legg noted that this initial Wi-Fi reliance will require a robust backhaul channel, with the executive linking this to AT&T’s current focus on fiber.

“This is fiber optic, passive optical network technology where you can get multi-gig speeds bidirectionally, and that's one of the things that's really important. It's not just the download speed. It's the upload speed from these, as there's going to be so much collaboration that's occurring that you need consistency in the speed direction in order to really use these devices," Legg said.

AT&T’s fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service was ranked No. 2 in downlink and uplink speeds by broadband speed test firm Opensignal in a recent report.

Legg said a cellular option that allows “the ability to walk around the city or … visit friends, … that becomes a different equation because you are dealing with spectrum.”

“I don’t want to say fiber optics is infinite speed, but it’s as close as you’re gonna get,” Legg explained. “Spectrum is limited, so there’s only so much bandwidth that you can optimize on any given cell tower at any given time.”

This then ties in with potentially offloading the processing and computing power and costs from a device onto a 5G cellular network connection.

“The question on the mobility side actually switches a little bit from how much computing power do you want to put in the device itself, so that it's computing literally right on your face versus putting it back in the network and doing the computing back in the network,” Legg said. “That drives a lot of how much spectrum you're going to end up using from one of these devices.”