Microsoft kills HoloLens 2, with no plans for a follow up device

It looks like Microsoft's AR platform HoloLens is being sent to a nice tech farm upstate. The company just announced that it's discontinuing production of its HoloLens 2 headset, according to reporting by UploadVR. Microsoft has no plans for a followup device, so this is the end of the road.

The company has told its customers and enterprise partners that this will be the last time to purchase the headset before stock runs out. However, HoloLens 2 headsets will continue to receive "updates to address critical security issues and software regressions" until 2028. That will mark the end of software updates. The original HoloLens headset will stop getting software updates on December 10. That's in two months.

We reached out to Microsoft to ask about its decision to end production of HoloLens headsets and if there's any chance for a hardware update at some point in the future. We'll update this post when we hear back.

This move isn't that surprising, considering Microsoft scrapped plans for a HoloLens 3 headset back in 2022. Alex Kipman, the company's mixed reality chief, said that same year that the HoloLens is doing great" and that any rumors regarding the demise of the platform were greatly exaggerated. What a difference two years makes.

The HoloLens 2 first launched in 2019, just three years after the original. It was advertised as a device for enterprise consumers, so it never really entered the mass market. This was before decent passthrough became the norm in the AR/VR industry, so it had a lock on the enterprise market for a few years. It looks like that wasn't enough. Microsoft nixed its entire mixed reality software suite last year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/microsoft-kills-hololens-2-with-no-plans-for-a-follow-up-device-153319304.html?src=rss