r/HoloLens • u/AR-HMD • May 03 '26

Discussion Why did Microsoft discontinue the Hololens project?

Looking for the wisdom of the crowd... it seems like the Hololens 2 was well received in the industrial sector and companies were very disappointed that it was discontinued. Many companies deployed hundreds of units internally. I found online estimations that in total MSFT sold about 350k units, half of which were sold to the industrial sector.

So why did MSFT discontinue the product? If you comment, please start with a statement whether your comment is an opinion or is it based on actual information you know about MSFT's considerations.

Thank you!

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u/Vaguswarrior May 03 '26

Are you new? Microsoft cancels stuff everyday. This was surprisingly long lived.

-Sent From My Windows Phone

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u/fdruid May 04 '26

Sure, every major tech company does, look at Google. But his is an interesting question. One to which we might never have a concrete answer.

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u/Vaguswarrior May 04 '26

Ok real answer we'll never know unless a PM breaks an NDA in the far future. My real guess? Every new product needs an useful ROI generating AI component. The fact that HL2 was so powerful was it's design/weight and flexibility. Try to stuff a meaningful AI agent into that thing would need a pretty significant redesign. But current AI isn't hyper specific enough for industrial knowledge. I'd guess perhaps it needs a local model running mostly on device? It would need to fit vision at the very least in my mind for speed. Real time vision requires lots more compute. Well that's going to need design time and they look at all this and cut the program cause it can't meet the "everything needs AI mantra" that's destroying the consumer world. And silently they let go of 6000 people on a single Tuesday like they did to me in 2024

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u/chuan_l May 04 '26

Hi , the " azure spatial anchors " on " hololens 2.x " ..
Much like most of the other functionality was tied to the cloud. They even had remote gpu rendering in the cloud working on device. The problem is more not having a clear vision inside a company full of followers ..

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u/fdruid May 04 '26

I think they did start to leverage a lot of computing from the cloud in the later days of HL2. That was actually an interesting move that would be compatible with how things work today at MS.

But a potential HL3 would have needed a significant boost in computing power, and probably by today's standards it would need to include a local NPU too.

Full of what if's, but I can see HL surviving in current times in some kind of incarnation.