Detail from the patent showing an iPhone being slotted into a headset

Picture safety goggles where instead of glass, you slide an iPhone over your eyes. That was Apple's first idea for the Apple Vision Pro and it will not let it go.

After the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, Apple admitted almost conspiratorially that for years it had filed hundreds of headset patents in plain sight. But there's one it keeps coming back to, and it was originally about the earliest, while it now also looks like the cheapest.

All the way back in 2010, Apple applied for a patent called "Head-Mounted Display Apparatus for Retaining a Portable Electronic Device with Display." It was then granted the patent in 2015.

But it didn't stop then. In 2020, it filed a new application for a patent with the same name -- and didn't stop there either.

For now a patent with the same name has newly been granted. And the text of it refers to being filed in 2023 as a continuation of one previously submitted in 2022.

Someone at Apple is really keen on this patent -- and it's increasingly hard to fathom why. For each version of the patent is about exactly the same idea of mounting an iPhone in front of a user's eyes.

The various patents describe ways "that allow users to couple and decouple a portable electronic device" such as the iPhone illustrated in each filing. This "temporarily integrates the separate devices [the iPhone and headset mounting] into a single unit."

"The portable electronic may be physically coupled to the head- mounted device such that the portable electronic device can be worn on the user's head," continues the latest version. "Each device may be allowed to extend its features and/or services to the other device for the purpose of enhancing, increasing and/or eliminating redundant functions between the head-mounted device and the portable electronic device."

In other words, once you've popped the iPhone onto your nose, it should stop being a phone and start being a headset.

Regardless of how carefully-worded the various patents are, this still sounds like a View Master. It sounds like a toy.

But maybe it was always supposed to. The proposals about what a device could show might perhaps apply equally to today's Apple Vision Pro as to 2010's gimmick.

Certainly this is a stretch, but perhaps this was how Apple started hiding all of those Apple Vision Pro patents in plain sight.

Yet that wouldn't explain the rather dogged way that Apple has been applying for a patent on this -- and twice succeeding.