Apple’s pitch? This may be virtual reality, but it’s anything but the metaverse. This is brand new technology for you, the consumer, to be enjoyed inside Apple’s famous walled garden. Its demo was all about watching huge virtual movie screens in your living room and disappearing in beautiful simulated natural environments. It’s a high-tech home theater for your face. Unlike other headsets, there are no handheld controllers — you navigate the digital world by looking at the objects of interest and pinching your fingers. You are immersed, you are entertained, and you are very much alone.
That these kinds of immersive digital worlds, whether closed or open, would rise to prominence was always a dystopian idea, one that originated in cyberpunk fiction, premised on the notion that conditions in the real world were so bad that users had to abandon their actual lives completely and escape into a more poorly rendered simulacrum.
This is precisely why Karpf thinks that
computers-on-your-facemight have a future after all.If the world keeps getting worse, he says,this will eventually have a lot of appeal.If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cypberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns — it’s almost enough to make you wish for the metaverse.
Brian Merchant
This article gets to the core of the issue of Apple’s recently announced mixed-reality headset, an issue it shares with a whole category of VR goggles: these devices are ultimately designed to be used in isolation, with few or preferably no other people around. I’m not convinced it’s an impact of the recent pandemic and the associated social distancing; Big Tech has always been in the business of creating tools to disintermediate and monetize human interactions, and the Apple Vision Pro represents a pinnacle of that evolution.
Another tendency leading up to this is how most tech products are designed by young Silicon Valley engineers, who tend to be single, without children, and hyper-focused on their job and career progress; they have invented ride-sharing and food delivery to unburden themselves from these chores.
The obstacles are seeded deep in our DNA. We’re highly discerning about what we put on our face, as it must enhance, not impair our ability to assert dominance, attract mates, and make connections. Jewelry signals wealth and strength. The $250 billion cosmetics industry helps us mimic visual cues for health and reproductive fertility. There is no version of a headset or goggles that makes us seem more appealing. None.
Headsets obstruct our peripheral vision, exposing us to stalking predators. Also, they’re uncomfortable. We are a long way from making three screens, a glass shield, and an array of supporting hardware light enough to wear for an extended period. Reviewers were (purposefully) allowed to wear the Vision Pro for less than half an hour, and nearly every one said comfort was declining even then. Avatar: The Way of Water is 3 hours and 12 minutes.
Scott Galloway
It’s rather unclear what consumer need the Apple Vision Pro is aiming to solve: despite excellent hardware, it’s severely constrained by its abysmal two-hour battery life, so early adopters will be forced to use it connected to a power source. Apparently you cannot move around too much either with the headset in VR mode; likely a safety feature to prevent people from bumping into furniture, but limiting nonetheless. I struggle to think who would want to use this instead of a regular TV, where you have more liberty to change your posture, pause the playback, take a bathroom break, or simply share the experience with a partner or family; the Vision Pro’s battery wouldn’t even last an entire movie, not to mention you would need to take it off and fit it back on for each break…
Video calls on a Vision Pro become awkward for the other party, as someone wearing one would appear as a 3D rendering, not a live-video feed – talk about uncanny valley! The device looks cumbersome for fitness as well. As for gaming, Apple hasn’t really mentioned it, but the lack of controllers isn’t encouraging. The demos mentioned productivity and office work, including that Microsoft’s Office suite would become available at a later date. Honestly, the prospect of manipulating an Excel spreadsheet or a presentation by voice or eye movements alone strikes me as an outright nightmare, enough to accuse the employer of cruel treatment of their workforce.
More generally, I have serious doubts about the interaction design when voice, gestures, and eye tracking are the only options. In almost every comparison of voice assistants Siri ranks last when it comes to interpreting queries; from my experience Google Assistant has its fair share of misses, so if Siri is even worse I can’t imagine relying on it for fast and precise controls. Early testers praised the eye tracking, but this also feels like an odd interaction; I don’t want my computer to constantly react to my eye movements. Maybe my gaze is simply drifting while I’m watching a movie or reviewing a document; would the eye tracker follow it around and highlight random pieces of text or interface components? That sounds annoying and distracting.
But perhaps this is less a gadget for consumers and more another addition to Apple’s growing ecosystem, another vehicle to extract money from hardware sales and developer fees. After all, it matters not to Apple if you buy a $3,500 Vision Pro and then abandon it after some days or weeks of experimentation. There’s some incentive to achieve a critical mass of returning users to collect App Store fees from installed apps, but I suspect Apple’s margins are high enough that this is not a short-term priority. A point casually ignored at the developer conference: how much will Apple charge as App Store commission for Vision Pro apps? I imagine it might be even higher than the current 30%…
I love Apple. Their products are second to none, truly. I have nothing but respect for their entire team. However, Vision Pro is so divergent to how I want to live and experience life, especially for my kids, that I'm beginning to fall out of love.
— Noah Stokes (@motherfuton) June 8, 2023
Despite these questions and shortcomings, the typical Apple stans have rushed to praise the product (even though it will not be available for at least another six months) and proclaim that Apple has once again outdone itself and revolutionized yet another product class (even though VR headsets are fairly old at this point and Apple doesn’t bring anything new besides premium hardware). This ‘new Apple product’ aura is working its insidious magic on journalists as well, relieved to have a new subject to beat to death despite the dearth of actual information. After people ridiculed Google Glass wearers and dismissed Microsoft’s HoloLens and Meta’s Quest, after a multi-year pandemic during which many in the US adamantly refused to wear a face mask to protect themselves and society from a nasty airborne virus, it would be extremely ironic if the relentless Apple hype would induce significant impulse purchases of the Vision Pro.
Apple has made an AR experience, with VR hardware, that doesn’t seem to do VR much, but that you don’t take outdoors, which is the AR dream.
Benedict Evans
It occurs to me though that Apple has had its strongest successes with products that were fairly well established in the market and part of people’s daily lives: the iPod introduced a new experience to music listening; the iPhone expanded what was possible on a phone (by that point mobile phones were already in everyone’s pocket); the iPad was mostly a big iPhone at a time when Apple refused to build larger iPhones; the Watch tried to replicate the iPhone success, but struggled initially because Apple didn’t have a clear message for its use cases. And crucially they were all priced competitively to ease the transition. None of these circumstances apply to the Vision Pro as announced: AR and VR remain niche products that people try out and abandon sooner or later, and its price is way above other premium gadgets, making the entry into Apple’s ‘spatial computing’ vision prohibitively expensive. The Vision Pro feels as if Apple had launched the gold Apple Watch Edition, but without the basic models to encourage mass adoption.
I will wrap this up with two other outstanding questions. Firstly, Apple managers seemed to subtly distance themselves from the device, as none of them wore it during the presentation. The simplest explanation is that the Vision Pro is far from ready for public use, and likely years from having an accessible price. The other question concerns the supply chain: Apple is one of the companies most entangled in China, and prone to become caught in the middle of rising tensions with the US; would the Vision Pro be manufactured in China as well? Because if so, supply might soon become problematic, if not borderline impossible…
Update: sure enough, a week later the Financial Times reported that Apple has been forced to make “drastic cuts” to production forecasts for its Vision Pro, down to fewer than 400,000 units in 2024, and that the company is relying on various Chinese partners, Luxshare to initially assemble the device, and another two China-based sole suppliers of certain components.
reporting without paywall on MacRumors
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