Reading all the discourse leading up to the release of Apple’s Vision Pro headset, and the reviews now that the embargo has lifted; a lot of it feels very familiar.
While some die hard Apple fans have been going a bit too hard on their adoration of the product and a company they seem to have aligned a lot of their identity as a person on; many on the other side of the fence have also been equally as dismissive of it.
As usual, the reality lies somewhere in the middle (but that doesn’t generate clicks in the social media space).
Many in Apple’s camp are trying to align this release as equal to previous moments which has genuinely changed industries: namely the Macintosh and iPhone announcements.
However for myself, I see far more similarities to the Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch was also touted at the time as a new communications and computing platform. They tried to sell the digital crown as an input method similar in significance to the mouse or multi-touch FFS!
The reality is that while the Apple Watch is indeed a good business for Apple, and it can easily be argued that it’s the best smartwatch available; it is still just a very good smartwatch. It’s a fitness tracker and notifications device just like competitors before and after it. It just happens to be one of the best implementations of an existing idea.
The Apple Vision Pro (at least in its current form) feels more aligned to the Watch than the iPhone. One of the best implementations of an existing VR space but not a radical shift in computing.
It’s a VR headset
Apple is trying to shift the narrative to avoid comparisons by referring to their headset as Spatial Computing…but it’s a VR headset. Anyone trying to even suggest otherwise needs a slap in their weird VR avatar head!
Along with Meta and their push for mixed reality in their newer Quest devices, they are all doing the same thing; passing a video feed from your surroundings into your headset display to make it feel more like you are experiencing something within your environment instead of completely blocking it out.
Pretend all they want however, they are all just VR headsets.
The reason is clear. Everyone knows (either consciously or not) that the ultimate goal is a set of regular looking and feeling glasses that has AR capabilities; computing overlays within your actual environment, not a video feed replica. The technology just isn’t there yet.
Once the technology is capable of this, that will be the breakthrough.
The real interesting thing is Meta’s willingness to try moving towards this ultimate goal from both ends; via the traditional VR headsets in Quest, and via limited but more regular looking smart glasses through their Ray-Ban Meta range.
It feels like Apple has cornered themselves into the top-down approach of trying to make VR feel like AR, marketing the device as something you can just use throughout your day.
But no one wants to talk to someone who is wearing a giant headset while their eyes are being digitally recreated on the front display to make it feel like they are in eye contact with you.
That’s not maintaining a human connection while being digitally connected, that’s just being a weirdo.
What’s next
Much like the next few years after the Watch, it’s going to take some time for Apple to figure out what this device and its iterations are best for. Part of me thinks that this will just end up being a very nice display for Apple services and the Mac; until Apple can achieve proper AR through some regular looking glasses.
For that reason, I think this remains a very niche device for a very long time. Apple can’t play the “get it into everyone’s hands at the lowest cost” play Meta did during the Quest 2; even Meta can’t do that anymore.
The Watch got successful becoming focused on what it was good at and getting it down to a cost acceptable by many as a secondary device to their iPhone. Can Apple achieve the same or similar thing with the Vision Pro and future revisions?