The gist of it: if Apple markets the hell out of its Vision Pro, to justify its cost and use, it’s just going to make it that much easier for all the other headset makers to come in, sell at a fraction of the cost ($500 seems like an impulse buy now) and claim to do just enough to make the experience meaningful without asking users to join a cult of bucket-heads..
Seems to me that if you want to be in the AR/VR/MR headset business, your sales pitch got so much simpler, and apparently, you are now in the spatial computer business. So, that should take care of your investor pitches, too. Just avoid messing with people’s heads. Literally.
The Spatial Computer Blinkering Your Eyes
I probably went a little overboard in my disdain for Apple’s Vision Pro launch. In my defense, it was a woeful attempt on the part of Apple to try and turn their headset into something that it clearly isn’t: a new way to interact with the digital world. It was an obvious, I might say cynical, pitch, to justify a product that costs about 7x more than its competitors and is over-engineered to make it seem like it has solved the problems of mixed reality products when it clearly has not. In fact, the only thing that the price tag and extensive engineering brilliance of the Vision Pro has done is to make it impossible for the product to be of practical use.
First of all, it is a hefty helmet that weighs you down with no real indication of how it could be usable for long periods of time; it needs an external battery pack that breaks the design, anathema to the Apple way of making products; the Vision Pro expects the user to give up an awful lot of personality and individuality to fulfill its pushed vision and make it seamlessly blend into every day lives like a smartphone or laptop.
Secondly, the fact that Apple pushed so hard to tout the product as a “spatial computer,” something that would replace other computing devices eventually, only made it more obvious that it is a very expensive and intrusive MR headset with a god-complex. You could sense that the Apple presenters were desperate to convince you that they had cracked the mother of all problems, creating an Apple product that would be a game changer and erase the memory of Apple’s iPhone moment. In that sense, Apple failed and failed spectacularly.
One reviewer said, the Vision Pro was an Apple-designed Meta Quest Pro. That’s from a guy who got into the hallowed sanctum at Apple and was hands-on with the product for a half an hour.
However, Apple has a wealth of experience that it can leverage, if it so chooses, in future products, maybe just not headsets. First, the Vision Pro gives Apple the R1, a chip for offloading the handling of sensor data. That’s a great piece of technology to have right there. Apple’s silicon ventures is a whole other discussion. It’s one of the company’s biggest strengths.
The company has pushed the limits on display technology, both MicroLED and OLED, and that’s going to give it plenty of ammunition in its own ventures into display manufacturing. It might embolden them to do more internally, or shy away from taking on those problems and dump it on their suppliers. Either way, that’s a win right there for procurement.
Also, the gesture control on the Vision Pro, if it works as it appeared in the fake demos, seemed exceptional. How much new IP and expertise has Apple acquired here that could be leveraged for phones, laptops, or other devices?
On the other hand, Apple added very little to our existing knowledge of near-eye displays. But at what cost? I am sure the Zeiss lenses used in the Vision Pro are not cheap -nthey are never likely to be cheap – but apparently, they perform admirably in adapting the Vision Pro for use by people who need glasses, for example.
Apple didn’t create a lightweight, pervasive headset. The company did its best, taking out the battery, using high quality, lightweight materials, and generally crafting a device from the best options available. Again, at what cost?
So, none of the problems of headsets went away, they were just mitigated with some expensive compromises in design, compromises that the user has to pay for. Well, every other headset out there could have done the same thing if the makers had chosen to pitch their products at thousands of dollars.
At this stage, Meta only needs to market the Quest 3 as having most of the benefits of the Vision Pro at a fraction of the cost to remain competitive. Heck, Meta can even double or triple its Quest prices and still come out as a much cheaper alternative. In fact, any other manufacturer can just ride Apple’s coattails by positioning itself as having a very cool spatial computer, with a much smaller price tag, and maybe a few less features, but who wants to wear a headset all day anyways.
It may be that the AR/VR/MR headset market just got a huge boost because everyone who isn’t Apple can claim to give a user a huge chunk of the same experiences at a much, much lower price, and no need to change your lifestyle, just wear your device casually.
Or, maybe the pitch is, “MR headsets can cause dizziness, nausea, eye strain, and are not suitable for use over long periods of time. That’s why our headset is so much cheaper and less feature rich than Apple’s: we want it to be a casual use product because we care about your wellbeing.”
As for Apple, the usual fawning press coverage is somewhat muted but there is a significant amount of expectation that Apple’s superior marketing will figure out a way to make the Vision Pro succeed. Or, the other take is, Apple’s just using the Vision Pro as a stepping stone to the next generation of computing. But that’s missing the point: the original Mac, the original iPhone, the original Microsoft Windows, the original Netscape browser, none of these were stepping stones. You don’t get a big sea change in behavior by making people hop on stepping stones. You need a clear path, a big wide broad path to the future that lots of people can walk on at the same time.
The single biggest failure of AR/VR/MR is that it has never been able to provide that multi-lane highway. The vision has always been somewhere far off in the distance with no clear way to get people there. Apple isn’t about to open up a trail with its Vision Pro. Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess.
