Apple's Vision Slow Play

I’m still processing the announcement, and we’re probably at least six months from actually having these things in our hands, but I’m obviously pretty jazzed by Apple’s reveal of their first XR Headset.

This is something I’ve been excited about for a while. I’ve written articles in 2018 and 2019, and even made this sad video about the letdown of WWDC 2020.

I’ve posted about this more times than I’d care to admit.

All told, folks like me from the XR industry have been waiting for this “One More Thing” moment for a decade.

Well, the day has finally come - Apple announced their headset!

Sort of.

Technically Apple announced a headset, and it looks amazing. It will almost certainly be the best headset ever created.

On the other hand, this is not the “iPhone moment” that the immersive industry has been waiting for.?

To clarify that: I mean the moment when the technology becomes mainstream and a new platform shift begins, not the moment when the product is announced, and everyone makes fun of it because it’s too expensive, doesn’t have a physical keyboard or stylus, and “doesn’t really do anything.”

To update my analogy from 2016, the Apple Vision Pro is more of a Blackberry or “Palm Treo” than an “iPhone for XR,” but it’s an important step in the right direction.

With the Vision Pro, Apple is under-promising the product’s capabilities for mind blowing immersive content and instead positioning it as the world’s best monitor (that just happens to do other stuff).

This is an extremely conservative approach that makes sense for a lot of reasons:

Flatten the hype curve - Apple entering a new product category will inevitably create a lot of buzz. By positioning this product as a niche, luxury “Pro” device that isn’t for everyone, they are taking some of the air out of the initial “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and hopefully reducing the depth of the “Trough of Disillusionment” that generally follows.

TV on the radio - It’s hard to showcase a new medium using the old one to do it. People have to actually try these things out for themselves, because watching a video of an immersive experience just can’t do it justice.?

Developers Developers Developers - It’s worth noting that the Apple Vision Pro was announced at a developer conference, so it makes sense to show off an amazing device and let that audience use the same creativity and imagination that has made the App Store so successful, rather than a suite of applications at day. Let the developers do their thing!

A "Vision" of things to come

While this wasn’t the watershed moment that I was hoping for, it’s extremely exciting, and a first step into spatial computing for the biggest player in tech. We’re already hearing rumblings of a more consumer-friendly version in the works for the next few years, so it will be interesting to see Apple develop this strategy.

This first device won’t be for everyone, but it’s for me.?

I’ll see you all by the third generation, I’m sure ??