Notes on Apple's Vision Pro

I watched, I read, and I watched again. Then I let it all settle for a few days.?

Here's some food for thought on the Vision Pro as we all try to fully grok what we've seen on Monday.

Vision Pro is the vessel, visionOS is the Ocean

Vision Pro as-a-product is quintessentially Apple. No other company in tech could have executed a device like this. The supply chain complexity level for the Vision Pro, alone, is beyond anything we've seen so far.?

Expect Apple to produce a limited amount of this and to be constantly sold out for months while the Operations Magicians in Cupertino led by Jeff Williams figure out how to gradually build more.?

Calling the Vision Pro a visor wouldn't do it justice. The device is, in fact, a full-fledged M2 computer that's as powerful as a MacBook Pro but is also capable of managing a way more complex of input/outputs than any computer Apple has ever made. Truly remarkable.

VisionOS is also quintessentially Apple–the software is the boldest move here. It's where the paradigm shift is taking place.

Apple redesigned an entire OS to integrate the concept of "space" into the Operating System, setting the foundation for a wholly-new computing concept.

Apple calls it "spatial computing," which is more a marketing term than anything else, but it's an interesting initial take to show where this new category is tentatively going, according to the folks in Cupertino. No Metaverse shenanigans, no focus on isolating, only to connect virtually with legless gamey avatars, and -surprisingly enough- no big gaming focus.

Top-Down Product Development

The way Apple is venturing into this new product category is a first in the company's recent history. Apple reversed its usual bottom-up strategy of underdelivering a first-version product to build one step at a time for a top-down approach.?

Think about this: the Vision Pro is the first Apple first-of-its-kind product to come out with the Pro moniker already attached to it.?

At Apple, "Pro" doesn't mean "professional." Rather it indicates that the product you're buying features Apple's latest, most advanced, and production-ready technologies. If we consider this meaning of "Pro," then Apple has decided to come out all guns blazing with a tech that would free the space and leave every single other competitor in the dust.?

Yet, there's one main problem with this approach. It makes finding a purpose for a new product category slightly harder because a larger set of features puts you under a constraint.?

On the other hand, the Vision Pro is a way bigger leap than anything Apple has tried so far. The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and the Apple Watch were all groundbreaking in their own different way, but none of them was built on a bet that people would accept a completely different paradigm of how they do computing daily.

That's why Apple made the Vision Pro a deliberately hybrid device while trying hard to paint scenarios that felt familiar, homey, and not completely detached from what we cherish and know well.

If you see a controller, they blew it

The lack of a set of controllers is the most impressive achievement of Apple's new product. Using your eyes and hands as the only input peripherals is groundbreaking, especially considering any report from those who tried remarked how well the system already works.?

Nobody on stage quipped that "if you see a controller, they blew it," but that would have been a nice quote. When Steve Jobs said that about the first iPad and the lack of a stylus, he probably already knew he would change his mind whenever Apple would be ready to come out with a stylus that would be good enough. I believe Steve would have loved the Apple Pencil and would have merrily joked about his quote.?

Here I see an opportunity for Apple to do the same at some point. As a future accessory, a controller as an additional input method is not completely out of the picture. Still, Apple needed to show the pure, unfiltered, eye-and-gesture-based experience first, especially considering that any controller is superfluous to use the Vision Pro, exactly as an Apple Pencil is unnecessary to enjoy most of an iPad's features.

Ignore the price

I must admit, I would have expected a harsher reaction to the Vision Pro $3499 price tag in the days following the keynote. From what I've seen and read, people understand that the Vision Pro is a groundbreaking piece of technology whose bill of materials adds up very close to the official pricing.?

Considering we're still months away from the product's availability, I believe the price is a detail that, right now, can be ignored.?

The Vision Pro is not a commercial product just yet, and therefore the price is just a number that Apple needed to share to contextualize the device and frame it within a value bracket. Apart from that, any discussion on the device's commercial success can be pushed to the end of next year.?

The price is also irrelevant because, as I mentioned, this would be a niche device with low production numbers, at least for the first year, and Apple will sell every single unit it can build.

Make it or break it.

As you might have noticed during Monday's keynote, Apple has put together a full-fledged team dedicated to visionOS and Vision Pro, both on the hardware and software side. It is a group of new faces we've never seen before in public.

VisionOS and Vision Pro are an SVP-making product category and a profound cultural challenge to the settled and vested interest of some of Apple's leaders.?

That's why I believe the reports about Vision Pro and visionOS have caused internal conflict and controversy at Apple to be realistic. Again, you could see that reflected in Monday's presentation. The head honcho of all things software, Craig Federighi, hasn't been seen anywhere near visionOS and Vision Pro. How come? Sure, he's got a lot of other duties, but it's still strange that someone so high in the chain of command (and a viable candidate to take Tim Cook's place in a few years) wouldn't have any interest in being associated to Apple's hot new product.?

Vision Pro is also a product that's still searching for meaning, and I'm quite sure there are many opposing views on its roadmap internally.?

The same happened every time Apple launched a new category-defining product. The iPod started an internal civil war about what it should be and its interface (a battle Tony Fadell won). The iPhone and the further development of iOS created a rift that resulted in Scott Forstall parting ways from the company after the internal conflict was the most probable root cause of Apple Maps' launch fiasco in 2012. More recently, the evolution of Apple's design approach to the Watch and, later, the new Apple Silicon Macs must have something to do with Chief Design Officer Jony Ive finally leaving Apple.?

Consider that some of these turf wars might have already happened behind closed doors. A Bloomberg report from March 2023 pointed out that an unusually high number of executives have been leaving Apple in recent months.?

I wouldn't be surprised to see a larger leadership shake-up finally materializing, let's say, one to two years after the Vision Pro's commercial availability.

A note on accessibility

Apple is a company fully committed to accessibility, but this is the first Apple product where that fundamental tenet takes second place. It's called Vision, it's vision-centric, and will inevitably exclude a large cohort of blind or vision-impaired users. That's a community that Apple caters to with every product in its line-up. Of course, that's true for every visor. On the other hand, the Vision Pro could be revolutionary for a wider, possibly larger group of users with a disability, considering the user's eyes can become literal cursors to navigate the interface. I am curious to see how Apple will approach this issue from a marketing perspective.