Will Apple Vision matter, where others failed?

🥽 T-1 day until Apple Vision Pro drops

“Apple has a long history of coming in late to the game, doing it (and marketing it) better, and creating an industry,” former New York Times tech columnist David Pogue wrote on Medium last year. Pogue was demoing Apple Vision Pro, the long-awaited VR headset we can all finally experience tomorrow for the low low price of $3,500 (roughly three times more than the failed Google Glass).

郭明錤 (Ming-Chi Kuo), an Apple supply chain analyst with a track record of accurate sales forecasting, believes Apple is going to have a hard time sustaining demand for a computer you can wear on your head. “Right now,” Kuo writes, “Vision Pro is still a very niche product.” Like the first iPhone, it lacks key apps. (Netflix, Spotify, and YouTube have said they will not launch Vision Pro apps, but TikTok’s product team has done a full redesign.)

This is true of every new invention, but it’s especially true for AVP: We won’t really know what it is until it’s in our hands (er, on our heads?). If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that Apple’s marketing copy avoids jargon like “virtual reality,” “mixed reality,” or “headset.” Instead, Apple is branding this product a “spatial computer.” It’s your new hands-free, desk-free laptop. On Reddit, a product designer lists ways we might use a floating computer, most of which revolve around freeing sedentary remote workers from our fancy office chairs. A decade from now, we’ll work while folding laundry (fun!).

Maybe this is yet another case where Apple arrives late to the party and creates a useful product out of something that was once a useless-ish novelty. They did it with tablets, smartwatches, and detached earbuds. Maybe they’ll do it with VR headsets, too.

Also: Are you getting one? How will you use it? I want to know. Write on Medium and tag your story “Apple Vision Pro.”

What else we’re reading

• Here are the top five paid subscriptions Medium staff software engineer Jacob Bennett actually uses. Bennett recommends Kagi, a paid search engine he argues returns better results than Google. “The goals of ad-supported search (and ad-supported content generally) directly conflict with why I use search engines,” Bennett writes. “I measure the effectiveness of searches by how long it takes me to find what I was actually looking for. By that measure, Google has been steadily getting worse.”
• Humans have a tendency to choose sides, even when it’s not helping us. “Stirring up division is easy,” illustrator David Milgrim reminds us. It’s much harder, but ultimately more rewarding, to recognize that we’re all pretty similar.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom

Don’t compete, create. Competing means, by definition, that you are playing by someone else’s rules. You are operating within narrow confines. […] Winning is inherently a narrow experience, whereas creating is expansive. And in an increasingly non-zero-sum world, the winners are increasingly the creators.

Written by Harris Sockel
Edited and produced by Scott Lamb and Carly Rose Gillis

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