Apple’s Vision Pro headset is a $3500 product designed to isolate you from your environment and strap a screen to your face so you’re constantly making money for tech companies.
When it launches next year, every rich early adopter who puts one on their face should be ridiculed. It’s not a vision for the future of computing we should accept.
https://www.disconnect.blog/p/apples-vision-pro-headset-deserves
@parismarx It's going to be the premium product that's going to break out the idea of an AR/VR iPhone.
Wait for the SE version.
@parismarx "These kids and their walkmans! Unacceptable! Look at them, walking in public not even listening to what's around them!"
Panic and ridicule about new tech happens all the time.
Check back in a decade. You'll have been proven one of those Walkman deniers.
@parismarx Who needs a phone when they're out of the house?! Obnoxious rings interrupting everyone else, disrupting the people around them, not paying attention to others. Mobile phone users are an imorailty! Rude, with too much money and not enough sense!
The arguments stay the same, decade after decade. Especially for early adopter level when it's still expensive.
@mattwilcox
Well, I think there is a point to the ridicule. Vision Pro is obviously not the device Apple wanted to make. Apple’s vision (no pun intended) is to make personal, intimate devices most people would like to carry with them, or even wear — everywhere. To make computing personal.
Vision Pro is not that device. Everything from its name, price and clunky design, to how it is marketed screams “professional customer”. Not consumer. And it’s the consumer they want to target — in the end.
Vision Pro is a way for Apple to iterate on the tech and in 10 years perhaps being able to launch the light-weight glasses they want to produce and that everyone would want to wear — everywhere, all the time.
@bitbear Well of course it's not the "final vision", just like the first of any tech isn't. It's literally the first passable attempt. It can't be anything more.
The thing is, the ridicule isn't about the device itself - but a complete myopia about the vision's appeal and applicability. The fact is, when enough people get enough out of a thing, "norms" change to accomodate that.
Which is why no one cares about people wearing earphones in public anymore. Or looking at phones.
@bitbear Was the first iPhone what the visions was? No, miles and miles off. It's *still* not there. But very rapidly, it went from "rich rude fools with more money than sense" to "me, my friends, and their small kids all have them and it's totally normal".
The utility of a smart phone was *always* that value. And, the same for spacial computing.
@parismarx
@bitbear @mattwilcox @parismarx but this is like ridiculing the original Mac for being black and white, or the original iPhone for lacking 3G: it’s accurate, but it misses the point.
I highly doubt Apple is happy to ship a device that requires a battery pack in your butt. They’ll iterate as you say. And Apple will iterate fast, as they did with the Mac and iPhone, whereas the competition has significant reworks ahead.
@chucker @mattwilcox @parismarx Yes and no.
While I agree that all ridicule directed at Apple for every new device they have launched since the iMac has completely missed the point, I think Apple still has such an enormous chasm to cross in order to properly express their mission with Vision Pro that comparing the chasm to iPhone missing 3G is itself missing the point of the ridicule.
I don’t think it’s wise to ridicule, but I understand why people are sceptical as it’s so unusual for Apple to launch a product that is so monumentally different in form, size and capability to what I believe they are envisioning.
The current launch of Vision Pro is more like if Apple Watch had been launched as a stationary nightstand alarm clock or iPhone as a DECT phone in 1995.
I understand why they are doing it and I think it’s the right move to make, but I think the move is a very unusual one for Apple.
@chucker @bitbear @mattwilcox @parismarx I think the message from the WWDC keynote with Disney on stage announcing Day One support/interest is that Apple might be betting that they have a much faster/more aggressive consumer-focused iteration plan than “10 years”.
I don’t know what they are planning or expecting or keeping up their sleeve, but I’m bringing popcorn because this feels like it may be real interesting to watch.
@max @bitbear @mattwilcox @parismarx that is indeed interesting, yep. In fact, just one single external vendor showing their app is also quite a choice.
Maybe it’s because the device is so far out? Maybe we’ll see something like “Adobe has done X” in early 2024.
@parismarx These are the folks who think traveling to Mars is the answer to our future.
I'm happy to help them pack.
@parismarx
I am torn between seeing it as a more advanced display for what we already do and the fear that companies will make another dopamine trap out of it. I lean towards seeing the latter as the actual problem, not so much the tech itself. Dopamine hell aside, do the benefits outweigh the disadvantages? More imprtantly, is an LCD screen or a projection the healthier choice when we want to avoid detachment? Today, I'd say yes.
@parismarx I agree with everything you wrote here, but I would just like to note that there exist a great many people who are already living extremely isolated lives, and products like this, used in the privacy of one's already existing isolation, can be liberating.
I live alone, I have no intimate friends, no romantic relationships, and rarely leave the house. I would never use such a device in the presence of other people, but I am so rarely actually *in* the presence of other people.
@parismarx
So with that scuba mask strapped to your face, what is the other person you are talking to looking at??
Struggling here.
What if I don't want a cheesy abstracted version of myself. Can’t my real face come along for the ride?
Just no.
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