Earlier this week, Apple debuted its long-rumored augmented reality headset, Vision Pro. Because the company is still a master storyteller, the product felt like an absolute technical and creative marvel that’s ushering in a new era, even though it won’t be available until early 2024 and other AR and virtual reality headsets already exist. (Disclaimer: I work for the company formerly known as Facebook that since 2021 has made its aspiration as chief architect of the metaverse abundantly clear.)
I’m not the right person to speak to what’s under the hood, or glass mask, of the Vision Pro. Clearly it’s quite impressive stuff, and we’ll leave it at that for now. However, I do feel like I’m just as qualified as anyone (everyone, really) to ask a simple question: what is a $3,500 face computer for?
Okay, sure. Entertainment. FaceTiming. A fun game or two. Maybe some work? I don’t know, man. This is a fairly new product category, and if anyone’s going to make AR/VR headsets as critical to our everyday information-age lives as the iPhone did for mobile phones, it’s of course Apple. But there’s probably a pretty good reason why the company has tempered expectations for the amount of Vision Pros it will sell in the first year of availability. Who, other than rich early tech adopters, is going to buy one, especially if it’s not clear how it’ll (promise to) make your life better?
Ben Thompson, a one of one in the world of tech reporting and analysis, wrote in his newsletter Stratechery this week that Apple exceeded his high expectations for the product because “the hardware and experience were better than I thought possible, and the potential for Vision is larger than I anticipated.” This sounds like a pretty strong vote of confidence from a key tech tastemaker, if only it wasn’t immediately followed by this sentence:
“The societal impacts, though, are much more complicated.”
After diving into the technical and experiential weeds for a while—in short, the product is amazing—he returns to the societal lens by asking the same question I did above.
“An incredible product is one thing; the question on everyone’s mind, though, is what exactly is this useful for? Who has room for another device in their life, particularly one that costs $3,499?
This question is, more often than not, more important to the success of a product than the quality of the product itself.”
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. What Thompson then explores is where the Vision Pro might fall on a spectrum from “novelty” to “everything” product. Currently our “everything” tech product is the smartphone, with tablets and laptops filling not-quite-everything-but-still-useful roles in the respective consumption and productivity middle territory of his spectrum. Thompson makes the case for this product eventually occupying everything the smartphone doesn’t, which is to say that it could become the predominant way people work and engage with entertainment, especially down the road as the hardware inevitably slims down and gets more advanced. Speaks to quite a few hours in the day, doesn’t it?
That road might stretch pretty far out though, and until the point at which the goggles become somewhat unobtrusive glasses with the same powerhouse technology at an affordable price point, it’s a lot to expect people will shell out so much cash to move further away from in-person connection by strapping a computer to their face.
Meta, who as I previously mentioned is my employer and a major player in shaping the future world of AR and VR we’ll apparently occupy, has a decidedly different approach to it than Apple. Thompson points out that whereas the fruit company is focused on a personal computing experience, Meta is focused on social. This makes sense given that its mission has long been to connect the whole world. However, no company is better positioned to understand the power of network effects, and even at the lower end of the market price-wise, it’s struggling to reach the tipping point of velocity and retention that leads to everyone you know having a thing, and—shit, now you have to have it too. Regardless, these opposing philosophies are a pretty fascinating story to watch—one side is betting on a future of increased isolation, and the other on togetherness even while apart. This is how Thompson completes his analysis and sets up the coming tech giant war:
“In other words, there is actually a reason to hope that Meta might win: it seems like we could all do with more connectedness, and less isolation with incredible immersive experiences to dull the pain of loneliness. One wonders, though, if Meta is in fact fighting Apple not just on hardware, but on the overall trend of society; to put it another way, bullishness about the Vision Pro may in fact be a function of being bearish about our capability to meaningfully connect.”
So, yeah. I know it’s popular to hate on Meta, but it’s possible I just made you root for its vision of the future. My bad! I’m not going to end there though, because what I’m most interested in is how we even end up with these philosophical and societal questions about the sort of future world technology is shaping for us. The fact that there aren’t a clear set of practical applications for products that are sucking up a lot of money and time and the brainpower of some of the most talented people in the world is strange. On a basic level, I find it troubling that the best reason we have for developing face computers is because we can. I guess progress, technical or otherwise, is basically coded into human DNA—why else would we be racing to develop ever-superior artificial intelligence that has a very much non-zero chance of ending our species?
Needless to say, I’m pretty interested to see how this all plays out. Because as much as I try to escape into nature, presence, reality as much as possible to ground myself, I know I’ll inevitably get pulled into whatever constructed reality the powers that be dictate for all of us. I hope they know what they’re doing.
Are these two approaches mutually exclusive or will converge at some point ?