Apple Vision Pro Thoughts: Is It The Future?
After watching the presentation, I thought I would record some thoughts to help the conversation here. I came away excited and more than a little depressed.
How did Apple position itself in the spatial computing landscape?
Apple won before it started with 4 decisions:
1 - Reframing the discussion from VR/Metaverse to spatial computing. Phenomenal positioning on a footing where Apple excels - compute and experience.
2 - Getting rid of controllers and replacing them with eyes and hand motions was inspired. This is a full Minority Report. Controllers as a first-class interface are a dead-end.
3 - The ability to "see through" the device. I laughed out loud to see Apple trying to coin a new term, "EyeSight" Good to see Apple hasn't lost its bluster, and, more importantly, blinding a user to a virtual screen only is another dead-end. You want to be able to know if someone wants your attention, and Apple made it as simple as entering your field of vision.
4 - Run a limited batch of 500,000 devices to bootstrap the device. For this to work, the first version must be insanely great for a small number of people, not average for many.
Apple is telling Meta they are attempting to scale before nailing the experience.
Positive thoughts:
You have just seen the future of immersive entertainment, amusement parks, education, and training.
The first version could succeed with education, hardcore gamers (Fornite?!?! ridiculous), military and remote workforce alone.
But then there's Disney. It will be ridiculous, and your kids will want it.
Apple's discussion of computing leaps being driven by input modalities was impressive and accurate.
No one manufactures like Apple. Nobody. 5,000 patents?!
Negative thoughts:
Is this how humanity is supposed to interact in the future? Sad and depressing that so much innovation is being put which:
1 - Further unlevel the playing field between the haves and have-nots.
Sad that I am Googling "how many millionaires are there in the United States" to determine the initial addressable market. It's 5.3 million. So 9% of millionaires need to buy 1 device to sell out, although that doesn't count corporations.
Seems aggressive, but you need some amount of scale to justify the investment.
2 - Further separates us from each other, taking a nice walk in the park with your family.
Battery is a major unsolved issue, but maybe Elon could help here ;-)
Apple's struggle to penetrate the business world could come back to bite it if Microsoft decides it needs to compete here. However, I expect that Microsoft will adopt whatever is successful over time, and Teams (!!) and other productivity applications can win here too.
3 - Even if this works, I don't believe this is an iPhone-level business for a long time. Spatial computing is specialized right now, hence the price.
4 - More than a little worried about that much compute strapped to my face.
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