Effectively, this is a next-generation step into computational photography. With quad pixels, you can easily see how the iPhone 14 Pro generated 12MP images from a 48MP sensor. It’s grade school division: 48 ÷ 4 = 12. But there is no 24MP sensor in the 15 Pro main camera. The Photonic Engine takes several images from the sensor for each photo, including a 48MP one for detail, and a 12MP quad-pixel one for low-light and noise reduction, then computationally fuses them together to produce a single 24MP image. Apple is having its cake and eating it too, merging the benefits of a sensor with many small pixels with the benefits of a sensor with fewer large pixels. You don’t need to know that this is happening, you just get more detail in your photos from the main camera.

Meta, today, has roughly the right price and is working forward to the right device: Apple has started with the right device and will work back to the right price. Meta is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware - Apple is trying to catalyse an ecosystem while we wait for the right price.

one of the things I wondered before the event was how Apple would show a 3D experience in 2D. Meta shows either screenshots from within the system (with the low visual quality inherent in the spec you can make and sell for $500) or shots of someone wearing the headset and grinning - neither are satisfactory. Apple shows the person in the room, with the virtual stuff as though it was really there, because it looks as though it is.

For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. This iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.

A lot of what Apple shows is possibility and experiment - it could be this, this or that, just as when Apple launched the watch it suggested it as fitness, social or fashion, and it turn out to work best for fitness (and is now a huge business).

Mark Zuckerberg, speaking to a Meta all-hands after Apple’s event, made the perfectly reasonable point that Apple hasn’t shown much that no-one had thought of before - there’s no ‘magic’ invention. Everyone already knows we need better screens, eye-tracking and hand-tracking, in a thin and light device.

It’s worth remembering that Meta isn’t in this to make a games device, nor really to sell devices per se - rather, the thesis is that if VR is the next platform, Meta has to make sure it isn’t controlled by a platform owner who can screw them, as Apple did with IDFA in 2021.

On the other hand, the Vision Pro is an argument that current devices just aren’t good enough to break out of the enthusiast and gaming market, incremental improvement isn’t good enough either, and you need a step change in capability.

Apple’s privacy positioning, of course, has new strategic value now that it’s selling a device you wear that’s covered in cameras

the genesis of the current wave of VR was the realisation a decade ago that the VR concepts of the 1990s would work now, and with nothing more than off-the-shelf smartphone components and gaming PCs, plus a bit more work. But ‘a bit more work’ turned out to be thirty or forty billion dollars from Meta and God only knows how much more from Apple - something over $100bn combined, almost certainly.

So it might be that a wearable screen of any kind, no matter how good, is just a staging post - the summit of a foothill on the way to the top of Everest. Maybe the real Reality device is glasses, or contact lenses projecting onto your retina, or some kind of neural connection, all of which might be a decade or decades away again, and the piece of glass in our pocket remains the right device all the way through.

I think the price and the challenge of category creation are tightly connected. Apple has decided that the capabilities of the Vision Pro are the minimum viable product - that it just isn’t worth making or selling a device without a screen so good you can’t see the pixels, pass-through where you can’t see any lag, perfect eye-tracking and perfect hand-tracking. Of course the rest of the industry would like to do that, and will in due course, but Apple has decided you must do that.

For VR, better screens are merely better, but for AR Apple thinks this this level of display system is a base below which you don’t have a product at all.

For Meta, the device places you in ‘the metaverse’ and there could be many experiences within that. For Apple, this device itself doesn’t take you anywhere - it’s a screen and there could be five different ‘metaverse’ apps. The iPhone was a piece of glass that could be anything - this is trying to be a piece of glass that can show anything.

This reminds me a little of when Meta tried to make a phone, and then a Home Screen for a phone, and Mark Zuckerberg said “your phone should be about people.” I thought “no, this is a computer, and there are many apps, some of which are about people and some of which are not.” Indeed there’s also an echo of telco thinking: on a feature phone, ‘internet stuff’ was one or two icons on your portable telephone, but on the iPhone the entire telephone was just one icon on your computer. On a Vision Pro, the ‘Meta Metaverse’ is one app amongst many. You have many apps and panels, which could be 2D or 3D, or could be spaces.

The term “mixed reality” emerged as a way to describe a class of related visual technologies. One of them, virtual reality, seals off users from much of the real world to immerse them in a digital experience. The other, augmented reality, makes digital items appear to inhabit the physical world.

That laptop has a full-sized keyboard and a beautiful 13-inch display. Maybe a 14-inch display with really small bezels. A smaller display is too small for most people’s taste (and may necessitate a slightly cramped keyboard); a larger display makes for too big and heavy a device for everyperson needs. The battery lasts all day despite active use and screen brightness being set to “plenty bright”. It has no fan because fan noise is abhorrent, but needs no fan because it’s equipped with chips that run more than fast enough without an active cooling system. The machine itself is physically durable and visually attractive. It has at least two high-speed modern I/O ports and a MagSafe port for charging. It doesn’t bother with legacy I/O ports, except, perhaps, a headphone jack, because that’s the only legacy port most people really will use. It only offers SSD storage. It runs just fine with the base amount of memory, but can be configured with up to two or three times more RAM, because more RAM is always better.3 This new M2 MacBook Air is that machine.

Thermals are where people seem spooked. People are just so scarred from their experience with x86-based laptops (Apple’s or otherwise) over the last decade or so, as Intel lost the performance-per-watt plot, that they just can’t bring themselves to believe that a thin, high-performance, long-lasting, cool-running laptop with no fan (or, in Apple’s parlance, no “active cooling system”) is possible, let alone available at consumer-level prices. I’m here to reassure you: the new M2 MacBook Air is thin, high-performance, long-lasting, cool-running, and has no fan.

Basically, there are millions of people whose computing needs would be more than met by the MacBook Air but who feel like they probably need a slightly thicker laptop with a fan on the inside and the word “Pro” stamped on the outside2 because their current ostensibly pro-level laptop — which may well be a MacBook Pro from Apple with Intel inside — struggles under the load of their daily work. It runs hot, the fans scream, and the battery doesn’t last long enough. Switching to this new thinner fan-less MacBook Air from a thicker MacBook Pro that makes frequent, clearly audible, use of its fan sounds like a downgrade. But for the overwhelming majority of Intel-based MacBook Pro users, it’s not. Switching to the new M2 MacBook Air would be the biggest upgrade in their computing lives.

The aforementioned “sounds too good to be true” incredulity is, I think, why the 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro exists. It’s why the M1 version of the 13-inch MacBook Pro sold well (second only to the MacBook Air) and why the new M2 version will continue to sell well. I expect it to remain the second-best selling Mac that Apple makes and yet, technically, it’s a machine almost no one should buy. But they do buy it, and like it, because they think they need it. It’s like people who think they want a big pickup truck or SUV yet never once use them for anything more than a smaller vehicle can handle. They just want it, because it feels like what they need, even though it isn’t in a practical sense.