"Will it be different?" is the key question the regular people ask. They don't want there to be extra steps or new procedures. They sure as hell don't want the icons to look different or, God forbid, be moved to a new place.

These bright and capable people who will one day help you through knee replacement surgery all bought a Mac when they were college frehmen and then they never updated it. Almost all of them had the default programs still in the dock. They are regular users. You with all your fancy calendars, note taking apps and your customized terminal are an outlier. Never forget.

The majority of iPhone users and Mac owners have no idea what's coming though. They are going to wake up on Monday to an unwelcome notification that there is an update available. Many of them will ask their techie friends (like you) if there is a way to make the update notification go away. They will want to know if they have to install it.

But what brings this all together is the battery life. I observed real-world uptime of about 15 hours, a figure that is unheard of in the PC space. And when you combine this literal all-day battery life the MacBook Air’s light weight and thinness, and its lack of active cooling, what you end up with is a unicorn. We just don’t have laptops like this that run Windows. It feels miraculous.

But cross-device platform features like AirDrop (seamless file copy between Apple devices), AirPlay (seamless audio/video redirection between Apple and compatible third-party devices), Continuity (a suite of cross-device integration capabilities), Sidecar (use an iPad as an external display for the Mac), Handoff (the ability to pick up work on another device and continue from where you were), and others are all great arguments for moving to the Apple ecosystem.

It’s the little things, like effortlessly opening the lid with one finger and seeing the display fire up instantly every single time. Or the combination of these daily successes, the sharp contrast with the unpredictable experience that I get with every Windows laptop I use, experiences that are so regular in their unpredictableness, so unavoidable, that I’ve almost stopped thinking about them. Until now, of course. The attention to detail and consistency I see in the MacBook Air is so foreign to the Windows ecosystem that it feels like science fiction. But having now experienced it, my expectations are elevated.

Some of the topics I touch on: Why I believe Vision Pro may be an over-engineered “devkit” The genius & audacity behind some of Apple’s hardware decisions Gaze & pinch is an incredible UI superpower and major industry ah-ha moment Why the Vision Pro software/content story is so dull and unimaginative Why most people won’t use Vision Pro for watching TV/movies Apple’s bet in immersive video is a total game-changer for live sports Why I returned my Vision Pro… and my Top 10 wishlist to reconsider Apple’s VR debut is the best thing that ever happened to Oculus/Meta My unsolicited product advice to Meta for Quest Pro 2 and beyond

Apple really played it safe in the design of this first VR product by over-engineering it. For starters, Vision Pro ships with more sensors than what’s likely necessary to deliver Apple’s intended experience. This is typical in a first-generation product that’s been under development for so many years. It makes Vision Pro start to feel like a devkit.

A sensor party: 6 tracking cameras, 2 passthrough cameras, 2 depth sensors(plus 4 eye-tracking cameras not shown)

it’s easy to understand two particularly important decisions Apple made for the Vision Pro launch: Designing an incredible in-store Vision Pro demo experience, with the primary goal of getting as many people as possible to experience the magic of VR through Apple’s lenses — most of whom have no intention to even consider a $4,000 purchase. The demo is only secondarily focused on actually selling Vision Pro headsets. Launching an iconic woven strap that photographs beautifully even though this strap simply isn’t comfortable enough for the vast majority of head shapes. It’s easy to conclude that this decision paid off because nearly every bit of media coverage (including and especially third-party reviews on YouTube) uses the woven strap despite the fact that it’s less comfortable than the dual loop strap that’s “hidden in the box”.

Apple’s relentless and uncompromising hardware insanity is largely what made it possible for such a high-res display to exist in a VR headset, and it’s clear that this product couldn’t possibly have launched much sooner than 2024 for one simple limiting factor — the maturity of micro-OLED displays plus the existence of power-efficient chipsets that can deliver the heavy compute required to drive this kind of display (i.e. the M2).

Strong technologies capture the imaginations of technology enthusiasts. That is why many important technologies start out as weekend hobbies. Enthusiasts vote with their time, and, unlike most of the business world, have long-term horizons. They build from first principles, making full use of the available resources to design technologies as they ought to exist.

We can take nature’s superpowers and expand them across many more vectors that are interesting to humans: Across scale — far and near, binoculars, zoom, telescope, microscope Across wavelength — UV, IR, heatmaps, nightvision, wifi, magnetic fields, electrical and water currents Across time — view historical imagery, architectural, terrain, geological, and climate changes Across culture — experience the relevance of a place in books, movies, photography, paintings, and language Across space — travel immersively to other locations for tourism, business, and personal connections Across perspective — upside down, inside out, around corners, top down, wider, narrower, out of body Across interpretation — alter the visual and artistic interpretation of your environment, color-shifting, saturation, contrast, sharpness

Headset displays connect sensory extensions directly to your vision. Equipped with sensors that perceive beyond human capabilities, and access to the internet, they can provide information about your surroundings wherever you are. Until now, visual augmentation has been constrained by the tiny display on our phone. By virtue of being integrated with your your eyesight, headsets can open up new kinds of apps that feel more natural. Every app is a superpower. Sensory computing opens up new superpowers that we can borrow from nature. Animals, plants and other organisms can sense things that humans can’t

The first mass-market bicycle for the senses was Apple’s AirPods. Its noise cancellation and transparency mode replace and enhance your hearing. Earbuds are turning into ear computers that will become more easily programmable. This can enable many more kinds of hearing. For example, instantaneous translation may soon be a reality

For the past seven decades, computers have been designed to enhance what your brain can do — think and remember. New kinds of computers will enhance what your senses can do — see, hear, touch, smell, taste. The term spatial computing is emerging to encompass both augmented and virtual reality. I believe we are exploring an even broader paradigm: sensory computing. The phone was a keyhole for peering into this world, and now we’re opening the door.

What happens when put on a headset and open the “Math” app? How could seeing the world through math help you understand both better?

Advances in haptics may open up new kinds of tactile sensations. A kind of second skin, or softwear, if you will. Consider that Apple shipped a feature to help you find lost items that vibrates more strongly as you get closer. What other kinds of data could be translated into haptic feedback?

It may sound far-fetched, but converting olfactory patterns into visual patterns could open up some interesting applications. Perhaps a new kind of cooking experience? Or new medical applications that convert imperceptible scents into visible patterns?

When I started my career 3G was the hot topic, and every investor kept asking ‘what’s the killer app for 3G?’ It turned out that the killer app for having the internet in your pocket was, well, having the internet in your pocket. But with each of those, we knew what to build next, and with VR we don’t. That tells me that VR has a place in the future. It just doesn’t tell me what kind of place.

The successor to the smartphone will be something that doesn’t just merge AR and VR but make the distinction irrelevant - something that you can wear all day every day, and that can seamlessly both occlude and supplement the real world and generate indistinguishable volumetric space.

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.

Betting against a first-generation Apple product is a bad trade — from infamous dismissals of the iPhone to disappointment with the original iPad. In fact, this is a reflection of Apple’s strategy: Start with a product that’s more an elegant proof-of-concept than a prime-time hit; rely on early adopters to provide enough runway for its engineers to keep iterating; and trust in unmatched capital, talent, brand equity, and staying power to morph a first-gen toy into a third-gen triumph

We are a long way from making three screens, a glass shield, and an array of supporting hardware light enough to wear for an extended period. Reviewers were (purposefully) allowed to wear the Vision Pro for less than half an hour, and nearly every one said comfort was declining even then. Avatar: The Way of Water is 3 hours and 12 minutes.

Meta’s singular strategic objective is to escape second-tier status and, like Apple and Alphabet, control its distribution. And its path to independence runs through Apple Park. Zuckerberg is spending the GDP of a small country to invent a new world, the metaverse, where Apple doesn’t own the roads or power stations. Vision Pro is insurance against the metaverse evolving into anything more than an incel panic room.

The only product category where VR makes difference is good VR games. Price is not limiting factor, the quality of VR experience is. Beat Saber is good and fun and physical exercise. Half Life: Alyx, is amazing. VR completely supercharges horror games, and scary stalking shooters. Want to fear of your life and get PTSD in the comfort of your home? You can do it. Games can connect people and provide physical exercise. If the 3rd iteration of Vision Pro is good for 2 hours of playing for $2000 Apple will kill the console market. Playstations no more. Apple is not a gaming company, but if Vision Pro becomes better and slightly cheaper, Apple becomes gaming company against its will.

Apple Vision is technically a VR device that experientially is an AR device, and it’s one of those solutions that, once you have experienced it, is so obviously the correct implementation that it’s hard to believe there was ever any other possible approach to the general concept of computerized glasses.

the Vision is taking that captured image, processing it, and displaying it in front of your eyes in around 4 milliseconds.

Real-time operating systems are used in embedded systems for applications with critical functionality, like a car, for example: it’s ok to have an infotainment system that sometimes hangs or even crashes, in exchange for more flexibility and capability, but the software that actually operates the vehicle has to be reliable and unfailingly fast. This is, in broad strokes, one way to think about how visionOS works: while the user experience is a time-sharing operating system that is indeed a variation of iOS, and runs on the M2 chip, there is a subsystem that primarily operates the R1 chip that is real-time; this means that even if visionOS hangs or crashes, the outside world is still rendered under that magic 12 milliseconds.

I’ll be honest: what this looked like to me was a divorced dad, alone at home with his Vision Pro, perhaps because his wife was irritated at the extent to which he got lost in his own virtual experience.

What can you do with this thing? There’s a good chance that, whatever killer apps may emerge, they don’t need the entire complement of sensors and widgets to deliver a great experience. As that’s discovered, Apple will be able to open a second tier in this category and sell you a simplified model at a lower cost. Meanwhile, the more they manufacture the essentials—high density displays, for example—the higher their yields will become, the more their margins will increase. It takes time to perfect manufacturing processes and build up capacity. Vision Pro isn’t just about 2024’s model. It’s setting up the conditions for Apple to build the next five years of augmented reality wearable technology.

VR/AR doesn’t have to suck ass. It doesn’t have to give you motion sickness. It doesn’t have to use these awkward, stupid controllers you accidentally swap into the wrong hand. It doesn’t have to be fundamentally isolating. If this paradigm shift could have been kicked off by cheap shit, we’d be there already. May as well pursue the other end of the market.

what starts as clunky needn’t remain so. As the technology for augmented reality becomes more affordable, more lightweight, more energy efficient, more stylish, it will be more feasible for more people to use. In the bargain, we’ll get a display technology entirely unshackled from the constraints of a monitor stand. We’ll have much broader canvases subject to the flexibility of digital creativity, collaboration and expression. What this unlocks, we can’t say.

A lot of people see software as a list of features, hardware as a list of specs. But when you think about how much time we spend with these things, maybe they just aren’t that utilitarian. We think of buildings not just as volumes of conditioned air — but also as something architected, as something that can have a profound effect on how you feel, something that can have value in itself (historical buildings and such).

Rather than debate the merits of these “let’s bring back some ports from five years ago” decisions piecemeal, I think they’re best explained by Apple revisiting what the pro in “MacBook Pro” means. What it stands for. Apple uses the word pro in so many products. Sometimes they really do mean it as professional. Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, for example, truly are tools for professionals. With something like AirPods Pro, though, the word pro really just means something more like nicer or deluxe. A couth euphemism for premium.

One thing I learned long ago is that people who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it. Thus they chalk up iOS and native Mac-app enthusiasm to being hypnotized by marketing, Pied Piper style.

Those who see and value the artistic value in software and interface design have overwhelmingly wound up on iOS; those who don’t have wound up on Android. Of course there are exceptions. Of course there are iOS users and developers who are envious of Android’s more open nature. Of course there are Android users and developers who do see how crude the UIs are for that platform’s best-of-breed apps. But we’re left with two entirely different ecosystems with entirely different cultural values — nothing like (to re-use my example from yesterday) the Coke-vs.-Pepsi state of affairs in console gaming platforms.

the desire to ship quickly was counterbalanced by a demanding, comprehensive perfectionism. Most commercial projects are driven by commercial values, where the goal is to maximize profits by outperforming your competition. In contrast, the Macintosh was driven more by artistic values, oblivious to competition, where the goal was to be transcendently brilliant and insanely great.

Unlike other parts of Apple, which were becoming more conservative and bureaucratic as the company grew, the early Mac team was organized more like a start-up company. We eschewed formal structure and hierarchy, in favor of a flat meritocracy with minimal managerial oversight, like the band of revolutionaries we aspired to be.

When Messages in iCloud is enabled, iMessage, Apple Messages for Business, text (SMS), and MMS messages are removed from the user’s existing iCloud Backup and are instead stored in an end-to-end encrypted CloudKit container for Messages. The user’s iCloud Backup retains a key to that container. If the user later disables iCloud Backup, that container’s key is rolled, the new key is stored only in iCloud Keychain (inaccessible to Apple and any third parties), and new data written to the container can’t be decrypted with the old container key.

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.

Google’s system was seemingly in the wrong in Mark’s case, and the company’s checks and balances failed as well. (Google permanently deleted his account, including his Google Fi cellular plan, so he lost both his longtime email address and his phone number, along with all the other data he’d stored with Google.) But it’s worth noting that Apple’s proposed fingerprinting system generated several orders of magnitude more controversy than Google’s already-in-place system ever has, simply because Apple’s proposal involved device-side fingerprinting, and Google’s system runs on their servers.

The impact is particularly noticeable among Generation Z and millennials, the first generations to come of age with the possibility of knowing where their peers are at all times. It has changed how friends communicate with one another and blurred lines of privacy. Friends now, sometimes unwittingly yet obsessively, check one another’s locations and bypass whole conversations — about where somebody is, what they are doing or how their days are going — when socializing. All of that information can be gleaned from Find My.

Although Find My is not marketed as a social experience, sharing locations has become a test of sorts, much like being included on a close friends list on Instagram or on a private story on Snapchat can signal closer friendships.

With Find My, “you aren’t actively choosing to do something as you reach a certain location because you’re constantly sharing your location,” said Michael Saker, a senior lecturer in digital sociology at City, University of London. As a result, “there’s an intimacy that’s intertwined with that act,” he added. “There’s a verification of being friends.”

Mainframes were followed by PCs, and then the web, and then smartphones. Each of these new models started out looking limited and insignificant, but each of them unlocked a new market that was so much bigger that it pulled in all of the investment, innovation and company creation and so grew to overtake the old one. Meanwhile, the old models didn’t go away, and neither, mostly, did the companies that had been created by them. Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them.

There’s an old saying that the first fifty years of the car industry were about creating car companies and working out what cars should look like, and the second fifty years were about what happened once everyone had a car - they were about McDonalds and Walmart, suburbs and the remaking of the world around the car, for good and of course bad. The innovation in cars became everything around the car. One could suggest the same today about smartphones - now the innovation comes from everything else that happens around them.