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).

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.

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.

I’ve also seen a lot of users on Twitter asking “who is Horizon Worlds for?” And it’s a good question. I have an Oculus. Meta’s core metaverse platform, the thing that ostensively will be replacing Facebook soon as Meta’s main online portal, the central OS for the company’s VR world, is too boring for children, too complicated for old people, too time-consuming for anyone raising a family, and, though, it might eventually be good enough to function as some kind of inescapable cyberhell for white collar workers to have endless meetings inside of, at the moment it's hard to imagine a real use case for it. Except for one. I’ve come to conclusion that Meta’s metaversal aspirations are just a cold and cynical bet on a future where we just can’t go outside anymore. Meta’s big plan is to spend the next few years cobbling together something with enough baseline functionality that we can all migrate to it during the next pandemic. That’s the only explanation for the absolutely deranged amount of misplaced optimism Meta has about this stuff. This is a company who has decided they can make a lot of money off a catastrophic future by forcing us into their genital-free off-brand-Pixar panopticon and mining us for data while we Farmville ourselves to death.