Dig this exchange of commenters on a review of Apple’s new Vision Pro.
The Earlies are all a flutter. Meanwhile the Lates are loading their empty Bic pins with spit balls and taking dead aim at them.
As an investor, I’m heartened by the Earlies’ enthusiasm; but more personally, I’m down with the Lates’s cynicism.
Everything exists on a continuum. For example, while running down San Vicente Blvd in Santa Monica last week I marveled at the amount of money a fair number of West Los Angelenos spend on cars. Why do they do that I wondered? I concluded, rightly or wrongly, it was because they’re vain. Porsche, Mercedes, and Range Rover make bank on people’s vanity.
Just as I was starting to feel really superior I caught myself. Glancing at my watch, I saw my average pace for the run was 9 minutes and some seconds. Prompting me to pick up the pace in order to avoid uploading a 9 minute per mile run to Strava.* Why you’re asking yourself. See above paragraph. Granted, more subtle and nuanced, but same concept. The only difference, the degree of vanity.
What does this have to do with Apple’s new Vision Pro you’re wondering. Well, I’m here to connect those seemingly disparate dots.
Maybe the mostly likely reaction to the Vision Pro is to fear for a future where tech laden introversion obliterates interpersonal relations even further. But when I walk into the Plum Street Y weight room almost everyone is already listening to their own music and/or podcasts making spontaneous meetings and convo highly unlikely. Including me.** Same on subways and lots of other public spaces. People are already using smart phones, head phones, and related personal tech to tune out the outside world, including the people they are damn near rubbing elbows with.
Steve likes to talk to me whenever he sees me at the pool or in the weight room. In the weight room, when I see him approaching, I pop out one of my AirPods. Easy-peasy. This is what came to mind when watching this Casey Neistat’s review of the Vision Pro.
Just watch from the 7+ minute mark. The first seven minutes are ridiculous, dystopian, depressing, pick your most negative adjective. But let’s do what Casey does at the end of his review and fast forward to a future where Vision Pro-like products are way way lighter, less obtrusive, and less dorky.
Something like eye glasses that morph into sun glasses in the sun seems likely. It would be easy to sit alone on a bench in New York City and switch seamlessly from being alone in your own multimedia world and then either resting the glasses on top of your head or letting them dangle around your neck whenever someone sits down next to you.
There’s no putting this personal tech toothpaste back in the tube, but my tribe, the introverts, will not roam the world alone, figuratively or literally. There will still be a normal distribution of extroverts. And we will still talk to one another even after the Vision Pro becomes semi-affordable and reaches critical mass.
Vain people will even continue expanding their circle of friends, and sometimes even fall in love, and sometimes even have children.
*Fail.
**Love me my AirPods. You can pry them from cold, dead hands.
Vision Pro. John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, is the rare “Elements of Style” writer who says things simply and succinctly. Vision Pro’s importance is evident in what may be his longest post ever.
Quite literally, for AAPL investors, here’s the money paragraph.
“But I can recommend buying Vision Pro solely for use as a personal theater. I paid $5,000 for my 77-inch LG OLED TV a few years ago. Vision Pro offers a far more compelling experience (including far more compelling spatial surround sound). You’d look at my TV set and almost certainly agree that it’s a nice big TV. But watching movies in the Disney+ and TV apps will make you go “Wow!” These are experiences I never imagined I’d be able to have in my own home (or, say, while flying across the country in an airplane).”
Fast forwarding to Gruber’s final paragraphs:
“Spatial computing in VisionOS is the real deal. It’s a legit productivity computing platform right now, and it’s only going to get better. It sounds like hype, but I truly believe this is a landmark breakthrough like the 1984 Macintosh and the 2007 iPhone.
But if you were to try just one thing using Vision Pro — just one thing — it has to be watching a movie in the TV app, in theater mode. Try that, and no matter how skeptical you were beforehand about the Vision Pro’s price tag, your hand will start inching toward your wallet.”
If you know Gruber’s work, you know it’s not hype. However, the question Gruber and his fellow tech analysts never seem to get around to is whether it will improve our quality of life. Based on Gruber’s review, maybe it will if what’s keeping you from living a more fulfilling life is the unsatisfying quality of your home television and movie watching experience.
Pressing Pause 