Thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro
Apple announced Vision Pro last month, and I’ve been thinking about its implications as both a developer interested in building on the platform and a consumer using the device. Here’s a completely random, unordered, hopefully interesting list of thoughts:
A New Paradigm in Computing
New computing paradigms are determined by truly innovative user experiences. The first Mac let you interact with a mouse, the iPod had the touch wheel, the iPhone had the touchscreen and the Vision Pro will have hand gestures and eye tracking. Meta, with their line of quests, was not able to invent a new computing paradigm, but Apple was.
The device will track your eyes and determine where exactly you are looking on the screen. And simple hand gestures will allow you to interact with apps. This strikes me as a more natural way of interacting with computers than anything before. Using your phone is not nearly as natural - you’re looking down at a small rectangular object. With Vision Pro, you can look straight ahead and continue doing some of the things you would normally be doing because it’s not fully immersive VR like a Meta Quest.
Apple vs. Meta
VR hasn’t really taken off yet, despite Meta spending tens of billions of dollars per year. Apple has a line that goes something along the lines of “we’re aren’t going to be the first, but we will be the best”. For Vision Pro, this seems to be true. The device is high quality with 23 million pixels, two 4K OLED screens, new hand gestures, and eye tracking. Apple is bringing the “Wow” factor with the device which will make it much more appealing than Meta’s average-quality devices. In addition, Apple also has a big ecosystem advantage over Meta. So many of us already use Apple phones and laptops, so using the Vision Pro will be much more seamless. Our favorite apps will be seamlessly ported over to Apple Vision making the device much more appealing.
Apple’s marketing is shining already. The imagery of the device is amazing and their new lingo like “Spatial computing” is capturing people on social media. These are all huge advantages over Meta’s line of Quests that give Apple a real shot at creating another home run product in a new category.
Implications for developers
As a product developer, Vision Pro is a very exciting, but challenging platform to build for. There likely won’t be as many greenfield opportunities as there were for the original iPhone App Store because the biggest iPhone app developers will quickly port over their apps immediately to Vision Pro. It’s also hard to imagine new applications without the chance of using the device until early next year. Still, there will be a great opportunity to build new, never thought of before experiences on the new platform. It’s also a great time to get into Swift and Swift UI, Apple’s programming language that is gaining widespread use. I’ve personally spent some time over the last few weeks learning more about Swift UI so I can hopefully build a beautiful application for Vision Pro or iOS. I’m currently brainstorming app ideas for the Vision Pro; here’s what I have so far:
VR therapy with an AI
Fully Immersive whiteboarding app
Mediation app
Historical location tours
Live comedy app
Learn hardware engineering
Historical Figure Meetings - chat with Steve Jobs or Leonardo Da Vinci.
(here’s my hello world Apple Vision Pro app)
Potential Downsides
With Apple’s device being so life-like and high quality, I hope we don’t get to a place where people prefer living in Apple’s mixed reality world over normal reality. When Apple was talking about the battery life of the device, they mentioned that the Vision Pro has two hours of battery or all day when plugged in. How close are we to a world resembling the Matrix where people “plug in” for all-day mixed reality use?
The fizzle-out problem
Apple needs to try and avoid the main problem that has plagued VR up until this point, which I’ll call the “fizzle-out problem”. People love the devices for the first few weeks or months but then completely stop using them once the Wow factor is gone. How can Apple overcome this? I think the main way is for Apple to create a device that’s a comparable or better experience than using a laptop. That means, among other things, that the Vision Pro has to be great for work purposes. If Apple can simply create a device that I enjoy working on it and I prefer it to work on my laptop, they’ll have a smashing hit.
Overall, I’m very excited about the release of Apple Vision Pro, and I can’t wait to try one and see how it evolves over time.