Apple’s vision for the future
The world’s strongest brand redefined existing product categories and created entirely new ones; with the Vision Pro they may be doing both.
The consumer market for virtual and augmented reality headsets has not yet taken off. Despite the persistence of Oculus, then Meta and their metaverse, many other less-known VR products, and the endless supply of videos of people breaking lamps, punching walls, and jumping into doors and TV screens, ‘nerd goggles’ as some call them have yet cracked the mainstream for what seems like obvious reasons.
So when Apple recently announced their new Vision Pro headset, many were quick to criticize it as a rare misstep in the company’s long history of innovation. Some were measured in their reaction, while other tech media were ready to declare the Vision Pro a misfire. Why would Apple, with all the resources, expertise, and brand equity in the world, venture into a product category that was clearly failing? If history is any indicator, they are not looking to enter the category so much as redefine it altogether.
Compare Apple with Google, which innovates by launching minimally viable hardware and software products to see what can gain enough traction to capture the user feedback needed to evolve and thrive. They do this knowing most of their products will not work, so it is a numbers game. Google Glass, Google Wave, Google Buzz, are just a few examples of Google products that came, often with great fanfare, before disappearing.
For a company that is known to be constantly innovating, this is what we as users have come to expect from Google. The stuff works, generally, but the features will often change, some will go away with little warning, there is very little product support, and we accept the chaos of their open-source ecosystem as the price of ‘free’, all of which relies on consumer trust for their core search engine product.
Apple, on the other hand, seems to innovate in a very different way; they don’t place a million small bets and get their MVPs to market as soon as possible. But they also don’t just study a problem for years and take their time in iterating, to bring polished, high-performing products to launch. They seem to work for years on problems that aren’t even well-understood, at least publicly, before launching new products. This may be why they are able to make innovative products that we didn’t know we needed until they existed.
Apple’s calculated approach makes their entering the VR/AR headset space worth paying attention to. But what gives us any reason to think Apple can succeed where others haven’t? I can venture a guess that won’t be informed any actual knowledge. Having not evaluated the product myself, nor watched any of the presentations or product reviews yet, and not even intending to buy a Vision Pro anytime soon, I can only go on what I know about the company and the cues I see here:
The name itself. The product is not just a high-resolution display you can wear and watch things on, but presented as a computing device that you can literally see through and still engage in your surroundings. This positions it differently than the closed-off, immersive experiences of VR headsets. It is designed to be integrated, rather than isolated. That directly opposes the advertised experience of most existing products that you use to essentially disconnect from reality to enter a virtual one.
Price. While the fact that the Vision Pro will start at $3,499 has some people fainting because it is five or more times the price of the average VR headset, a price tag like this communicates that they believe this is a completely different type of product altogether, and they want to engage an audience that is eager to adopt, willing to pay to be on the bleeding edge, shares the values of the company, and is more interested in learning about where the future of this technology can go than paying the lowest price.
Spatial computing. Apple is deliberately using novel language that the general public is not familiar with so as to position this product as something that is both very different than both VR and AR, but something that can be integrated more into daily activity.
Disrupting their own product lines. If a product like Vision Pro and spatial computing has as much daily practical application as Apple promises, this could destroy demand for their traditional high resolution displays. That to me signals a long term commitment that could potentially mean a major shift in their business.
All of this suggests to me that Apple is being very intentional with the development and rollout of the Vision Pro.
I don’t say any of this as an acolyte; I don’t own even close to every Apple product and I am a laggard on the tech adoption scale, eschewing the latest and greatest in favor of the next-to-most-recent version of any hardware because it will be more proven and less expensive. But I can’t look at the Vision Pro and forget it is coming the same company that revolutionized personal computers, gave us the iPod, defined the modern smartphone and tablets, and created products like the Apple TV, AirPods, and the Apple Watch.
Based on that record alone, I think it’s the safe, conservative bet that Apple will create a new category here that could be just as consequential as the iPhone, and that the less-supported prediction is that Apple’s Vision Pro will be a rare flop.
Perhaps the skeptics know something the rest of us don’t and the inevitable failure of the Vision Pro will be one more indication to them that Apple, despite its continued growth under Tim Cook, is just not what it once when Jobs was at the helm.
Or, maybe like those poor headset users jumping into walls and breaking TV sets, they are just constrained by their current viewpoint and need a better way to see more of the world in front of them.
