The long-awaited unveiling of Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality non-glasses was a resounding success. The success of the presentation of the new “space computer” is measurable: the company’s shares rose by 2%, it has displaced ChatGPT from the headlines and Mark Zuckerberg has been forced to talk about it in an address to Meta workers.
In October 2021 Zuckerberg had sold the world that the next iteration of the internet was the metaverse: a virtual space where we work, communicate and have fun, an extension of social networks where the key word was “presence” . 24 billion dollars, two years and a change of company name later we are where we were: the future of the internet seems to be not avatars without legs or ridiculous versions of the Eiffel Tower and the Sagrada Familia.
With these precedents, I had all the doubts in the world regarding Apple’s new product: we were coming from far behind and coming from many cycles of frustrated expectations. The key was once again to change the question: the presentation was not about how to have fun in a fantasy world, but about how to “increase” the real space to be more productive; Apple was not responding to the future of the internet, but to the future of personal computing, hence the zero mentions of virtual reality and the metaverse.
Apple had already answered the question successfully before: in 1984 with the Macintosh, in 2007 with the iPhone and in 2019 with the iPad. Notice that all these changes have three things in common: 1) they have redefined access to information (mouse on the Mac, finger on the iPhone); 2) the screen-to-user distance has been shortened (much to the delight of ophthalmologists), and 3) they all looked ridiculous to us when they came out (who’s going to buy a $500 cell phone? Who’s going to answer a call with their watch?)
The Vision Pro (it’s a space computer) follows the trend: it dispenses with controls and allows interaction with sight, voice and hand movements; its two 4K screens are glued to the eyes, and by now everyone is wondering who will spend the $3,499 they cost. The Pro in the name gives clues: in a couple of versions the Vision will come out, without the Pro, at half the price, and if they do the work of a computer they won’t seem so expensive. Remember that to buy a Macintosh in 1985, a US office worker had to work 212 hours to pay the $2,495 it was worth; today, to buy a Vision Pro “only” you need 91.
The history of computing is that of making computers disappear. We used to work inside them, then we sat them in front of us, then we put them in our pockets and now they effectively disappear from our sight because they take up the whole thing. We will have to wait another ten years for them to disappear completely and for the concept of spatial computing to become a reality. The Vision Pros are just another step in that direction. I imagined it smaller.
