The long-awaited presentation of Apple’s Vision Pro augmented reality no-glasses was a resounding success. The success of the presentation of the new “space computer” is measurable: the company’s shares rose 2%, it has displaced ChatGPT from the headlines and Mark Zuckerberg has been forced to speak about it in a speech to the Meta workers .
In October 2021, Zuckerberg had sold the world that the next iteration of the internet was the Metaverse: a virtual space in which to work, communicate and have fun, an extension of social networks where the keyword was “presence”. 24 billion dollars, 2 years and a company name change later we are where we were: the future of the internet seems to be neither legless avatars nor ridiculous versions of the Eiffel Tower and the Sagrada FamÃlia.
With these precedents, I had all the doubts in the world regarding the new Apple product; We started from a long way back and came from many cycles of frustrated expectations. The key has been 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 Metaverse.
Apple has successfully answered the question before: in 1984 with the Macintosh, in 2007 with the iPhone, and in 2019 with the iPad. Note that all these changes have three things in common: 1) they have redefined access to information (mouse with the Mac, finger with the iPhone), 2) the distance between the screen and the user has been shortened (to the satisfaction of ophthalmologists) and 3) they all looked ridiculous to us when they came out (who will buy a 500 dollar mobile? Who will answer a call with the watch?)
The Vision Pro (it is a spatial computer) follows its trend: it dispenses with controls and allows interaction with sight, voice and hand movements; its two 4k screens are glued to the eyes and right now everyone is wondering who will spend the $3,499 they are worth. The Pro of the name gives clues: within 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 will no longer seem so expensive. Recall that to buy a 1985 Macintosh, an office worker in the US had to work 212 hours to pay the $2,495 it was worth; today, to buy Vision Pro “only” need 91. The history of computing is to make computers disappear. Before we worked inside, then we sat them in front of us, later we put them in our pockets and now they effectively disappear from our sight because they take up everything. 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 Pro are just one more step in this direction. I imagined it smaller.
