Go back to 1999, the era of the Golden Convergence, when everyone was convinced that the PC on your desktop and the TV in your living room were going to combine into one big push-stream information furnace. Tell them there that in 25 years, the PC and the TV will converge into a headset that weighs a pound, fits over your eyes, and gives you utterly realistic windows hanging in space with your work in them or screens that can be as big as a house to watch movies on. It would seem like the most natural evolution of things in the world and the obvious next step.
This is why that 2007 rollout of the iPhone is up there with Doug Englebart’s 1968 “Mother Of All Demos” – Steve Jobs and Apple shifted the paradigm and moved the epicenter of the computing experience to the palm of your hand, and made the smartphone the default computing experience for the whole world. The only things we don’t use the phone for are for actual productivity work, or for kicking back and looking at TV and movies on a big display.
Hm.
It’s a mistake to think that the Vision Pro, publicly unveiled yesterday in an event Apple clearly intended to be in lineal descent from the Mac and the iPhone, is supposed to do everything. It is not. They did not show it being used for anything you’d routinely do with a phone other than maybe taking pics of the kids and looking at them. All of the things the Vision Pro does are things that you don’t want to have to do on a 6 inch screen. In so many ways, the Vision Pro is an attempt to take a desktop computer with you.
I mean, think about it. Most of us plug our laptop into a larger display for actual work work. More than one, sometimes. I hate having to have a laptop bigger than 13”, but that’s simply not enough screen at my age when you need to have Zoom and Slack and a browser open with the Jamf console and maybe CodeRunner and Terminal, never mind Outlook or (spits) Teams. Put this thing on, and all of a sudden, you are surrounded by the vision of computing that really began with Minority Report and tool full form in every Marvel movie: multiple virtual screens hanging in mid-air with everything you want surrounding you on top of your normal environment.
Facebook’s approach to VR has been to ship a minimum viable product and rely on hype that someday it will be useful for more than avatar chat with legless torsos. Their plan is to create a Yugo, sell it cheap, and hope people will snap it up on the promise it’ll get better. Apple is selling the Cadillac experience, something you can actually look at and say “ooh, that’s kind of cool” and “wow, that would be neat” and then implying that the price will come down to Ford Escort levels sooner than later (did I just date myself again? Woof) – and on current form, if you look at the iPad and Apple Watch experiences, it stands to reason that you should be able to get the equivalent of today’s Vision Pro for a price closer to $2000 by Christmas 2026 at the very latest.
And the thing is: everyone who looks at the thing in person and uses it says the same thing – it’s a demo, yes, but an exceptional one that quite frankly kicks the shit out of everything else in the AR/VR space. Yes it’s too expensive now for mass market, yes we don’t have an obvious killer app that makes this a must-have in the spirit of Pagemaker or Uber or Instagram, but even the most hardened cynics in the industry with the highest expectations have conceded that Apple has not gone frog-sticking without a light. There’s something there, even if we won’t know exactly what for a few years.
And quite frankly, they need the next thing. The smartphone crossed the finish line a decade ago, and while so many of the tweaks and gimcracks added to iOS in 17 are genuinely welcome and useful, they’re tweaks and gimcracks. If it weren’t slow as balls and riddled with bug vulnerabilities, I could pull out my old first-gen Moto X and have a satisfactory phone experience using Slack and Instagram and Reeder (okay maybe not Reeder) and play back music and podcasts and never be bothered. There’s nothing I need from my iPhone 13 mini, other than compact size, that I can’t get from the five year old iPhone X that is being sawn off by iOS 17. The only existing Apple product that intrigues me is the Apple Watch Ultra, and that’s mainly because it’s bigger and has a huge battery (cellular would be Very Nice To Have but until one of my phone carriers can support it, there’s no point).
Which brings us back to the other problem: my AirPods Pro were bought in October 2019, replaced under warranty in March 2022 (probably with refurbs, let’s be honest) and don’t have the battery life they had. My Series 6 Apple Watch was bought in September 2020 and benefits nontrivially from the addition of low-power mode. I’ve had the iPhone 13 mini a year (bought six months after release) and am already contemplating a battery replacement – and although I still intend to ride it into the ground, I suspect that by 2026 I’m going to need a bigger phone just for ease of reading, never mind battery life. If you have to replenish the ecosystem every five years, there will be a certain urgency to try to bring the price down on all of it if you can (which is a big part of how people end up buying a new $200 Android phone every 18 months). At some point, you’re going to look at the ecosystem and say “is there a piece of this I can drop” – for me, it was the original Series 0 Apple Watch, and I got by fine with a Fitbit for two years instead. If I were to wind up on a Vision Pro, that would probably be the death knell for the iPad, and the next iPhone would just have to be bigger. Apple was more than wiling and able to cannibalize its own products when it was just a question of migrating from iPod mini to iPod Nano, but will they be able to convince people to add that much to their every-X-years Apple rent?
I mean right now, the goal is to get at least three years out of every device and four out of everything with a touchscreen. By rights, there shouldn’t be a new watch on the horizon until next fall, there shouldn’t be a new phone on the horizon before fall 2026 and there shouldn’t be a new iPad in the mix…well, maybe ever at this rate, but definitely not before 2029 or so. We’ll see if Apple can make the Vision Pro indispensable…and if so, at whose expense.