Matthew Mandel

I’m super excited about Apple’s new AR headset, the Vision Pro. I can’t stop thinking about how cool it will be to blow up my computer screen and enmesh it in the world around me. [NOTE: I still haven’t been able to find a way to try a Vision Pro. If you’re reading this and you know someone who could help me remedy that, I would be very grateful for your help!]

You can play a semantics game about whether to call it VR or AR or XR or spatial computing or something else, but the essence of the thing is that instead of blocking out the space around you to focus on a small screen, it’s going to turn your space itself into a computer interface. Or as Tim Cook puts it, “it’s the first Apple product you look through, not at”. A lot of VR is unsatisfying not just because of the latency or lack of apps but because of how it totally tunes out the world around you. Instead of regressing into further narrowness, the Vision Pro seems like a step toward merging (harmonizing?) our computing experience with our experience of the real world. Between work, entertainment, and social media, we already spend an absurd percentage of our days interfacing with a computer. Instead of trying to reverse that trend by awkwardly distancing ourselves from virtual worlds and losing the amazing things computers can offer us, we’ll have the opportunity to bring the boons of the Information Age to our experience of the physical world.

Ben Thompson points out that the Vision Pro is well situated to eat the Mac and iPad, whose main functions are productivity and content. If the Vision Pro delivers on easy to use limitless work spaces and uniquely immersive content experiences, it’s pretty easy to see how it replaces the laptop and tablet. Thompson stops at the iPhone though:

What is left in place in this vision is the iPhone: I think that smartphones are the pinnacle in terms of computing, which is to say that the Vision Pro makes sense everywhere the iPhone doesn’t.

This is definitely true as long as the Vision Pro only has two hours of battery life and is relatively bulky. But the endpoint of the Vision Pro platform is certainly to combine the productivity of the Mac, the viewing experience of the iPad, and the pervasiveness of the iPhone all into one. It’s not hard to imagine a future where people look back at videos from the 2010s and are amazed that we ran around craning our necks to stare at tiny little screens all day. Like AirPods augmented our auditory reality with voices of people not actually there, nth gen Vision Pros will allow us to keep our chins up and stay engaged with the world while occasionally glancing at texts or emails.

The new form factor is more than enough to make the Vision Pro interesting, but I’m also enchanted by how uncertain its future is. Some use cases feel like no brainers: collaborating on virtual Smartboards, live event experiences, natural interaction with 3D models, but there’s just so much white space. What do we do differently when real estate isn’t a constraint on our computing interface? What new tools for thought do we build when we have more degrees of freedom for input/expression? If you’re tinkering with visionOS native apps, I’d really love to meet!