I agree 100%. But I don’t see a large market for the VP in the near future. Mainly because most of the people I’ve observed only use two or three apps to do their job.
At my last company most used Mail, Safari, and a spreadsheet. And there was a lot of interaction between employees and managers throughout the day. So “clunky headsets” probably wouldn’t work for them, or for people like H.R. managers who maintain an “open door” to encourage people to come to them with their requests and problems.
I think something closer to regular glasses will have a much higher adoption. The question is how much runway will Apple give the VP? As others have said, “Is the Vision Pro a 40 year device, or a 4 year device?”
Good article. In 2017 the majority of our employees only needed Safari to do their job. We continued to use mail.app, and excel or libraoffice, etc. but the option was there if we needed it.
Today I do very little computation on my Mac or iPad, everything is cloud based. I’ve never been able to work without a network connection so this doesn’t have a downside.
Personally I despise the shift to the cloud and everything being a webapp. It’s so slow and I liked things like keyboard shortcuts. I miss the days of desktop apps. (Although I use the desktop version of Excel all day long, but even that is slow to save thanks to our use of OneDrive and a crappy network).
It’s not the solution for everything. Our graphic team that was constantly creating and modifying images wasn’t happy using servers running on gigabit ethernet.
I appreciate your positive speculations. It’s good to be positive, but wishful thinking is still wishful thinking.
I don’t agree that “we will learn to use new tech in a healthy way.” I don’t see evidence of that in the real world of tech. Instead, I see the contrary.
It’s generally acknowledged there is a huge problem with people not using tech in a healthy way. All you have to do is look around in any public setting to see how the now not-new tech of smartphones is not being used in a healthy way. Or read the many articles and studies indicating the unhealthy common use of this tech. Or read about schools banning cell phones (as you cited) because they’re not being used in a healthy way.
Tech is not necessarily healthy-self-correcting, especially when there are huge profits to be gained by encouraging people to use it in a unhealthy manner.
The “bigger companies” that I always see cited: Spotify, Netflix and YouTube are all direct rivals of Apple in streaming services. This isn’t a problem with app developers avoiding Vision Pro, it appears to be a problem with Apple’s rivals not wanting to support a new platform where they’re not in total control. This reminds me of the original Apple Watch, where most pundits claimed the watch was useless because it wasn’t a good Facebook or Twitter platform, and those were apparently the only thing they could conceive that people used.
I may be out of the loop because I’ve been working from home since 2017. To me a bunch of people in an office is the definition of the old world. Zoom is second nature now for better or worse, but I’m looking forward to spending a good portion of my workday in Vision Pro. At home mind you
At some point the concept might look more like Minority Report or standard glasses. I don’t mind looking like a fool while being an early adopter. Lots of people made fun of me with my first gen AirPods too. iPhone too for that matter.
That’s human nature. Once Tech becomes sufficiently ubiquitous, people will use it by behaving in exactly the way they always behave: a mixture of virtues and vices. Human nature will be exploited for profit, and it’s generally more profitable to pander to human selfishness and immediate gratification than it is to appeal to self-restraint and moral uprightness. It’s not smartphones that make people behave badly and there were a million imaginative ways to do that long before tech appeared.
I have sympathy with where you are coming from. MacSparky’s view that very clever people in large corporations use sophisticated psychological science to capture our attention, time, behaviour and attitudes in order to exploit us for profit or power is obviously true, as is his humility about recognising that stuff impacts us far more than we consciously recognise. But I think it’s vital to recognise where the problem is: people aren’t very rational or intentional and exploiting that has made some people extraordinarily wealthy - if they weren’t exploiting us via tech, they’d still be exploiting us.
It’s great that you work from home and don’t have to worry about being in an office full of people. I work from home also. However, we’re a distinct minority. According to the latest statistics, the “old world” as you call it is still about 75% of all working people, who don’t work from home. And the statistic of numbers of people working from home has been dropping since the pandemic ended. It’s not expected that most people in the foreseeable future will be working from home. So the “old world” is still the “real world” we live in.
To me the issue is not just “looking like a fool,” but more about the social isolation and impacts of wearing a headset. Many people felt the negative social impact of wearing face masks. Many experienced it as dehumanizing and making interactions much less personal. And they didn’t cover the wearer’s eyes.
Also, an iPhone or a set of AirPods did not cover half your face, including your eyes where so much communication occurs between people. Not exactly a parallel situation.
I I recently watched a 360 degree video about Rio de Janeiro, a short informative documentary. It was beautiful and it felt like you were there. You could look in every direction, up, down, there were no gaps. This is only possible with VR, in this case with the Meta Quest 3. Nevertheless, AR is also useful. Both are technically demanding, AR even more so than VR. And of course the Vision Pro can do both.
But that is entertainment, and I really don’t care for that level of entertainment per se. Now if it was a detailed walk through of an archeological dig maybe but as I said all the reasons I’d want a Vision Pro are all based on AR not VR. That doesn’t mean that VR might not be what makes it a success or not but it’s selling the technology short to just focus on that when there are so many more useful things that could use that system to really improve user experiences and get things done that are hard or impossible without the overlay of AR on the real world.
In an interview with Ben Thompson on Stratechery, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said:
“We have to be careful about making sure that we’re not investing in places that are not really yielding a return, and I would say we’ll see where things go with Vision Pro,” Peters responded. “Certainly we’re always in discussions with Apple to try and figure that out but right now, the device is so subscale that it’s not really particularly relevant to most of our members.”
While there are not a lot of people like me, I haven’t had a Netflix account in a decade. There is a 99% chance that I will be subscribing to Disney for at least of one month just to use it with the AVP. If I like it, maybe longer (I have no idea what to expect from it).
One of the things I hear on finance podcasts every time Netflix comes up is that they have stalled on getting new people in. They pretty much have everyone already in places like the US. So sure, don’t invest any money on a tiny product like this, but ignoring and turning off the iPad app is silly (assuming it works).
Yep, that’s global, they would like to grow in the US because of bigger margins, but they struggle here. Not an expert, just going what I hear (literally last week). By struggle I mean everyone who wants Netflix in the US, has it.
I think with a new product like this the problem is that talking about it immediately sends people into wild speculations about what it will look like it in the future, what it will be useful for, what it won’t be useful for, and predictions about what tech in general will look like. All of which is basically useless.
I prefer to raise questions about what it looks like right now, my gut sense in seeing people using it, how it will be reviewed by nerds enraptured by a bright new shiny thing, and how it should be evaluated.
I rotate streaming services every month or two, depending on what they are offering. So I subscribed to Netflix one month in 2023, and will probably do the same this year.
None of them, IMO, are worth subscribing to full time.
What I think is interesting is how many podcasters jump to the “X, Y, or Z app isn’t on AVP because developers are mad” argument. I feel like we need to go back to Logic Fallacies 101. That might be true. Or it could also be true that the numbers of expected sales don’t rise to the level that Netflix wants to sink resources into this yet.
But it’s more fun to draw causation lines to fit a desired narrative.
