Let’s start with a big caveat: We don’t know how Apple’s Vision Pro headset will handle the real world.
After years of anticipation, Apple on Monday unveiled the headset — which mixes elements of the digital and physical world — and offered big promises on performance and mainstream potential.
Wall Street evidently wasn’t impressed by the price or the time frame: After a day of stock market gains that pushed Apple to record highs and within distance of a $3 trillion market cap, its shares fell as the world took in what the company had spent years developing.
Apple has done what many technology observers had thought impossible. It has made mixed-reality computing interesting and appealing. Unlike competing devices, which leave the wearer feeling closed off, Apple is promising a device that reduces the intrusiveness of the technology as much as possible. The headset wearer’s eyes are visible to those around them, allowing a simulation of eye contact without needing to remove the device. It’s a feature that in time I expect will become standard on every mixed-reality device and will feel so obvious we’ll forget it ever needed inventing.
Navigation in the device is controlled with your eyes and your hands and not, as Apple’s presentation made note, using the clunky controllers needed for other devices, such as those for rival Meta Platforms Inc.’s Quest headset. The new operating system, visionOS, keeps the visual language of the iPad and iPhones, and with it, a sense of familiarity with how apps work.
Ironically, Facebook parent Meta might benefit from the Vision Pro rollout. Its headset is available today, and costs just a fraction of the Apple device. The new Meta Quest 3, announced just last week to grab a few days of headlines before Apple’s launch, costs $499 and already boasts a healthy catalog of apps and games.
A deal with games development platform Unity is a start — and compatibility with existing iPad augmented reality apps means there will at least be some things to do from day one. But it will be a challenge to convince developers to pour resources into a device that for a long time will have a tiny number of users.
But that’s the reality of a first version. The first iPhone didn’t have an app store. The Apple 1 computer, released in 1976, barely did anything at all by today’s standards. As it happens, that first Apple computer cost $666, or about $3,500 in today’s dollars.
Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper