The Apple Vision Pro Was Always Doomed to Fail
Imagine you just spent $4,000 on an Apple Vision Pro.
You excitedly bring it home and set it down on your coffee table. As you open the premium-feeling Apple packaging, the smell of the fresh plastic and metal fills you with a familiar joy. You strap on the headset and enter an intoxicating setup mode that immediately introduces you to the feeling of spatial computing. Your body feels like it's in that world, and although it's just a bunch of bland menus, you're pumped.
You enter the main UI, free from the tutorial shackles. The virtual world is your oyster. Now it's time to populate your home screen with apps. You start with applications for working, such as email and word processing. This is a serious grown-up VR/AR headset, after all. But now it's time to play. You start watching your favorite YouTube channel, probably Aperture of course, and the viewing experience is impressive—maybe even better than your large TV.
Your new device is brimming with potential, but the real world and its responsibilities call your attention. Luckily, this headset was built to keep your needs in the outside world in mind. You can see the real-life space around you; in a way, what you're actually seeing is a camera feed meant to capture the environment around you as accurately as possible. It may not be perfect, but hey, it's pretty cool.
But now, your spouse's home. You try to interact with them, but that proves frustrating. You take the headset off to talk. As soon as you feel it's socially acceptable to return to your virtual world, you put the headset back on. You notice your neck is getting tired—sore even. The strap is comfortable but can only do so much to offset the device's weight.
In the first week, you use the Apple Vision Pro several hours a day. You take it with you on a flight, use it to work in a coffee shop, and once, you even dare to watch a movie on the subway. After about two weeks, you pick up your headset, put it on, and realize that the novelty has faded. It's still impressive, don't get me wrong, but the weight and time it takes to set up start to become an inconvenience.
You're traveling to see your mom, and you know things will be busy, so you decide to just skip the headset and stick to your phone and laptop. You'll be back to play with it once you return; you tell yourself. Two months later, you're only using it on weekends to watch a movie, and you're wondering if it was a good investment. Someone asks you if you recommend getting one. You pause, which tells them everything they need to know.
The Apple Vision Pro is Apple's latest attempt to take a promising technology that has so far lacked good execution and executed it in a way that only Apple can. It falls neatly in line with AirPods and the iPad, and how they improved on Bluetooth headphones and tablets, and how Apple's walled garden made them the best in class, at least for those with other Apple products. Apple planned to do the same with the Apple Vision Pro and the VR/AR space.
It had a sleek design made of mostly metal and glass, which other headsets lack. Unlike most other headsets, Apple also emphasizes work over play, and of course, it integrates perfectly with other Apple devices. Because it closely follows the template of other previous products, it wouldn't be surprising to think that the Apple Vision Pro would be an overwhelming success, but that hasn't even been the case. The demand for these $3,500 headsets has been low, and production has even slowed down due to these sluggish sales.
Tech reviews have slowed down, and it looks as if people have moved on from the Vision Pro so quickly. So this does beg the question: why does nobody want the Apple Vision Pro? Just before we answer that, one of the main problems with the Apple Vision Pro is the amount of time it takes to get going. Setting it up alone can take around 15 minutes before you get to the content you want, and in the same time, with your smartphone, you could have started and finished a lesson from Brilliant.org.
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Back to our story: right off the bat, we need to address the elephant in the room— the price. At $3,500, this is seven times the price of its closest competitor, the Meta Quest 3. It's more expensive than a base model of the latest iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air combined. Most people aren't willing to spend that much money on a first-generation product that doesn't even have a native Netflix app. That's why many tech reviewers believe that this first generation was created for developers to make apps for the platform, not really for the general audience.
Beyond the price, other factors are also at play here. Unlike other VR headsets, Apple wants this to be a regular part of your life. Their marketing suggests it'll fit into your lifestyle like the iPhone in your pocket. But like other VR headsets, there's one significant barrier it can't get around: the barrier it puts up between you and the real world. VR can be an incredible experience; it can convince your body that a fake world is real. Anyone who has looked down into a canyon with their headset on will be very familiar with how it can trick the senses.
But to get to that world, you must put on the headset and leave this one. The idea of entirely ditching reality as a daily activity goes against our basic sense of responsibility to ourselves and others. The device creates a barrier between you and the rest of the world, which is filled with people who demand your attention. Of course, you have real-life human needs you can't fulfill in a virtual world.
Apple's other innovative devices took over many of our lives. The smartphone constantly distracts us from work and our play. The iPad does the same thing, but it's bigger, and admittedly with that come some added benefits. They made tasks that were otherwise difficult simpler and more intuitive. The Apple Pencil and illustration apps have more recently made tablet-based illustration so much like the real thing, taking away many of the previous inconveniences of digital drawing.
But there is one line these distracting devices didn't cross; they seamlessly slid into your current life. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on stage, he talked about merging three things we use every day onto one device: all the songs you could ever want, a mobile phone, and the internet—things people already loved and couldn't do without. These three things, separately, and the iPhone simply combined them into one device.
On the other hand, the Vision Pro asks you to do something you've never done before, to leave this world and enter a new one. That's something most people just aren't ready to do yet. Apple has clearly anticipated this problem and tried to get around it with features the other VR/AR headsets largely don't have. It has a camera facing inward and one facing out so that you can see a digital representation of the outside world, and others can see a digital representation of your eyes for FaceTime calls. The headset creates an avatar of you that's meant to reasonably convince others it's actually you.
So far, neither of these features are working well and still lies very much in the uncanny valley. While these attempts to fit the Vision Pro into your life are impressive, there's one big problem: a replica of reality, no matter how accurate, will never be as satisfying as the real thing. Even when impressively reduced, the stuttering and latency of the simulated world is still a frustration that you've never had to deal with in the real world.
When your phone lags, you can easily look away from it for a few seconds and then continue. You don't feel trapped in the virtual world with the Vision Pro; you can either stare at nothing for a few seconds or go through the stress of taking off the headset. Even if you do that, there's no way of knowing if it's fixed itself without putting the headset back on again.
One of the biggest reasons we're addicted to our smartphones is how easy it is to get into. Once you whip it out, and you're on TikTok, ready to consume content. With something like the Vision Pro, it takes a few minutes to get the headset, put it on, and strap it into place before you can get going. Once the novelty of the product wears off, that setup time is what prevents you from using it as often as you might.
With the Vision Pro, we're confronted with a world of simulation in which we risk losing track of our tangible existence. The headset gives us a stark choice between a simulated world with simulated communication and the real one. With this comparison so obvious, even this fairly accomplished fake world feels inferior and, on some level, not suitable for humans. We have a perfectly functional 3D world in front of us that costs nothing. Why have we let tech convince us that reality isn't good enough, that our vision isn't enough, and we need to upgrade it to the Vision Pro?
The Vision Pro acts as a hub between our various work tasks and the media we consume for amusement. It works well in this way, but does it work better than our hub, called reality? A hub where you can seamlessly change focus from your computer to other human beings; a hub that doesn't require a battery pack to be clipped onto your belt like you're an overeager PA monitor. As much as the headset tries to simulate your real-world experience, it inevitably comes up short.
How we navigate our world is very complex, and we're rarely aware of our habits, big and small. Is Big Tech up to this challenge, and what kind of effect will adapting to Vision Pro have on how we engage with the world? Given how similar the simulation is to real life, it could alter how we use our eyes in the real world, which may not be good. The Vision Pro asks us to enter deep into the online world of profiles, where our sense of identity becomes tied to our profiles to an almost literal extent. Who we are outside of our simulation starts to become less and less significant, even though it comes with significant consequences for our well-being.
In-person contact is more important than we give it credit for; we are hardwired to connect with others, and when we do, our brains reward us for it. Any form of in-person contact releases a suite of feel-good hormones like dopamine and serotonin. The brain also unleashes our bonding hormone, oxytocin, which helps with depression and even boosts your immune system. Oxytocin makes you more empathetic, generous, collaborative, nurturing, and grateful. This helps tremendously in relationships and makes all of us better functioning members of society.
Screens have already separated us so much. A wide adoption of frequent VR use would probably worsen our isolation problem. When we put on a VR headset, we're confronted with a separation from others. We are social animals and don't get a truly social experience from these virtual interactions. We get a simulation, and that'll never truly feel right, even at its best. And Vision Pro is far from that.
But there are times during our day when we want to wall off in our work and sometimes in our play. There may be a place for the Apple Vision Pro, but it's not around others. It's when we could use a wall, when we really need our own world for a bit. But then again, you can't plan real-world interruptions. That frustration of reality crashing in may make VR a terminal niche format.
Even in the video game world, VR has failed to take off. The nuisance of cutting yourself off from the world, combined with most cost considerations, has relegated VR to a small chunk of the market. Even with a more affordable set, the Meta Quest line of VR headsets hasn't really found that mass appeal. What's on offer is still very impressive; shooting a bow and arrow in a world that's convincing to the body is hard to beat. But even in a format that is exclusively simulations of some degree, this appears to be too much of a bother for most gamers, and motion sickness doesn't really help either.
Defenders of the Apple Vision Pro often point out that we have a history of scoffing at groundbreaking tech before it takes off and becomes an indispensable part of our lives. When the iPad was first introduced, many of us mocked it. We questioned why anybody would need what is essentially a bigger smartphone. But it's been widely adopted and loved by many. While this example is true, the notion of tech fatalism is misguided.
Overall, tech isn't just going to take off because it's bold or made by a reliably successful brand. Failures happen, and we increasingly see the negative consequences of big tech's influence on our lives. In cases where the consumer has a choice, they're more likely than ever to say no to tech distractions. Tech has waged a war on reality, making our material reality worse while drawing you into a simulation. But only so far can you push people before they recognize what's happening isn't good for them.
Eventually, it becomes all too clear that you're not just being sold a product; you're being sold a false set of values. In a way, Apple's Vision Pro's main competitor is reality itself, but with zero latency and an unbeatable price. Apple has its work cut out for it. Which would you pick, reality's vision or Apple's Vision Pro?
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