The Apple Vision Pro Arrived on Store Shelves With Seismic Implications. Have We Forgotten Already?
The Apple Vision Pro Arrived on Store Shelves With Seismic Implications. Have We Forgotten Already?
Our tepid enthusiasm for the Apple product of tomorrow
This piece was originally published in February.
The future has a funny way of arriving at our door. Whether elections or virtual reality devices, it all begins as a distant speculation. “I wonder when Apple will release a phone?” people used to ask when iPods still reigned supreme. And once a few million iPhones had wormed their way into pockets, we had the same question about the company’s eventual foray into watches and tablets.
“I wonder when Apple will release their first VR device,” was the prevailing query until this past October. With Sony and Meta making greater and greater leaps with their respective VR helmets, it naturally prompted the question.
But Apple is a meticulous company that rarely makes final decisions before it’s fully prepared to shift paradigms. The phone and watch technology were within the company’s grasp for years before iPhones and Apple Watches became the law of our brave new land. Apple is a master of stoking anticipation.
With each introduction of these seismic new products, their announcements have hardly ever come as a surprise. People inside and outside of the tech world were aware of the iPhone rumors years before Steve Jobs actually announced the devices. When a downscaled version of the technology made its way to the wrist watch, there weren’t many who didn’t at least vaguely see it coming.
The Apple Vision Pro is more of an inevitability than a surprise. That the pioneering tech company would erect a virtual universe was practically a matter of fate by the time it built bridges to the clouds. Apple rarely approaches new ground without an attempt to conquer, and it rarely makes the first strike before it’s confident it can level a decisive one. It won’t introduce a new product without the certainty that it can make something snappy and familiar out of the strange and foreign.
Apple has made a concerted point of skirting around the vocabulary of its competitors prior to the release of this new headset. Making it through their last two product unveilings without so much as a mention of “virtual reality” or “AI,” they want the stigma around the world they’re carving out to fall before the world can enter.
This new virtual reality technology has its share of kinks. But growing pains can only be expected as we begin reliving the memories embedded within our videos and entering into a world of what Apple calls “Spatial Computing.”
People already immersed in Apple’s ecosystem will find something they know all too well when they put on an Apple Headset. And what the new product is raises questions that are every bit as philosophical as they are technological.
However, philosophical terrain isn’t new for these tech giants that subtly reshape our world with each new iteration of each new product. Transforming the physical world into a digital one is a task with which these giants are well-acquainted. But giants can tiptoe and giants can leap, and Apple’s latest move looks like the latter.
How this shift will manifest won’t be easily noticed at first. It will be a person on the subway or bus lost in a virtual world. It will be a gradual familiarization with uncanny valley faces imposed onto screens where human features once were. As with the iPhones that started appearing in hands — sparsely spread amidst colossal crowds of people — the Apple Vision Pro isn’t poised to take over the world overnight. It’s playing a long game.
The Apple Vision Pro in these early days will be benign and easily missed by most of us. Those of us that take notice of the headsets will see something akin to what we saw during the early days of Corona: a curious cover on faces that conceals where real human emotions once reigned supreme. Animatronic eyes concealing real ones. The more cynical among us, though, might have trouble shrugging off this Black Mirror episode.
Regardless of where we lie on the spectrum, what’s nearly certain is that we will grow familiar with a virtual world as we once did a socially distanced one. It’s a transition for which the seeds have already been carefully planted. Because Apple prepared for these days with an acute-eyed foresight for the future, the evolution will be as seamless as our acceptance of the online world that hovers around us here today.
And that’s how the future arrives. Not with a bang, but with a flurry of stimuli that drowns out all whimpers.
We release new genies from bottles with such a commercial regularity that the arrival of our odd new realities comes with a certain numbness. We welcome each new one with a stone-faced immediacy. We never give ourselves a proper grace period to reflect on what happened to yesterday.
We’re a people perpetually leaning forward. And we’re contorted into a tomorrow whose implications we can scarcely grasp.
When tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee released a video on Apple’s new VR headset, he called it “Apple Vision Pro Review: Tomorrow’s ideas… Today’s Tech!” In a perfect summation of where we stand, the title encapsulates the general feelings of early reviewers. In a change of pace from his normal product analyses, though, Brownlee created separate reviews to explore both the technological and philosophical leaps forward that this new product represents.
Brownlee is reputed by many online as the best tech YouTuber and he’s known for his approachable and honest reporting. In his early product reviews, he doesn’t pull any punches. He doesn’t claim that wearing this product today will be a bold vault into a faraway future, but nor does he deny the gravity of this achievement. Incremental improvement is the worry. The notion that with each year and each iteration, these headsets will grow cheaper, lighter, and more capable is where we each should find a cause for concern.
These changes of our time defy parallels. We’re standing together atop exponential curves of innovation and there’s no ceiling in sight.
It isn’t the artificial intelligence and VR of today that we need to worry as much about. It’s where they’ll be tomorrow. It isn’t the first assembly line of headsets that will change the world unrecognizably. It’s when the helmet-clad commute becomes a part of our new normal.
There’s no denying that the Apple Vision Pro has already made waves. But in these early months after release, it hasn’t been the tsunami some feared. In these mellow ripples on calm sunny days, though, we see a tide whose shallows we can wade. And when the water is warm enough, there’s no such thing as a brave new world whose depths we won’t cross.