Apple’s Vision Pro The launch resembles the debut of the Apple Watch in more ways than one, but for me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has tried to distance Vision Pro from its existing collection of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by focusing solely on the term “spatial computing.” However, marketing seems to focus on identifying a few key use cases that it believes will best engage consumers.
The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which, like its cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it first appeared. Apple initially focused on many features that the Apple Watch has now completely done away with, including Digital Touch that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. Overall, it was presented as a relatively powerful and full-featured platform almost on par with the iPhone in terms of future capabilities.
The intervening years and generations of the Apple Watch have seen it grow significantly in terms of sheer technical capabilities and specs, yet the marketing and focus around the product on Apple’s part has been more economical, spending huge effort in areas that seemed to resonate better with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, security.
To some extent, all new product launches are based on an assumption that ends up being more or less true, but rarely exactly accurate. But the iPhone debuted with a much more focused and much more precise idea of what it would be for users than the Apple Watch. Vision Pro, I would argue, is even further removed from how and why people will appreciate it. Given the right positioning and product mix to support it, I think the Vision Pro could become a lasting part of Apple’s overall mix, but not if it continues to aim to be a complete platform capable of standing on more or less equal base with your iPhone, Mac or even iPad.
Meta has done a much better job of coming to some sort of focus on how it sells VR to the masses. The company took a much softer, “mixed reality is cool” stance in the recent release of Meta Quest 3, versus the “metaverse is the next big thing in computing” that tried to shove down our throats in the Quest 2 generation. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to be moving his brands from the metaverse to AI as the next big thing for which he has extreme FOMO, which must have helped facilitate this shift.
The Meta leans into what Apple has already learned with the Apple Watch: Some devices just aren’t good at some things, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be amazing at others. Surprisingly, Apple has already learned this lesson — and one that may even apply to the specifics of what is and isn’t good — with the iPad.
The iPad has become an excellent and favored couch content consumption device. Apple still touts its creative prowess, but that’s mostly for the Pro models, and even then it’s likely a secondary or bonus use case for most buyers. Vision Pro is already being praised by early reviewers as a great virtual theater for watching movies and consuming other kinds of video content, and even tasks like basic text input sometimes face harsh criticism.
Meta Quest 3 is also great for just watching videos, but it’s also tailor-made for interactive training use cases like that provided by Supernatural, which Meta wisely bought. It’s terrible at text input and productivity, on the other hand, and any gains in that direction tend to just reduce annoyance, rather than make it truly enjoyable to use for those things.
The whole push for virtual reality to become a mainstream general-purpose computing platform was more about a fictional future based on how the technology works in science fiction, which ignores basic details like how your nose feels when you’re wearing something heavy. its bridge, or how horrible it is to type on a keyboard that floats an indeterminate distance in front of you and offers zero tactile feedback.
VR is really good at the things it’s really good at, and it’s great in small doses for static, interactive, or passive experiences that benefit from a sense of immersion. It’s terrible at many other things – chief among them being the next big thing in personal computing or mobile.
