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Critics are, as usual, having a field day announcing Apple's supposed plans to “cancel” or “retire” the first iteration of its Apple Vision Pro spatial computing platform.
But what is Apple really doing with its immersive headset? Is the Vision Pro a big, tragic, confusing mistake like the AI Pin, or is it just the first step in a carefully planned rollout of the future?
Shock journalists love to turn ordinary things into alarming news. And since Google has essentially turned the entire journalism profession into little more than clickbaiting interns into watching ads, there's unfortunately nothing left to do but shock journalism and its bombastic claims that usually turn out to be empty burgers.
John Gruber, one of the remaining pillars of Walt Mossberg-style calm reality in the Apple world, weighed in on The Information's alarming headline on Friday.
The article claimed that “several people were directly involved in creating components for the device” as the source of the hot tip that “Apple has sharply cut production of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset since early summer and may stop making the current version of the device entirely by the end of the year.”
Alarming! But wait, really?
“A headline like ‘Vision Pro Sales Are Fully Meeting Expectations’ isn’t going to hit people as a big story, but Apple is drastically cutting Vision Pro production — yes,” Gruber wrote.
In his article, he cited a report from last summer that said, “Sony, the exclusive supplier of the Vision Pro’s high-resolution OLED displays, only has the physical capacity to produce 900,000 units per year, and with two displays on the Vision Pro, the Vision Pro’s maximum production capacity is about 450,000 headsets per year,” which is roughly the number of headsets Apple is estimated to have shipped.
All this hype about Apple not being able to sell enough, or not being able to find interest, or desperately having to drastically cut its plans — and everything they’ve been saying lately — seems to fall apart when you compare the number of devices Apple could have shipped with the number the company is estimated to have sold.
It also shouldn’t come as a surprise that Apple won’t keep releasing the 2024 Vision Pro forever. It’s almost the end of the year! God, how time flies. It seems like it was just the Year of Generative AI, and now it’s deep in the foliage changing into Apple’s Vision Pro Year One.
If we take a little stroll down memory lane, it’s almost as if the original Mac, the original iPod, the original iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch — and pretty much everything else Apple has ever released — is quickly being replaced by a Plus, or a 2, or a 3G, or whatever new series identifier the company has used since the dawn of the tech universe to signify that new technology is actually improving rapidly, getting faster, better, cheaper, or fancier with each passing year.
The idea of this happening again isn’t really all that alarming.
What if Apple had started with a cheaper, simpler AVP?
It's undeniable that the Apple Vision Pro was aimed at the very top of the cream of the crop of AR and VR experiences. Was that a mistake?
Many people seem to believe that the AVP “should have been” more mainstream, along the lines of the iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch, etc., so that this new luxury would be more accessible, and therefore likely to lead to a larger installed base and encourage more spatial apps and immersive video content to be used on it.
Imagine if Apple had released a much simpler VR headset that cost a few hundred dollars. What then? Well, we already have several examples of this. Meta has been trying to make this work for five years now, after acquiring Oculus—which itself was struggling to do the same thing. Apple even collaborated on some level with HTC Vive to develop VR on the Mac back when the iMac Pro was released.
Perhaps Apple studied the market in great detail because it is so unique in this area, and specifically decided not to do something that no one else was actually doing.
In fact, we know that is exactly what happened because we all watched and saw it happen. Apple’s Vision Pro came years after the first pigs to market had written everything off at home.
If “cheapening the budget” was the critical spark that would ignite VR and excite the masses, why didn’t Google’s humble DIY Cardboard VR pave the way, but fizzle out and get forgotten? Why wasn’t the “essentially free” idea of just putting an Android phone to your face the thing that launched AR/VR into the stratosphere?
Instead of being a “me too,” Apple decided, as it does, to forge its own path.
Google Cardboard ends up in the trash
A New Look
Looking back at how well Apple’s unique approaches to PCs, MP3 players, smartphones, wearables, and more have worked, it shouldn’t be surprising that Apple’s slow, deliberate approach to launching an entirely new Spatial platform would involve an entirely new approach to the very AR/VR market that has failed to gain the same traction as 3D TVs.
Maybe the problem with Immersive Computing was that the existing devices were too cheap? That would explain why customers kept leaving their headsets on the shelf shortly after purchasing them. They just weren’t good enough. And to be good enough, they couldn’t be widely available to everyone in the first year.
Apple’s demo of the Vision Pro highlighted key features that were both impressive and dauntingly expensive. The resolution for the wearer is mesmerizing. The EyeSight display even goes so far as to show others a simulation of your eyes, a far cry from Google’s literal paper Cardboard and the various headsets that make you look like you’re plugged into the Borg for as little money as possible while stumbling around in your own world and visually disconnected from the present.
Apple has priced the Vision Pro very high to deliver an amazing product, knowing full well that doing so will put it out of market for buyers who can typically afford even a pretty good iPhone. A phone, watch, and headphones are all pretty easy for anyone to spend the money on. A $4,000 TV of the future? Not so much.
That was intentional! Apple, as the world's leading expert at launching successful new OS platforms, knew there was no point in trying to push spatial computing on the cheap.
Cardboard looked like something from Amazon
A Premium at Different Prices
In fact, the cheap Android Way that Google and its licensees have pursued has already achieved the opposite of Apple in almost every way: Android tablets have failed longer than the iPad has flown. Demand for cheap Android watches has been pathetic longer than the Apple Watch has captivated. Android TV's various incantations were a minus even before Apple TV became a plus.
Apple has often but consistently succeeded by being more premium at a higher price. Critics have always bleated about it, but that's the sound sheep always make when things aren't going their way.
Apple approaches premium differently for each market. In MP3 players, Apple launched the iPod at a price that at the time seemed absurd and “flimsy,” as one review put it. That's because, instead of using an inexpensive flash card with limited storage, it packed in a fancy compact hard drive and a newfangled, custom-designed rotary input controller to “think different.”
It took the iPod several years to grow from a niche luxury device into the most impressive global success in consumer technology.
In phones, Apple stunned the market by introducing a “desktop-class computer platform” rather than a pocket-sized, glorified PDA. It cost so much more than the cheap Windows Mobiles of the time that Steve Ballmer famously scoffed at the threat because he couldn't see any way Apple could gain significant market share for mobile phones at such a high price when most phones were effectively free with a subscription service.
Then again, it took a few years before the iPhone went from being a luxury phone to something everyone carried unless they had no credit at all and forgot to put something aside for later.
With tablets, Apple could take existing technology and present the iPad as a much better alternative to the status quo at a very competitive price. This wasn’t a huge departure in strategy; it was simply because the lightweight iPad didn’t have to cost a lot to simply present the web, email, games, and other iOS apps on a larger screen.
The iPad, unlike other platforms released during the Steve Jobs era, was actually an instant hit, obliterating all competitors in its first year and maintaining its leading position in the tablet market ever since. Sure, its affordability helped it reach that level of success faster, but that was again due to the fact that tablets were relatively cheap for Apple to design and manufacture.
Not so with the Vision Pro. It’s expensive because it’s crammed with really high-quality everything from its displays to its own processors, cameras, and sensors. It was pretty clear that the Vision Pro wasn’t going to fly off the shelves due to its high price. But there was a limit to how much Apple could scale it down before it wasn't good enough for everyone.
Hello, Chips
After the failure of Windows Phone and Surface, Ballmer's successor at Microsoft, Satya Nadella, followed Apple's lead and released his first major hardware product, HoloLens, as a relatively expensive $3,000 premium prototype aimed only at developers and enterprises.
It wasn't a hit, but the sheeple gave it plenty of slack. The idea that AR/VR wouldn't work on the cheap wasn't original to Apple, simply because it was so obvious to anyone looking at the tech landscape. Cheap AR/VR is literally nauseating.
Even Google Glass tried to charge relatively high prices without any illusions that AR/VR could be subsidized solely through advertising and tracking. Starting at $1,500, Glass was too expensive for a toy, but the thing wasn't compelling enough to be anything more than a toy.
Then again, for some reason the sheeple mostly bit their tongues throughout the jokes and Glassholes era, and took a wait-and-see approach right up until Google officially stopped working on its imperfect basic prototype.
Isn't it interesting that the sheeple won't call anything from Google, Microsoft, or Facebook a failure until it's a total, official failure, but won't call anything from Apple even “good enough” until it matches the iPhone in glorious success?
The High Price of Futurism
By aiming high and delivering high, Apple can appeal to people with disposable income who haven't been as excited about all the AR/VR that's come before. But there's more to the Vision Pro platform than just expensive hardware.
Another component of spatial computing that is really, inherently stubbornly expensive is its software. Building apps for iOS, iPad, and Apple Watch is already quite expensive for developers. A good app can easily cost $100,000 to make. But the large installed base of the iPhone, iPad, and Watch drives massive sales.
The catch 22 of an expensive platform device is that there are fewer users to subsidize the development of spatial apps. A generation or two ago, LaserDisc offered a huge leap in fidelity over basic video tape, but the high price of the players meant that LaserDisc movies were generally “valuable rentals” rather than affordable for many home collectors to buy outright.
Given that the Vision Pro has an installed base of around half a million, it’s going to be hard for Apple to push developers to spend a ton of money on spatial computing support unless there’s a compelling business case. If it’s not a large audience, it needs to be a high-value audience, and the ultra-high-end market is certainly that.
People with money weren’t very interested in HoloLens or Glass. But the Vision Pro? Apple is positioning it as a better experience for people who can afford it, among its already premium installed base of iPhone and Mac users. Recall that the Apple Watch and AirPods debuted in similar ways.
Beyond spatial apps, another piece of software that’s inherently expensive to build is Apple Immersive Video. Creating what I’ve called the future of television requires not only very high-resolution cameras and lenses (there are two!), but a complete rethink of how content is shot.
It’s also even more expensive to edit and deliver, simply because it requires so much more data. Sharper, higher-resolution content is also less forgiving. The cost of everything that goes into conceiving, creating, and assembling Apple Immersive Video is staggering, and there’s no easy way to recoup that cost by simply charging a large download fee.
Apple’s entire strategy with Apple TV+ makes it seem like the company didn’t bother releasing high-quality movies and new TV shows just to lose a ton of money by being an artist. Apple has built its own media pipeline around understanding how to deliver immersive content that you might want to enjoy privately on a plane or on a huge virtual display at home.
Nobody wants to watch Netflix Shovelware or YouTube podcasts in an immersive cinematic cocoon. But Avatar or Mad Max in 3D? What about Apple’s own immersive Foundation or Masters of the Air? Apple built a unique ownership of the former and funded the latter itself.
An immersive screen requires immersive content
Faced with the seemingly impossible dilemma of making accessible, immersive content for the Vision Pro’s initially limited installed base, Apple addressed the situation in part by following the example of LaserDisc: making 3D movies a paid rental. But Apple also created a solution that didn’t exist in the LaserDisc era: a subscription to Apple TV+’s own creations, which look stunning on the huge screen.
People with money now have something dazzling to pay for. They can babysit the nascent seed of Apple’s spatial computing platform until hardware prices come down enough to appeal to a wider market. Until then, the Vision Pro is reserved for commercial developers and the well-heeled, out of necessity. It simply couldn’t support itself at a lower price, because there would be no point.
As Android has proven time and again, if you aim too low — in price, and therefore in value — you’ll achieve nothing.
All this has happened before
Perhaps the best example of Apple's Catch-22 approach to rare hardware at stupid prices is the MacBook Air. Steve Jobs first unveiled the envelope-sized machine in 2008 as the thinnest laptop ever, at just 0.75 inches. It wasn't just light and thin, though.
The MacBook Air was light, thin, and expensive.
It was expensive. In large part, it was so expensive because, to achieve its thinness, it used a solid-state drive, meaning that instead of a spinning mechanical hard drive, it read and wrote data to memory chips. At its debut, people complained that it might have been more affordable if Apple had at least offered a version with a spinning hard drive, or had ditched the absolute thinness and instead just made a basic laptop with an Apple logo on it.
For years, pundits and critics have bemoaned Apple's obsession with thin and light, insisting that “everyone knows” that what everyone really wants is a powerful laptop with cheap storage options and a big screen. The MacBook Air was neither, and it certainly wasn't cheaply accessible to many.
But all these years, powerful laptops have found their niche as gaming platforms, while everyone else has gravitated toward the biggest eclipse that's ever happened in portable computing. The reason: Apple wasn't trying to make a cheap device, it was trying to make the best.
In 2008, a solid-state drive was a super-premium device. Today, it's practically a must-have. Meanwhile, there have been plenty of competitive advances that have driven costs and prices down. Jobs' vision of a light, thin MacBook Air has been widely criticized as impractical and limiting, but the reality is that once you hit your 40s, or maybe even your 30s, you start to realize that the weight of your laptop has a big impact on how much your back hurts.
Many writers who have had the time to share their opinions haven't been around long enough to know what people who make money actually want.
With the debut of the MacBook Air, laptops got thinner and more complex to use SSDs, requiring not only new hardware but new software at the OS level. Apple led the way by not being afraid of high prices, knowing that early adopters would pay more for something better.
MacBook Air sales didn't take off in the first year. But a few years after that, everyone else started copying. And that provides key insight into why Apple shamelessly debuted the Vision Pro with crazy specs, regardless of its price. Apple knows how things work and where prices are headed.
All About the Base
Apple also knows that it will be critical to not only attract a large installed base for spatial computing, but one that is commercially significant. Google could probably count every download of interest in Cardboard at the time and crown itself the king of VR.
But such metrics are meaningless because Google hasn’t done the work to create compelling software or services that could support VR. It seems clear that no one would be able to attract enough attention to make everything from 3D movies to immersive video to spatial apps if they were hamstrung by the inferiority of a $300 VR device. Maybe not even a better $1,500 one.
The hype drums try to beat out a baseline that suggests the Vision Pro is over and done with, but the reality is that people bought it and the content is slowly becoming available. Cost and other barriers to delivering new, desirable immersive content create the reality that there will simply be an initial drip, at least at first.
Apple, as a rich content factory and subscription service, can keep this trickle of content going until it accumulates enough to make a compelling case for buying the Vision Pro or whatever comes next. Vision Air?
This has all happened before, too
Just like the MacBook Air in hardware, Apple has already made long-term strides in software and services. Remember the days of the first Video iPod? Apple's initial partnership with Disney to stream postage-stamp-sized videos of a very few TV shows on iTunes was initially met with ridicule. But that library eventually grew quickly.
Apple Movies’ first launch on the iTunes Store was also initially sparse. That’s all changed. Today, you can watch almost anything on your TV with an Apple TV set-top box, using Apple services or one of its streaming partners. That also means you have huge libraries of high-quality content on the Vision Pro.
Apple’s first year of iPhone apps was limited to its own built-in Mail, Safari, Maps, and so on. A year later, the first third-party apps were things like pretending to drink beer, simple games, and a bunch of fart apps. Over time, though, the App Store has become a treasure trove of compelling, powerful content that has changed the way we work.
Today, Apple’s Immersive content is fairly limited. The company has multiple teams working on adventure, animal, sports, and travel series, and it’s created the Spatial Apps platform for its iOS and iPad developers. He even delivered his first example of an immersive short film with Submerged, a 17-minute story that feels much longer and more engaging than its running time would suggest.
Submerged takes viewers aboard a World War II submarine and follows its crew as they battle a dangerous new threat.
The Future Is Coming
It will take time for Apple Immersive to reach the scale it did with iTunes and the App Store. Years, even.
Don't fall for the clickbait bleating that demands more hay today. Sheep never imagine or herald a glorious future; they never dream of it. they just stare at each other as they queue for the trough, making their concerned noises of limited meaning.
Apple isn't moving as slowly as these lambs might imagine. And it won't run out of money as long as it sells virtually all the premium hardware in the world in every other segment.
When a more affordable Vision becomes achievable, Apple will have a content portfolio to exploit it. And the sheep will bleat about something else, as they do.
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