I got an Apple Vision Pro. My history with Apple products is that I once was proud of this mountain of empty white Apple boxes that I kept under the bed. I bought the first iPad on launch day. I didn’t buy the first iPhone. I had an iPod Nano (probably forever my favorite design for a thing). I had an iPod Shuffle. A bunch of MacBooks. Etc. etc.
Conclusion: I’m keeping it and alternate between “man this is so cool” and “man this is an expensive browser”. I’ll keep it to continue trying new VisionOS experiences as they come out. I also have this idea that at some point in my life I’m going to learn to program again. (Once upon a time I was paid to write pretty good CSS combined with spaghetti jQuery.) And I think it’ll be fun to trying to make some widgets for the Vision Pro.
I want to make a video looking at the Vision Pro through the lens of books about the history of Apple.
But first, I’ll need to grab highlights from the books about the history of Apple. I was about to start a doc and realized I should slowly write a growing blog post instead. So here we go.
Is the Vision Pro wonderful? (sometimes!)
“Make Something Wonderful” compiles Steve Jobs’s thoughts into a book, in his own words. Here’s an example of what he’d describe as wonderful:
“And when we sit down to design products [at Apple], we don’t think, “Oh, well, our target audience is fifteen to twenty-nine, male.” We don’t think that way. We think about making a great product for just about everybody. And the beauty of the products we make is they can be tailored with software to do almost anything.
So we weren’t thinking, in the iPad, of any specific audience, but we’re thinking about everybody.
We don’t have to go home at night and tell our kids when they say, “Well, what do you do? What did you do today?” “Well, I worked on our next-generation server, you know, that’ll be powering something or other.” We can say, “I worked on our next-generation iPad. You know, the ones that you use in school.”
And that’s a really wonderful thing.”
I’m excited to see how the software evolves. Sometimes the Vision Pro makes it possible to see the future. “Sweet I can look at this 3D scan I took last year and it brings me right back to that meal. Imagine when it’s going to be able to…”
Sometimes you hit a brick wall in the OS. I got pumped by David Sparks’s virtual writing cabin setup turned my environment to 100%, set up the bluetooth keyboard, played Brain.FM up in Safari, pulled the Notes app up to write, pinched to tap “Hide others” and was ready to go…
The music went out.
It was a little unexpected with how “Hide others” would work on MacOS. And VisionOS is closer to iPadOS which doesn’t have “Hide others”. So I had the MacOS expectation and it wasn’t met.
“Make Something Wonderful” highlight might be more like “I worked on our next-generation Vision Pro. You know, the ones that you use in _____” and I’m curious what the blank will be filled in with as time goes on.
Some thoughts from Cal Newport
For years, people wondered if Apple was going to release its own TV. A giant display with tvOS built in. Squint and the Vision Pro fulfills that need.
Here are Cal Newport’s thoughts on it (full video):
I don’t know that everyone yet is still on the same page that I’m on, which says the whole reason why Apple is investing in the Apple Vision Pro, the whole reason why they’re doing this is because you don’t need to, once this technology is sufficiently advanced, you don’t need to own separate screens.
Once you can fit an Apple Vision Pro into a pair of Ray-Ban glasses, I don’t need a phone and an iPad and a laptop and a TV and an office computer. I just need these glasses, which can put similar-sized screens wherever I happen to be, so why buy all those things?
It’s a huge industry.
The consumer electronics industry is huge. Apple’s profit comes almost entirely from building physical screens in nice brushed metal boxes.
If those all go away, Apple’s in trouble, so they want to own the virtual screen future, and I’m still convinced that’s where we’re going to end up.
If I want to make a phone call, I put a screen in front of me projected by my glasses.
If I want to watch TV, there’s a screen put on the wall projected by my glasses.
If I want to write, a screen comes in front of me at the coffee shop projected by my glasses.
I don’t need to own other bits of electronic.
I just need whatever drives those glasses.
Like the iPad, it looks like it’s going to fulfill entertainment consumption needs before it fulfills productivity needs.
(TO BE CONTINUED…
… I want to chip away at this post. I’ll add a book quote at a time until… I guess until the posts feels done?)