When Apple unveiled its first mixed reality visor, Vision Pro, many (all?) cried out for a technological miracle. Leaving aside the fact that, once again, the company didn’t invent anything (for the forgetful, just google Microsoft HoloLens), the question here goes beyond technology: why stand as an advocate of a new way of using an innovative object while making it, in fact, inaccessible to most consumers?
The price of the Vision Pro is well beyond all expectations, even beyond the already insane price that many leakers had leaked in the past, i.e., more or less $3,000. Here we are at 3,500 as the entry cost, imagining that it could even go up to over 4 thousand for configurations with more memory. Of course, Apple is not Oppo or not any other company ready to make less than expected by launching something new on the market at an honest price, and that is why it will remain the usual Apple: a brand that wants to be the Louis Vuitton of technology, not the Levi’s of the moment. Right or wrong is not for us to decide, but it is a fact, and Vision Pro is yet more proof of it.
Apple Vision Pro
Nothing to complain about in terms of construction and technology, at least from what we learned from watching the remote presentation. Plenty of reasons to buy it, some good reasons not to. Apart from the price, we mention for the sake of completeness the too-low battery (2 hours? Really?), the need to always have a power outlet or a large battery bank at hand, the lack of desire to wear something on one’s face to perform actions that, call them old, is very easy to do from a smartphone. Email? A scroll is enough, the message on WhatsApp. Two seconds and I read it with my mobile phone, and the same for Facebook notifications and the various nonsense on TikTok (I know, I’m old too). Will doing these activities with a mixed reality viewer make them more interesting? Probably yes, for the first ten minutes.
Mind you, it is not a product that can replace the smartphone. Perhaps it is closer to the realm of the computer or even closer to the tablet, which offers a mixture of convenient, but not too advanced, productivity and multimedia experience. Yet it is a new and profoundly different thing, so any predictions about its hold on the market and our lives are entirely premature.
Then who will feel like holding something over their face to surf the web or watch a movie? Extreme nerd stuff, not for everyone. According to Tim Cook, somewhere I read it, Vision Pro may become the next iPhone. With the right considerations and looking at the price, it is already extremely expensive that someone else will take as an example in the future at half the price. If, on the other hand, the idea is to wander around town without a smartphone but with a bulky visor on your eyes, well, I see that as very difficult. Not least because I don’t want to imagine where to plug in that cable to get more than 2 hours of autonomy on the go.
