“Apple’s Vision Pro Is a $3,500 Ticket to Nowhere, Janus Rose’s latest article for Vice is headlined, with the sub-headline, “A decade after Facebook bought Oculus, VR still has no appeal except as an expensive novelty toy.”
As a rule of thumb, the tech from dystopian cyberpunk novels in the 80s and 90s manifests in our reality in one of two ways: either as horrifying weapons of police state oppression, or expensive novelty bullshit for rich people.
After more than a decade, it seems clear that virtual reality is one of the latter cases. What began with Facebook’s $2 billion purchase of headset startup Oculus in 2014 — and its subsequently ill-advised VR pivot and rebranding as Meta — has led us to Apple’s announcement of its new Vision Pro, an augmented reality headset which is set to retail at a typically-Apple starting price of $3,500.
Revealed at the very end of the company’s recent press conference, the VR/AR “spatial computing” device is less notable for its features and more for its shocking inability—or perhaps refusal—to read the room. Large companies like Meta have repeatedly failed to make a compelling use case for VR over the past decade, despite massive hardware budgets and hype campaigns singularly obsessed with the idea of building an online Metaverse that no one wants to live in.
MacDailyNews Take: See, because Mark Zuckerberg, whose main claims to fame are stealing a social network and abuing it to repeatedly trample his feckless users’ privacy in order to line his own pockets (until Apple put an end to that), failed at something, Apple will fail, too. You know, like iPad after years of Microsoft failing with tablets.
So if not for awkwardly embodying legless avatars, what — and who — is Vision Pro for?
The earliest depictions of VR and AR devices in science fiction were exciting because they came at a time when the internet was untamed, and the line between the digital and physical worlds seemed to blur for the first time. In our current reality, that distinction has long since ceased to exist, and the internet is largely controlled by the whims of giant tech companies and their captive platforms. Apple’s new device might briefly revive interest in the idea, but after a decade of stagnation, it’s going to be hard-pressed to get anyone to strap in besides the profoundly wealthy and bored.
MacDailyNews Take: Just getting this one into the database for future use.
With Apple Vision Pro we are witnessing the birth of spatial computing.
Don’t be this guy: "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse.’ There is no evidence that people want to use these things."
— John C. Dvorakhttps://t.co/dp3Y9avlmc #VisionPro #Apple— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) June 6, 2023
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