If it’s a device, just wait for Apple
In just a few days, you or me or anyone can pre-order the new Vision Pro from Apple. By the time the Super Bowl is being played, people will be walking around wearing them.
Look, it seems to me that Apple is a different company under Tim Cook than it was under Steve Jobs. It is hegemonic, not an upstart. It’s not quite as groundbreaking. Even for a brand with premium pricing, the Vision Pro has an - ahem - eye-watering price tag ($3,500 compared to, say, $600-$700 for the Oculus). And the marketing for it leans on product features and appeals to authority that probably offends Jobs-ian purists.
As a final caveat, I’m not an expert in this stuff. I’m sure Apple has had some flops that I am forgetting, and I have always been skeptical of VR/AR headsets. People have been talking about this stuff for literally decades and it has not come to fruition in the way forecasted.
But if I had to guess, I would guess that we’re entering a new era of computing - yet another ushered in by Apple.
Late last year, I watched the film BlackBerry, which is great for a lot of reasons, most especially for giving us a bald Glenn Howerton doing a CEO version of Dennis from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The film climaxes with the announcement of an iPhone, which, of course, destroyed Research in Motion’s market share in quite short order. RIM made many mistakes on the road to oblivion, and, at least according to the film, arrogance was its biggest sin.
But, you know, this stuff is also hard. The first-mover’s advantage, if indeed it is an advantage at all, just buys you time. And Apple seems to put pressure on the market like no other - not just from a time-based perspective, but also in the seeming inevitability of it shifting the paradigm.
I’m reminded of this every time I have to turn on the television in my basement and am disappointed to see the Roku interface pop up. No touchpad. No easy connection to my AirPods. Might have to sign in to a streaming service I’ve signed in to scores of times already. Roku was a nice bit of technology when it first arrived, but as usual Apple did the trick of making it simultaneously less conspicuous in my life and also more integral. It won’t surprise me if the Vision Pro turns out the same way.