Apple’s Stone Soup
Apple’s entry into the AR/VR market with the Vision Pro headset is expected to be better than its competitors, but its engineering-focused approach may challenge its success.
DISCLAIMER: I own (a measly amount of) Apple stock. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be critical and ambitious on their behalf.
It came as no surprise Apple entered the AR/VR, or should we instead say the XR (Mixed reality) market. The rumours about it go back to 2015 when it acquired Metaio, which made AR software for mobile devices. So with their upcoming Vision Pro headset, they are now ready to sprinkle some of their stoic approaches to design and manufacturing over the field.
Most noticeably, the presentation of the headset didn’t reveal any news, rather than showcasing the exceptional engineering craftsmanship that Apple is well known for. Apple’s high-quality “It just works” philosophy may become a game-changer for the AR/VR/XR market. Still, the company’s engineering, rather than design-focused approach, may challenge its success.
Understandably, Tim Cook wants to expand Apple’s domain. Although popular, iPhones, iPads, and Macs have only shown incremental improvements throughout the years, even in light of the M-chips in Macs and MacBooks impacting Apple’s position in the PC market. But their product line is old news. Cook has steadily been shifting Apple’s focus towards services like iCloud, TV+ and Classical Music, building subscription-based software on top of existing hardware. So entering the AR/VR business is yet another opportunity to ramp up the App Store’s revenue since the AR/VR market is estimated to show an annual growth rate of 13.72%, resulting in a projected market volume of $52.05 billion by 2027.
So, Apple has been focusing on widening its profit streams by creating more revenue from subscriptions and software rather than introducing groundbreaking new products. Their first new hardware venture in years, although late in the game, is expected to be better than its competitors, but the success of this headset will depend significantly on the software it can provide. Many companies haven’t been able to develop any AR/VR software & hardware “package” that has gained widespread appeal, and Apple did not demonstrate any features that haven’t been seen or done before in one way or another. Although the user experience is top-notch, we have yet to see the “aha”-moment arise from them or anybody. The Apple Vision Pro is only a derivate of macOS & iPadOS in its current state.
Bring your ingredients
Therefore, it is up to the developer community to dig out the silver bullet for Apple to ramp up the App Store’s revenue. I cannot help thinking of the old folk story “Stone Soup”, which begins with a hungry stranger who enters a village carrying only an empty cooking pot. The stranger is looking for food, but the villagers are unwilling to share their meagre supplies.
Undeterred, the stranger fills his pot with water from a nearby stream and places it over a fire. He then drops a large stone into the pot, stirring it occasionally and commenting on how delicious his “stone soup” is. Intrigued by this strange dish, the villagers gather around the pot, curious about the stranger’s recipe.
As the stranger stirs the pot, he asks if anyone has some herbs or spices to add to the soup. One by one, the villagers contribute small amounts of vegetables, meat, and other ingredients, until the pot is filled with a delicious and hearty soup that everyone can enjoy.
The story of “Stone Soup” is often used as a metaphor for the power of cooperation and sharing, but in the case of Apple, the point here is that they no longer provide the world with the whole soup, as they did when Steve Jobs was behind the wheel. Instead, they rely on profitability through services such as the App Store. And investors are happy when they see they create new opportunities in potential markets. But when Wall Street is happy, that does not mean Main Street is also.
Don’t get me wrong. Apple does do everything right. You pay premium prices for premium products that bring actual value to its users. But even though I am convinced that Apple will pull it off somehow, making its headset a financial success, their “better, not different” approach being enough to succeed in the current market climate, it remains to be seen whether the company can maintain its position in the long term. Because its focus on engineering over design can potentially hinder its success in the AR/VR market, as the headset’s lack of human touch is noticeable, I believe the design, for now, is not appealing enough for the users.
Apart from lacking a silver bullet, it takes no UX designer like me to see the uncanny valley they have entered with the headset. You only need to see their presentation to sometimes feel your toes cringe in despair. Looking at a father recording his daughters’ play in 3D through a headset with an avatar-generated set of eyes staring at them made my heart stop momentarily. This image indeed showed how far Apple has moved away from its philosophy of creating products for humans. Apple’s success in the past has mainly been due to its focus on design, creating beautiful, intuitive devices. The company is about to abandon this approach by doing something as inhumane as replacing empathy with engineered technology for subscription-based services.
The shift has been subtle but seismic. After Jobs, critical design team members like Jony Ive and Imran Chaudhri left the once powerful core design team. As Tripp Mickle concluded in his book “After Steve — How Apple Became a Trillion-dollar Company and Lost Its Soul”:
Though they [the design team] seldom acknowledged it to one another, they knew that the company’s startup culture had faded. Without Jobs, some thought, Apple had become a machine with a heart of stone.
And it is no wonder that the names of the companies founded by Ive and Chaudri are called “LoveFrom” and “Humane” as an indirect comment on what the designers lost in the wake of Job’s death. Apple has lost its human touch, and the Vision Pro is an ultimate testament to this. Remove proper eye contact, and you remove what is human. Although an attempt to counter this has been made, it is not enough. For a new product like the AR/VR headset to gain mass appeal, you must remove barriers, not create new ones. This was what made the iPod and the iPhone highly successful.
From user input to user immersion
The Humane AI Pin, the latest device in the human-computer interaction game, which is an attempt to move personal computing into an era of more “invisible” computing, at least tries to bring more humanity into technology by removing the barrier of a screen — a screen that much too often fights for our attention as human beings. But even by doing so, Humane still has to overcome some other sensory in- and output barriers. The clothing-based wearable Pin will work by monitoring your surroundings and providing you with AI-generative contextual information. But you will often need to talk to it. And without any visible interface, you will look rather silly walking around talking to your pocket, not to mention the implications of the constant monitoring of your surroundings, which already proved to be troublesome for Google’s Glasses back in 2013, where stories that others could potentially unknowingly be monitored by the wearer began to fill the media space. And where Google co-founder Sergey Brin claimed that Glass could be seen as a way to become even more isolated in public, despite the original intent being quite the opposite. For personal computing to overcome such privacy barriers, it needs to become even more invisible, to shift from user input to user immersion (something I wrote about back in 2015). Human interaction and social implications are at stake here, although we still need to see how their device will handle this, and I applaud Humane for at least trying to think differently — one thing Apple has failed to do with their headset.
Despite my certainty in the fact that the Vision Pro will revitalise the AR/VR space, depending on whether Apple and the developer community will be able to convince the rest of us about its true potential, I cannot shake the feeling of the company has completely lost its touch with the foundation on where it was built. To make things that “just work” but profoundly intuitively so, with a deep understanding of human aspects enveloping them, adding surprise, delight and reassurance of privacy and social concerns for both Wall Street and Main Street. I hope they can bring the balance back so that it is not only engineering and operations that move the company forward but design based on empathy and ingenuity. On sensibility rather than only sense. And where we do not need to bring the broth to the stone but be served a delicious and surprisingly great meal.
