Vision Pro and the Future of Computing
With Apple’s announcement of Vision Pro on June 5, 2023, there’s been a revived discussion of the future of computing. In the last decade there’s been a shift away from generative, personal computers in which users had an equal probability and toolset for producing content as they had to consume it toward a consumption-based human-computer interaction. Mobile or tablet computing sought but continually failed to fully replace the personal computer. Mobility was in constant tension with capability. While tablets and mobile phones still offered a lighter, often cloud-based version of digital production, it was social media that provided a pretense for pseudo-production: content-creation, i.e. capturing photos or videos on a phone and posting them via the thumb-driven ersatz input method that substituted a ten-finger keyboard. The Vision Pro is a bold stride toward a consumption-only digital interface.
Constraints such as software being executable only on a personal computer or relying on heavy processing power means that hardware–the lingering element of the physical world in the transition to the virtual–has persisted. Of course, this moment in the history of computing is fairly arbitrary. Both software UI and computation can and will cut their personal hardware umbilical cord. Already, cloud computing can offer more processing power than is available in personal ram modules or chips, but the software calling upon this random memory isn’t optimized for cloud computing, most likely due to the bottleneck of current telephony and communication infrastructure. And many cloud-based applications run as well, if not better than consumer applications. The Vision Pro looks beyond these constraints.
The specs on the Vision Pro are telling of the future that Apple is seeing. There’s no discussion of ram or processor speed. We’re shown the M2 and R1 chips, but framed as sensor input and output. The heavy lifting is happening on the mother computer’s motherboard.
There were only two memorable numbers mentioned in the Vision Pro presentation: 4k (displays) and (a price tag of) $3499.
It’s as if they’ve fully admonished everything that they’ve learned from their personal computers and smartphones campaigns.
Vision Pro is both too early and too late. Arriving prior to the necessary infrastructure to fully displace all desktop and keyboard-driven computing, the headset still relies heavily on personal computers. It can’t be fully cloud-dependent for the foreseeable future. There’s also the power issue; the tethered battery is both a design pock and technological weak link. The fact that it was announced in June 2023, but won’t be for sale until early 2024, means that it’s even too early for Apple.
At the same time, it’s 2023, and for the last five years, we’ve been hearing that three things will happen in the coming year. First, that Teslas would be fully self-driving; second that bitcoin would hit $1 million; and third that virtual reality was going to replace this horrible, horrible world which we’ve created. And then we got the best experiment possible to test these three predictions: the pandemic and the lockdown and…everyone went to Zoom?! Elon failed, Satoshi didn’t overthrow the Fed and Meta laid off tens of thousands of employees. In the face of a once in a century pandemic, the world settled for 2007 VoIP technology over the great synchronicity. No million man march into Second Life. SARS-COV-2 killed more than a few million people on earth but the message was clear:
virtual reality is preferential only to people whose lived social experience is fundamentally low-rez.
But maybe we’re just not ready to shrug off this mortal coil. Augmented reality is portrayed as a baby-step away from a stinky, smelly world toward a fully virtual landscape. That’s the endgame predicted by the Zuck, who took the path of the metaverse, even to the extent of renaming the parent company in a timely announcement during the news cycling around the whistleblower, Francis Haugan. (Meta is meta, but is that the same as virtual?) For the last decade we’ve been shown VR games that are somehow worse than PC games and told it is the inevitable future. Meanwhile videogames have gone through a soul-searching period of sincerely asking the question “what is a game?” which is the prime indicator that the designers not only don’t know how to have fun, but also have lost track of the gamification goals of the virtual world.
Apple, instead, portrayed how so many urbanites already live: in tidy isolation, around screens most of the day, pretending to be productive. Augmented reality may be just the decoration of a habitat that, after we clutter it up for a while, we realize how much we miss the stark alienation in which we reside. Whether the Vision Pro is a success or flop–whether it changes the world in which we live forever or just for a few early adopters is–fundamentally a question is whether you believe cultural change occurs due to exogenous factors and that technology is the tool by which to facilitate that change, or technology is itself the driving factor of cultural makeovers. I personally lean toward the former, and again suggest it’s both too early and too late.
The design genius of the Vision pro isn’t the overt, advertised specifications, or even the portrayed use cases; the hook is that there’s no reason to set it down or get up from it and walk away, other than the battery dying. (Of course, there will be generic battery packs on ebay.) Abandonment, by boredom or life duties, has been the weak point for computer hardware that aims to deliver an endless stream of content to us that is relevant both to our individuality and our physical context. My prediction is that Vision Pro 2 will be waterproof so you can shower with it on, snagging those 8 minutes that, on average, Americans spend getting wet, lathering up, reflecting on their past, present and immediate future, before rinsing off and drying themself. Vision Pro 3 will be designed so you can sleep with it on, securing not only those 5–10 liminal minutes before waking up and looking at your phone, but also delivering subliminal content while you sleep.
The price–whether warranted for its engineering marvels or not–wagers another version of computing: it’s not fun. The pricing says this is not a toy, this is a computer and most people use computers for shopping, communicating, entertainment and work, but not gaming. Gaming is too much fun. This is a markedly different interpretation of the metaverse than Meta, who’s betting on the gamification of virtuality as the driving-force for people to leave the sweaty, hairy, smelly world in which we have lived for the last 300,000 years.
While the Oculus is a TV wrapped around your head, playing bad-graphic games, while the Vision Pro is the melding of mundane daily life and work with your now-familiar pandemic domicile.
It’s also a display. And a projector. And a gaming console. But most importantly, it’s a memory camera. The most compelling part of Apple’s WWDC presentation was the scene of an adult man watching two children play and then replaying the recorded video in his digital prison. (It’s like the engineers of this device were dedicated fans of Black Mirror but didn’t understand that the genre of cultural criticism is inherently foreboding.) The scene is a nice G-rated application for what I predict will quickly become a mostly X-rated domain. But after the integration of the Vision Pro with other peripherals to satisfy our basest desires and we pause in our post-coital latency period and the dual 4k-displays eek out the last joules of the battery pack and we look back at the moments we’ve recorded and not only comprehend the passage of time but inhabit the ineluctable frailty of our mortality, will the design of the Vision Pro accommodate tears?
