Apple Vision Pro Wants to be Two Products

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We published a new piece this week on product strategy and the Vision Pro.

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You can read it at this link.

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I remember when the iPhone came out. Same with the iPod (though I was much younger). At the time, Steve Jobs was one of my heroes. Apple developed products that were breakthroughs in their categories even though they weren’t ever the first. That approach gave Apple its current reputation for innovation and design.

The Vision Pro is really exciting. I can’t wait to get one. Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, presciently said that before something like this “can be something everyone can afford it has to be something people want.” Mission accomplished.

But it’s also overengineered. Mark Gurman say that Apple’s launch strategy is taking a “scattershot” approach and letting the market decide what it’s for. App developers aren’t tackling it yet, and the Vision Pro will launch with a smaller App Store than the iPhone or Apple Watch.

You see this problem throughout the products space. Designers are afraid to commit to certain use cases, lest they be wrong. Business planners fear not being able to cover a vertical. So no one has an opinion and every product can do everything, but only somewhat.

The great virtue of the Apple of old was focus and its predicate: choice. To make product choices, you must have a vision of what the product must be. That allows you to take advantage of nascent and amazing yet immature technologies to appear on the cutting edge.

The Vision Pro is an example of abandoning that approach. It wants to be two different products. Let’s explore.

iChoose

Apple went through two distinct periods, technologically, in its history: a Wozniak and a Jobs period. In the beginning…