The Vision Pro is an odd duck. (What else would you do with an odd duck than strap it to your face?)
It’s a device that’s largely defined by its experiences, from spatial computing to immersive video and memories. But Apple hasn’t exactly bombarded Vision Pro owners with them, and the few that have arrived lately have been hit-and-miss.
Major League Baseball shipped an update to its visionOS app just in time for opening day and it hit for the cycle, if by “hitting for the cycle” you mean striking out swinging, striking out looking and grounding into a triple play. (These are all baseball terms. Feel free to look them up if you’re confused.) Many of the snazzy features it demoed at the Vision Pro unveiling were missing and if you close the main navigation window while watching a game video, all the windows close. Hopefully, it at least made a happy “bleep-bloop” sort of noise. Reviewers were unclear about this.
Apple itself released an immersive video of Major League Soccer. Sounds exciting until you realize it’s the Cup playoffs from last year, it’s five minutes long and it took the company three months to deliver it. Obviously, these experiences will get better. Lead times will get shorter, bugs will be squashed and experiences will be made more full-featured. In the meantime, however, the Macalope’s not feeling any FOMO.
One thing that does seem to have gotten some praise of late, however, is the addition of Spatial Personas. Have you ever wanted to talk to a ghost… that was still alive? That’s just what it looks like. Spatial Personas put those 3D representations of other Vision Pro users we all complained about into whatever space you happen to be in. According to those who’ve tried it out, it somehow takes a little bit of the uncanny out of the valley and makes them seem more realistic.
Apple is definitely moving the experience on the Vision Pro forward, it’s not Touch Bar-ing it, but some have found the moderate pace somewhat perplexing. The Macalope wonders himself what Apple itself makes of this product. At $3,500, it probably knows it’s not going to sell that many devices no matter how much content it makes. Yet, if it doesn’t make enough content to satisfy the customers who did shell out $3,500, it doesn’t get that sweet word of mouth, that hot buzz, that cherry zing-zang.
Okay, that last one isn’t a thing anyone says. (Yet.)
How do we classify this product? The Vision Pro is not a developer release and it’s not a prototype. But it still seems like a more prematurely released product than is usual for Apple. Sure, other famed Apple products have been released without everything available on day one. The Macalope doesn’t know if you’ve heard, but it took years to get copy and paste on the iPhone. True story. The Apple Watch Series 0 was a largely complete product, but it was slow and didn’t ship with all the health features it would come to be known for. The first MacBook Air was expensive and had a spinning disk drive. Moving parts. So gross. Conceptually, these second two devices didn’t really hit their stride until they were a few versions in. It’s quite likely that’s going to be the case with the Vision Pro.
Early reports of Vision Pro returns were rather exaggerated, but the real staying power remains to be seen and will depend in no small part on how compelling Apple can continue to make the device. The Macalope’s certainly not saying he knows better than Apple how to roll out this product, it’s just going to be interesting to see how much is enough.
