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Review: Two Weeks With the Apple Vision Pro
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Creepy aside, this use case does sound, well, useful. But how often do we pass by someone wearing a pair of shoes we want? In other words, are people going to walk around wearing a pair of smart glasses that they most likely will have to charge daily or carry around a power source with, just on the off chance they'll see something they want to buy, and the glasses helps make the purchase easier? I think this use case is one way such a device can be used, but it would have to have a bunch of other uses for people to be convinced to wear one all day, all the time.
Apparel, furniture, living rooms, bedrooms, office, exterior paint colors, cars you can't identify, etc.
The broader context is anything you can think of that is purchasable... we get our ideas about what we want by seeing or hearing them (I've used Shazam a LOT to tell me what a song is that I hear in a restaurant and then go buy it), and we often forget what they are or have no idea where to start looking. And cracking that nut solves a number of problems, including the marketplace for intrusive advertising or advertisers collecting data on you... if everything everywhere advertises itself, what use do merchandisers have for intrusive ads, or other middlemen, if software and hardware can connect you directly to the thing you want?
It's not going to entirely replace other ways of doing things, but it is a multi-trillion dollar market, something big enough that it's worth Apple's time and gargantuan cash reserve to go figure out... and it's a convenience that every single person who buys anything can use.
This is why I think this tech is about 50 years away. The firepower and the battery life tech aren't anywhere near what they'd need to be yet. But this is where I think MR would actually be useful on an iPhone-like level. Until then, it's a bit of a novelty that is more cumbersome than convenient.
EDIT: Also, this is just an example of the kinds of features that make this tech truly useful... productivity driven by wants more than needs, because desires drive more spending that does not need a business justification. There are other kinds of things we do that revolve around anticipating our needs, but that level of AI is even further off into the future.
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Ah, okay. Yes, by then there might be a wearable glasses type of device that would basically be an iPhone on our face, that does everything the iPhone does and more, and people will happily wear them all day, every day, just as they carry iPhones in their pockets now. Because it will be that useful.
I think both Apple VP and Meta Quest are first baby steps toward such a device. Will they get there eventually? Who knows. 50 years is such a long time, the company that eventually makes this device may not even have been formed yet!
It can be powered/supplemented by a cell phone not too unlike how Apple Watch works with an iPhone.
It’s a more “convenient” 2nd display projecting computations primarily done by a phone
Apple’s excellent “pro” (prosumer and up) profit portfolio would like to differ on that take unlike Meta’s unsuccessful track record of providing prosumer and up products reliably.
Meat’s Quest Pro headset is heavier than the Vision Pro and has always struggle to get anything close to the fanfare Apple’s prosumer standalone headset has earned.
Apple and the likes of Asus and Dell have no problem selling prosumer products alongside mainstream products—and having mainstream audiences salivating them creating low-end equivalents one day like Apple’s Pro Display XDR and Asus’s Pro Art PA32UCGQ that have aged like fine wine in the segment of monitors they sit in.
Not everything has to be mainstream to be successful. Nvidia, Dolby, Apple, and others know this very well.