Thoughts About That New Apple AR Headset Which I Expect To Age Poorly

So. Hmm.

mathNEWS articles are written on Mondays for publishing on the following Fridays. That means that, as I’m writing this, Apple has just announced their long, long rumored AR/VR headset, now officially titled the Apple Vision Pro. I’m sure by the time this is published, we’ll have all sorts of think pieces and memes about this thing, but I wanted to get my initial reaction down raw.

Who knows, maybe the goggles will turn out to be revolutionary in the same way the Mac, iPod, and iPhone were- not the first in their category, but the first to make the category accessible and desirable to the average person. Having watched Apple’s presentation, that’s what they seem to think they’re doing. Apple is wealthy enough and stubborn enough to wedge this into our lives if they really, really tried. It’s been a while since they’ve launched a flat-out flop, and I expect this to be a moderate success, at least. And you can head to East Campus to see what happens when you bet against Apple.

But I see a lot of major issues with the product as presented this afternoon, and I think it’s worth getting these thoughts down today. Who knows, maybe I’ll be wrong and this will age like all the people who thought the internet was a fad, and we can all look back in a decade and laugh at me.

Let’s get the obvious problem out of the way, the one that everyone seems to be focusing on- that price tag. $3500 USD. That’s $5000 CAD. I know this is a new product category, I know this is an Apple product- but man. There’s no getting around how much that costs. Apple had to ease people into $1500 phones, and even now they offer cheaper options. Starting at $3500 is bananas, and means this first generation is going to be very limited to developers and rich weirdos.

For most first-generation products, that might not necessarily be an issue- but Apple is going to want as many people to have this as possible to get people used to how these overgrown ski goggles look. Their demo showed people walking around an office or their home with these on, and it was impossible to take seriously. People mocked AirPods when they came out, but this is going to be a whole lot harder to take seriously when you run into someone wearing them at Starbucks.

Not that you’re likely to see that, because the stated battery life is an atrocious two hours WHILE physically connected to a mandatory external battery pack. Look- I’ve been around the block. I know that when a tech company gives you a battery life estimate, you halve it. But even with 2 whole hours, this is just fundamentally not something you could take into the real world, beyond an outlet.

And that’s assuming you’d even want to use it in public anyways, since the stated control methods are “eyesight, hand gestures, and voice”. If I want to open Instagram under the table in class, I can do that relatively low-key. If I want to open it on the headset, I need to do some combination of yelling at myself and frantically waving my arms around. I don’t know if anyone at Apple has social anxiety, but using this machine in public seems to be impossible without looking like an idiot and/or someone having a stroke.

Those things are relatively minor flaws, though, in the sense that there’s a clear path to fixing them. Not that it’ll be easy, but “the battery life needs to be better” has a conceptually simple solution- “make a better battery”. Apple knows what they need to do.

The deeper issue is the one that’s plagued all XR headsets trying to masquerade as “the future of computing”- what exactly does Apple expect me to do with this thing?

Forget the fact that they only showed the OS as a CG concept video. In those concept videos, the only thing Apple can seem to imagine people using this headset for is… all the things they already do on their phones and PCs. Taking FaceTime calls. Texting their friends. Using email. Watching movies. Playing games. Spreadsheets. Oh boy, they’ve got spreadsheets on this thing.

Everyone already has a way to do all of this. The fortunate of us have several (and considering the price, Apple is definitely targeting the fortunate of us). It would be one thing if AR was a more convenient way to do these things, but… it isn’t! Wearing a headset all the time is tiring and significantly less convenient than using your phone you’ll be carrying with you while you wear this anyways.

Apple seems to think that people will want to use AR to do the things they already do just fine because… why? Now you can do it while looking like a jackass, talking to yourself and waving your arms around? It just seems like yet another tech company creating a product they deem to be “the wave of the future”- not because it actually enabled anyone to accomplish anything they couldn’t do otherwise, but because it was in science fiction and it’s technically possible now to do it.

The iPhone was so successful, not because it gave people new things they could do, but because it took the existing capabilities of other products, combined them, and made it frictionless. The Vision Pro only introduces friction.

I want to be wrong. I feel like something like this is probably the future eventually. And I’d especially love a whole new paradigm of computing to explore, to work in, and to imagine new exciting things to do with. I don’t think we’ll be using PCs and phones forever.

But I have a really hard time thinking this is it. See you all in a decade for either a good laugh at my expense… or for when another company tries to do this again.

~

February 2025 Update: I was totally right about everything in this piece lol