May 4 2024

Oh, the Humanity

I’m indebted to The Overspill for sharing the intro to M. G. Siegler’s latest piece on the Apple Vision Pro:

Arguing about the shipment projections for Apple’s Vision Pro is sort of like arguing about how many tickets were sold on the fateful Hindenburg journey.[1] For one thing, we’re going to find out the number one way or another, eventually.[2] For another, we’re sort of overlooking the massive airship exploding in the sky.

[Footnote links omitted from this quotation since this is a paid subscriber post at Spyglass, so we non-subscribers can’t see that content.1]

On the one hand, we’re still a few months on from the release to actual paying customers of the Apple Vision Pro. On the other, rumours that the Vision Pro won’t see a hardware update until late 2026 do suggest that the Apple faithful are going to look back on this experience as an extended beta test of an idea that the world wasn’t ready for yet. The Vision Pro may be seen as a testbed for ideas that will reappear down the line in other products. Like the Xerox Alto was.

[Via The Overspill]


  1. I wish micropayments had turned out to be a thing. I’d have willingly thrown Spyglass US$1 to take a peek at the rest of the linked article, but not US$10 for a month’s subscription or US$100 for an annual subscription.↩︎