The Apple Vision Pro is ‘the spiritual successor to the Newton’

Albert Fox Cahn, the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), a New York-based civil-rights and privacy group, writes for Business Insider, “We won’t look back on Vision Pro as Apple’s new iPhone moment. If anything, it’s the spiritual successor to the Newton, the widely mocked 1990s PDA.”

Albert Fox Cahn for Business Insider:
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[W]hen the Apple Vision Pro arrived, I was giddy with excitement to dive into the type of toy I’d dreamt of since childhood. The long-delayed promise of augmented reality was finally here. But almost as soon as I strapped on these cyborg ski goggles, I wanted to throw them against the wall. Not only was I frustrated, I was terrified. Apple’s nearly $4,000 gimmick may be a bit of a flop for the company. But for the rest of us, it’s an extremely alarming harbinger of how tech giants are going to know even more about our private lives and radically reshape our communities once again.

The Vision Pro tries to answer the question of how you can use a computer without a mouse or keyboard. It answers it poorly. When you mount Apple’s personal panopticon to your face, an augmented-reality interface appears, using a dozen cameras to map out your environment. It films everything around you, every piece of furniture, every scrap of paper — Post-it notes, bank statements, health-insurance bills — even your choice of recreational beverage to show you a grainy, digitized copy of your world on a screen.

My personal laptop doesn’t see the handwritten notes I leave loved ones or the passwords I type into other devices. My work computer’s webcam sees only the one highly stage-managed corner of my life I show it, the wall of books and awards carefully crafted with the hope my background could one day earn a score on Room Rater. Within seconds the Vision Pro had photographed more of my apartment and body than my laptop saw over the decade I’ve had it.

Just setting up the headset turned into a nauseating ordeal. Want to navigate an app? Use your hand to click and zoom. This felt amazing the first time I tried it, but clicking and zooming is no way to type. I can only imagine how it would have looked to someone in my living room, as I tried to hunt and peck letters on a simulated keyboard, constantly cursing in irritation. As I flailed at the imaginary keyboard, it became clear just how little thought Apple gave to one of the most important features of digital life: passwords…

After the fifth time I tried to peck out the randomized 20-character combination I used for Disney+, I was so filled with sickness and rage I needed a break. As a friend who tried my headset remarked, “It gave me the nausea of a roller coaster without any of the thrill.”

What a major fall from grace for the Cupertino colossus…

We won’t look back on Vision Pro as Apple’s new iPhone moment. If anything, it’s the spiritual successor to the Newton, the widely mocked 1990s PDA. But just like the Newton, this buggy beta test of a product launch also foreshadows technology trends just around the corner. And as future headsets blind us and isolate us, we may not be able to see the next corner.

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MacDailyNews Take: Blah, blah, blah, on and on it goes with Albert mainly fixated on the admittedly wonky virtual keyboard to the detriment of all of the other features and input mechanisms available to Vision Pro – which is exactly what you’d expect to occur when a product is released too early to average users.

Apple Vision Pro is a devkit for developers, not for average users, and should have been released as a devkit for developers.

When a product is released too early to average users, you get reviews like “it’s the spiritual successor to the Newton.” And you deserve them.

As we wrote last week:

There are a lot of people inside and outside of Apple who think the company should have waited on the Vision Pro, but it’s fairly easy today to see why Tim Cook released this beta (alpha?) devkit: He likely knew last year, or had a strong inkling, that Project Titan was a goner and there wasn’t much excitement in Apple’s pipeline. He’d need something to point to as “innovation” while he continued on his seemingly unending quest to iterate and monetize products invented by Steve Jobs’ Apple (a very different place) while continuing Apple’s retail store buildout. He also needed something to energize developers and, who knows, they might come up with a killer visionOS app while Apple toils on the long road to real lightweight spatial computing glasses and beyond.

More importantly, Apple last year had already come to the sad realization that they’d missed the generative artificial intelligence revolution and would need a distraction while they feverishly scrambled to catch up (the fruits of which — alongside what sound like disappointing partnerships which hopefully, somehow, preserve user privacy — we’ll hopefully begin to see at WWDC this June).

You have to feel for Cook. After a decade plus of being able to iterate and monetize Jobs’ inspired products and services and continue adding retail stores around the world to spectacular effect, and being lauded for it, he now finds himself in a place that requires actual vision to be able to see which path to take. And he’s not the guy. Even the guy who put him in the position knew it.

Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs

See also:
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023

Beyond the fact that Cook can’t even execute a compelling live keynote address, his big send off, the “Apple Car,” [the idea of which was also germinated under Jobs] fizzled in ignominious failure.

See also:
• Scrapped Apple Car ‘a massive disappointment that will alter the course of the company’s history, perhaps for decades to come’ – Gurman – March 11, 2024
• Apple employees referred to doomed Apple Car project as ‘The Titanic Disaster’ – February 29, 2024

So, despite myriad misgivings and protestations inside Apple, Cook pulled the trigger early on the Vision Pro. He had to have something to point to that would buy him some time. Even Apple’s rubber-stamping board of lackeys would wake up and start asking questions otherwise.

While Cook is hemming and hawing when faced with shareholders (virtually, of course, never again in person for as long as Cook remains), Apple is currently in scramble mode trying to catch up to rivals — including the world’s most valuable company, Microsoft — in generative AI, a technology the company seems to have completely missed while focusing instead on the not-ready-for-primetime Apple Vision Pro, visionOS, its now-canceled decade-long multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle boondoggle, replacing leather in iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands with overpriced junk in a quest to “save the planet,” forcing employees to endure a constant barrage of time-wasting zero-productivity DEI sessions, and myriad other various and sundry “initiatives” which Cook deems of import. – MacDailyNews, February 28, 2024

When you lose your visionary CEO and replace him with a caretaker CEO, this is the type of aimless, late, bureaucratic dithering that ensues. – MacDailyNews, November 21, 2017

Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024

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