As the Vision Pro has been progressively unlocked for review, the curiosity about Apple’s new device has gone through a rollercoaster of ups and downs: first extreme excitement, then mediocre, and finally Meh, which isn’t all that different from the Meta Quest.
From my point of view, it’s not so much that it’s not so Apple as it is that Silicon Valley’s relationship with the supply chain has moved very fast in the last two decades (to the point where a big money maker can toss together a decent product in five years, even if it doesn’t know how to do anything), and that the new age of media is kicking the bucket of the traditional media at a breakneck pace. If the iPhone 3G were released today, it would probably be rated even lower than the VP. Every new product is not a good product at the beginning of its existence, and we have to learn to see the future in it.
Personally, I think VP is Apple’s big gamble on the future of mobile internet. It’s not as impressive because the man at the helm is no longer Steve Jobs, but that’s not a bad thing. Individuals can’t live in the past, let alone a business organization.
Since we are talking about a big gamble, it means that today’s Apple will have the possibility of losing the gamble. From this business, I can also give a conclusion: Apple’s financial results in the past two years should not be too good, because even if part of the growth fundamentals have been sacrificed, the VP’s strategic weighting must be the highest, there is no one.
I’ll start with three key points to explain why this clunky thing will represent Apple’s next Alpha.
Space computing devices
Apple is a company that takes its product definition much more seriously than most tech manufacturers. The VP is essentially a VR device, but Apple doesn’t intend to steer it in the direction of Virtual Reality. The VP has most of the capabilities of a VR device, except for the tactile ones, but just because it can do it doesn’t mean Apple is relying on it.
VR has never been a profitable business, and Meta has tossed and turned for so many years without creating an ecosystem with a deep moat.
The degree of decentralization in this industry is very high – even the interactive experience and hardware system do not have a unified paradigm. Companies are often left to follow some very basic ergonomic and biological principles to make immersive games or apps within the constraints of existing technical solutions, and basically have to operate based on their 2D display space matrices. A very, very few vendors with strong development capabilities (like Valve) might do killer titles like Alyx on it, but as you can see, that’s all it’s been for years.
Apple’s “spatial computing” concept is, frankly speaking, an extension of this logic: it’s a re-purposing of iOS/iPad OS/Mac OS in 3D space, but it’s much lighter than VR and has a much wider range of applications. When you take Quest with you, all you can think about is what I’m going to find in the Quest apps to try out;
For Apple users, the scope becomes: the apps that have been on Apple devices before.
It’s like most of the devices in the Apple ecosystem today: 90% productivity combined with 10% multimedia entertainment. But it’s a much more difficult and historic task than the I devices and Mac devices that came before it: multi-unification.
That’s another point I’ll get to below.
Vision OS
When you open Vision OS, most of your native apps are actually VP implants of iOS/iPad OS. Since the headset is powered by the M2, these apps work right out of the box in the local environment; on the Macbook, the VP becomes a mirrored display because the MBP is already running the M3 Pro or Ultra processor, and there’s a generational performance difference between the two.
But was it really going to stay that way?
The first generation of VP is actually a big data aggregate of many of Apple’s past devices in terms of interaction: the earliest testing ground for its guidance UI was the Apple TV, except that at that time the interaction was guided by the touchpad rather than by eye gaze (but the core logic was the same); its gesture perception and decision-making actions relied on the Apple Watch, or else its entire interaction detection area wouldn’t have been as extensive as it is today. It’s not as wide as it is today.
You can put your hand on your thigh to realize the basic interaction premise that the system has been through enough data to determine that these actions will only have a very low likelihood of misuse, and to achieve this there is no better data collector than the Apple Watch; and finally, the spatial audio, the Airpods series in the provision of this function is also built-in corresponding processing chip, you can understand that it is The audio component of the VP has been operating in Beta, and the official version is just a change in packaging system to an external speaker design.
Apple has been doing the underlying data collection and exploration for this system. Above we mentioned the interaction, then from the application level? Obviously, Apple’s three major mobile/desktop Hybrid systems are the most stable and reliable sources of data. In ’14 I was discussing with a friend that in the future Apple would find a way to finalize the xx OS as a whole, and that the current limitations were due to the incompatibility of mobile and desktop computing infrastructures. Ten years later, the last bottleneck between iOS/iPad OS and Mac OS is a purely arithmetic difference, and VP’s mission is to erase that last difference.
The ultimate vision of Vision OS is to become Apple’s all-in-one OS.
Why do people often say that Apple’s system is buggy? Why do people often complain that today’s Apple photos are surpassed by rivals? Why do people feel that Apple’s cell phones look the same after a few years? Because Apple has not really focused on the optimization of mobile devices iterative. Compared to the camera algorithm (that is, the core function of cell phone hardware competition in the regular context), Apple’s business focus is the arithmetic platform integration, even as the general public at the moment the perception is 0.
You can understand that the last few years of the iPhone is actually the same phone, Apple has been doing the basic arithmetic evolution —— until it and VP listed arithmetic difference is small enough to be symbiotic just. From a camera perspective, while the major vendors are rolling sensor rolls of software algorithms, Apple’s focus is on 3D spatial photography and UHD/High Contrast video capture, which is a very pure VP-oriented business choice to make sure that when the VP becomes ubiquitous, the vast majority of the photos/videos taken by the users can be experienced non-destructively in 3D space.
The MacBook series is the opposite, and represents the upper limit of VP power in the future; the Macbook Air is already fanless, and MBPs should be moving in that direction shortly, when VPs can be decoupled with sufficient redundancy. Why has Apple been downplaying the x64-based Mac lineup? Because business-wise, it’s not a necessary future arithmetic business, and it doesn’t mesh with VP. They can’t beat NVIDIA in the super-specialized market.
The future of Vision OS also means that you can just buy a Vision Pro and do what all of the above hardware devices are doing. It’s heavy, it’s not quite powerful enough, and some of its interactions are a bit inexplicable, and that’s fine. The important thing is that in a few years, Apple customers will be thinking about buying a One-for-all: the camera quality of an iPhone, the full range of compatible app systems, the spatial audio of AirPods, the (probably) day-long battery life and the (possibly) halved size.
It’s not a device that will replace any of these, but it could very well co-exist with them.
a That’s the ultimate Vision OS vision. The difficulties it faces before realizing it, such as ecological issues and experience problems, are surely a mountain to climb, and may not be perfected even years from now. However, Apple’s big gamble lies in the fact that if the gamble is won, this device can realize an increase in purchases by Apple users close to a 1:1 ratio.
The hardware problem is limited by the times, the development rate will not be too fast. However, Apple needs to find a breakthrough in the growth of Vision OS in the App Store in these two years, and there is no new ecology without star Apps.
App Store
VP’s path in the App Store is different from that of any VR device maker, and its vision is to have the world’s richest XR application resources and means of realization.
However, to realize this vision, it takes 5-10 years of application creep to achieve: first there, to the explosion, and then to the construction of democratization.
Productivity software part of the fact that they want to round up the difficulty is not too big, basically, VP in the first two years of service are professional-level creators/industry chain related personnel, this part of the application may be as early as before the release of the hardware has been immersed in the SDK environment, the listing is no more than to do a gesture.
The Apple/Microsoft office suite publicized by Netflix is purely a gimmick, and no one will really use VP to do desk work, which is extremely inefficient.
This part of the multimedia application is worth talking about. The so-called multimedia, generally covers several business segments:
Streaming media, covering movies / TV shows / documentaries / live programs / music / audio programs;
New generation digital traditional media, such as books/magazines/newspapers, etc., but this part of the media with or without VP is almost the same, and will not be tabulated later;
And then there’s desktop gaming, where Apple has made a late entry.
In this part of the business, Apple got a 50/50 result.
New-school giants such as Spotify and Netflix said no in advance, while old money such as Disney Paramount was happy to get on board. This isn’t surprising at all, but it goes back to what we said at the beginning of this section: who is VP’s target audience? For the first two, porting their own apps isn’t complicated at all, but VPing is a very small gain, as long as you can download the iPad app in VP.
Spotify and Netflix’s content distribution systems are not complicated, and the core health indicator for admission is the installed base of the OS. At the current time, even if every user who buys VP subscribes to these two APPs, the total numbers can be ignored outright.
Disney and Paramount, as the most recent old money to embrace streaming, will have a more special status: in addition to distributing works based entirely on the streaming system, they also have numerous TV content lineups (e.g., live sports events/headline theatrical movies, etc.) and IP derivatives, which are streaming content that can be used for immersive experiences that can make VP a new consumer end. At the same time, getting this business right will require them to spend a long time as seed developers themselves iterating consistently on a single stable platform.
For Apple, more and more media companies with business models like Disney’s and Paramount’s will surely choose to enter the game in the nascent stage, in order to take the initiative in the next-generation battle of the VR ecosystem.
I’ll go out on a limb and predict that these two companies may soon introduce VPs as a key component of interactive experiences in their own entertainment ecosystems.
Finally, the toughest bone for VPs to chew on is gaming.
Recently, Apple started to embrace the head game makers to attack the desktop gaming field that it had not paid much attention to before in order to let VP have its own killer desktop game in the gaming ecosystem: it has to be mature like Fruit Ninja or Angry Birds back then and make full use of VP’s brand new interactive and immersive experience to realize the effect of breaking the circle of traffic, and at the same time, the part of commercialization should be close to the way of mature game publishers instead of handheld game publishers as much as possible. At the same time, the commercialization part should be as close as possible to the way of mature game publishers instead of the handheld game kryptonite flow (even if you really want to do this, you have to raise the ecosystem first).
Game as early as in the Quest has been very important to the VR industry to promote the role of the VP this stage, Apple’s requirements for it will become very high: for example, you must be at least a mature work.
Why is it that Quest’s installed base has grown but there are few killer titles? Because it relies mainly on sales channels rather than C-suite consumers. A hardware system that doesn’t rely on consumer demand is not destined to make much progress in the software ecosystem, and even if it does, it’s just trading volume for market. That’s why Quest’s mall is full of demo-like works, most of which are not fresh for more than 30 minutes. To put it bluntly, Quest’s VR battle experience in the mall is the best.
The Vision series (including Pro) will be weighted as heavily as Mac OS in the App Store from now on, and the importance of the consumer business is self-evident. For Apple, this is a good time to cut away a big chunk of the traditional game maker’s pie, for several reasons:
The graphics performance of the M-series processors has gradually caught up with that of console display cores based on the X64 architecture, and ports no longer have an inherent performance barrier;
Traditional game consoles are more willing to favor their own first-party works, and most third-party manufacturers need more other influential platforms to assist in distributing their works back to the capital;
The scale and spending power of handheld game users has been well documented over the past few years, and from an iOS perspective, the ecological migration across VR has the advantage of a huge pool of users;
The industry’s largest installed base of Quest, the ecology is very crotch pulling, the competition has a good chance of winning.
Of course, reaching these four points also puts unprecedented demands on Apple:
They must come up with enough App Store resources to convince major manufacturers to port games to their own architecture;
They must give up some of their bargaining power in the App Store so that manufacturers can have a higher profitability (such as the recent third-party payment access problem, the good news is that they are solving, the bad news is that the solution is not very good);
They have to expose handheld gamers to VR in a short enough period of time to create new population growth;
They have to create a huge sales advantage for Quest in the short term in order to ensure that having a full voice in the VR scene will allow for a continuous cycle of 1, 2 and 3.
The first two of these have been poorly received by Apple throughout the gaming industry, and are the two issues I think they’re most likely to fall out of favor with.
But if you consider Apple’s ambition to be all-in-one, there’s no better time than the present to establish a deep partnership with a game maker if you have to find a key point in time.
As we all know, Apple has been absent for an entire golden age of PC/home consoles, focusing entirely on handheld games. The problem now is that the Vision series is strictly living room entertainment hardware (or at least the Pro certainly is), and it’s the last battlefield it’s going to have to fight if it wants to or not.
And finally, the conclusion.
Vision Pro is the most risky business Apple has done in years, and its victory was based on category breakthroughs (much like the mobile internet at the time) rather than rivalry or supply chain advantages. This is the ultimate growth problem that Cook needs to solve during his tenure at Apple, and I can’t give an extremely favorable or unfavorable opinion at this point, because even Apple itself doesn’t have an old way to go, so how can we learn from the experience of others before us?
But in today’s tech world, Apple is the only company that has dared to take the step of opening the door to its own foundation, and I say Respect.
