As the dust settles on Apple’s Vision Pro headset announcement, critical reactions are mostly all about the same thing: wearing big goggles around other people is weird and no one is going to want to do it.
Ben Thompson articulated this general critique quite clearly:
I didn’t even get into one of the features Apple is touting most highly, which is the ability of the Vision Pro to take “pictures” — memories, really — of moments in time and render them in a way that feels incredibly intimate and vivid.
One of the issues is the fact that recording those memories does, for now, entail wearing the Vision Pro in the first place, which is going to be really awkward!
…it’s going to seem pretty weird when dad is wearing a headset as his daughter blows out birthday candles
This isn’t the first time we’ve had to contend with weird new technology. Matt Birchler offers the two most likely paths the Vision Pro might take:
The question is, what’s this going to be like:
- AirPods, which many people thought looked silly at first but then people got used to them.
- Camcorders, which took decades to go from kinda awkward to mainstream over decades and massive advances in the tech.
When AirPods first launched, I remember how viscerally strange I found them. Now, not only do I use AirPods religiously, I don’t even remember why I thought they were so weird in the first place. If Apple can pull that off again, we will be in for a wild next few years.