The Apple Vision Pro's Missing Apps
Ben kicks off a screamer this morning with a quote from a prior interview with Om Malik:
But the thing is you actually have to be mobile-native to actually appreciate something like this. So if you've grown up watching a 75-inch screen television, you probably would not really appreciate it as much. But if you are like me who's been watching iPad for ten-plus years as my main video consumption device, this is the obvious next step. If you live in Asia, like you live in Taiwan, people don't have big homes, they don't have 85-inch screen televisions. Plus, you have six, seven, eight people living in the same house, they don't get screen time to watch things so they watch everything on their phone. I think you see that behavior and you see this is going to be the iPod.
I'll go one further: when I moved to Florida, I went to great pains to create the best home theater I could with a complete blank slate. That landed me with:
- A $6000 ultra-short throw 4K projector
- A $1500, 123" screen situated 5 feet from my eyeholes
- Black out blinds with edge side channels to prevent the Florida sun from sneaking in
- The usual accouterment: surround sound, receiver, streaming box, wired networking, a thousand cables to connect it all, etc.
I think I read six hundred posts on AVS Forum and Reddit before settling on this setup, and three years later it's still the best configuration money can buy. People who come over and watch a movie are usually blown away. Indeed, it is pretty fucking rad.
But, you know what? Vision Pro already smokes this setup. Wider field of view, tighter perceivable dot pitch, better color reproduction. Using an individual headset isn't just better for "mobile-native" users one might imagine in a far-flung Asian country where everyone lives in 200-square foot studio apartments… today's high-end headsets are already better than the best flat displays, period.
The bulk of the post is spent comparing Apple Vision's launch with the introduction of the iPod. iPod's success was enabled by Apple's clever persuasion over the record labels to dramatically devalue their songs on iTunes, while the biggest story about the Vision Pro is that Netflix and YouTube are skipping its launch due to Apple's draconian App Store policies. Wanna watch Netflix? You'll have to use Safari:
Apple may be unhappy that Netflix viewers have to go to the Netflix website to watch the service on the Vision Pro (and thus can't download shows for watching offline, like on a plane); Netflix might well point out that that going to the web is exactly what Apple makes Netflix customers do to sign up for the service.
Ben goes on, mostly about what this conflict means for the short-term. We'll have to see. I think his analysis is pretty mcuh bang on.
However.
One thing I'd suggest is that visionOS is actually Apple's first bimodal platform, in that it has the potential to be the ideal experience for both consumption and creation (something that, to date, Apple has divided with iOS/iPadOS/tvOS/watchOS on one side and macOS on the other). My primary use case for a Vision Pro is to just mirror my Mac screen to it as I develop software, despite having a $3000 6K Dell display a few feet away, simply because the Vision Pro offers a bigger, better screen (despite having fewer pixels).
In Steve Jobs parlance, the Vision Pro is simultaneously a car and a truck.
I think it's exactly because Apple can move the ball down both ends of the field simultaneously with a single futuristic platform that they're so obviously committed to this platform. In the past, the thing that's given Apple leverage over software and media companies has been that they dominate hardware sales to the juiciest demographic of consumers. Today, the conversation is over whether regulators or circumstance will force them to loosen their grip on the app store. But it's unlikely we're going to know how the next chapter of this power struggle will play out any time soon—it'll be at least 5 years before Vision Pro has the kind of gravitational pull to attract either a massive installed base or regulatory scrutiny, so smart money would probably bet on a stalemate (for now).
I suspect Apple is clear-eyed about all this and they're prepared to patiently plug away at this platform for ten years before rethinking their strategy. On that score, there's not really any point in changing course until the underlying technology reaches a tipping point to appeal to a larger, mainstream audience. If and when that happens, if Apple once again owns the platform that powers the market's best product, they'll once again have all the leverage they had with iPhone.
One thing Steve Jobs and Tim Cook have in common is the degree to which they are preternaturally stalwart in their convictions. If Tim Apple is shook about any of this drama, he's sure as hell doing a good job hiding it.