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:
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.
