To The Moon

Yesterday, I wrote about the first impression I had of the Apple Vision Pro, a more emotional impression than going into details. Today I want to focus on the second one, mainly focused on the details of the Vision Pro, and what they mean.

It was the MacIntosh that ushered us into the personal computer era, developing a new way of interacting with it. Changed the cursor and direction arrows to the mouse and the position arrow on the screen. The green letters disappeared and instead we organized our desktop with folders and apps as if it were our office, which changed the way of working with computers to the point that all manufacturers copied and followed it.

With the iPhone, it put computers and the activity we carried out with them into our phones, and now with Apple Vision Pro it takes us to the spatial computer, that is, to a device that will transform our environment, wherever we are, on our screens, from in such a way that it will soon make us forget about keyboards and mice, to slide fingers across touch screens and manage our digital activity with a mixture of voice commands, gestures, pinches and our own gaze.

Apple Vision Pro is not the first augmented reality viewer, others came before it, but just like the iPhone, it was not the first mobile phone, as I said yesterday, it was the definitive one, which had nothing to do with the previous ones, to which trained to do infinite things more. With digital watches, he did the same again, giving them “the Apple touch”, which consists of turning the complicated into simple and easy, but the merit was not so much the device, as if it was in the iOS operating system developed for each of the devices that were what moved them, and that made possible the way we interacted with him or her, with the applications and programs that we all know and use, but in a new environment. Now Apple Vision Pro also comes with its own operating system, VisionOS, which is the heart and brain of the system that will make it work as expected.

To get the first version, which will reach users in 2024, Apple has spared nothing, and has made all the company’s resources available to engineers, which are many, even knowing that the cost would rise and the price too. : the screen materials, the casings, the chips, the lenses, the memory…, everything necessary to achieve a Premium product, and finally, boy did it succeed. They wanted to launch the definitive device, and once again become the reference to imitate and that everyone will imitate, and with Apple Vision Pro they have achieved it.

How have they achieved it? Well, taking each and every one of its components to the limit of what is possible: such as its microscreens, so that digital and real reality complement each other, reaching up to 4K resolution, something common in large televisions, but impossible to find when we reduce the size of the screen to the size of a postage stamp. Apple has been able to place 23 million pixels on two screens the size of a postage stamp, on micro-OLED panels that guarantee unparalleled dynamic range and colors. They also incorporate their best processor to date, the M2, to which they add a second processor: the R1. Also add the twelve cameras that the device carries, the five LIDAR sensors, and the 6 microphones, which are what make it possible for everything to seem to be in its place in space, and then we will understand why the Vision Pro have gone much further, as happened on previous occasions with the successive developments of Apple.

If the ease of use and the user experience are up to what we have seen in the videos of the Apple presentation, Vision Pro at WWDC 2023, will have fulfilled its main objective: to make the complicated simple, as I already said, simplifying the way we interact with the devices immersed in our environment, something that will make it possible for us to change the way we do anything.

But let’s talk about the price: for now, we know that this first version has an announced price of $3,500 in the United States, and that it still has no price in our country. Apple products have always been the most expensive, but they offered more capabilities than their competition, which justified their higher price. The same thing happens with the Vision Pro, they are not conceived as a massive product, but as something much more important, much more efficient, capable of doing more things in a way that was non-existent until their arrival, which represents a paradigm shift in our way of doing things. The Vision Pro since yesterday are the object of desire of many people, technology taken to the limit as an aspiration. This is how Apple has developed its empire.

If until today nobody has been able to get this type of product to cross the walls that give way to a use beyond certain activities, such as gaming, or entertainment, if nobody has managed to make a viewer go further beyond its condition of being the novelty of the moment, a new and entertaining curiosity that we will forget about in a while, if practically nobody bought Zuckerberg’s idea of the metaverse, the biggest failure of a great technology company in recent decades, if nobody until today has been able to find the way to open this new horizon to the world, it had to be precisely Apple, which has not cared about the price, nor the difficulties it has had to overcome to develop this device, so that this will not be forgotten.

Apple Vision Pro should not be seen just as another electronic product, but as the next step for our activity to evolve in our own space. Only Apple can achieve these achievements. In his vision, and his determination to make it possible and real, is the difference.

How right Steve Jobs’ Apple was when he launched his well-known slogan “Think Different”. Thinking differently, and doing different things, is what differentiates them from the rest, and also marking enormous distances.

El artículo se puede leer en español en este enlace.