Apple Vision Pro: Brilliant Molochian Hellgoggles
There's nothing "meh" about Apple's new platform. It's brilliant. It's *terrifying*.
“We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer
The Object Itself
Let me get the first half of this out of the way quickly. This is not a review of the Apple Vision Pro, the specific hardware device launched a week ago. The interesting stuff is about the implications of “spatial computing,” Apple’s description for what happens inside the thing.
But I should at least mention the device itself.
The Apple Vision Pro lives up to the expectations I had when I wrote my piece last week. It’s an amazing piece of kit, feels expensive and well made, and just works. If I was a negative Nelly, there are plenty of warts: it’s heavy (too heavy for some people), I had setup issues, apps crash, the battery life ain’t great, it’s expensive (at $4k it’s about 50% less than an inflation-adjusted launch-Mac in 1984, but still…) and it’s mostly a blank slate right now lacking a “killer app.”
Yawn.
Every 1st-gen Apple products since the ‘80s, has gone this way:
Launch a piece of breathtaking hardware with a brand new way of interacting with the digital world.
Make sure that the core OS is bomb-proof and intuitive, if simplistic.
Allow barnacle-developers to make a pile of schlock apps that add features every rational user wants.
See what resonates, rev the OS a ton, and the rev the Hardware so that it's mass-market acceptable, obviating the need for almost all third-party launch applications.
Sell sell sell.
While we could argue about the relative merits of the Newton (which is now an iPhone/iPad), or even the Lisa (which became the Mac), Apple really doesn’t invent things and then fail much. (I blame Bandai for the Pippin).
Apple is very serious about this thing. They’ve filed over 5,000 patents on it (FIVE THOUSAND), acquired whole companies to produce it, and I suspect will invest heavily in it for at least a few hardware generations, if not indefinitely. The original patent was filed in 2007, and granted last August, and while Apple has “only” sold about 200k units, that’s still nearly a billion dollars in a week, which, while less than a percent of a decent quarter’s sales Apple, ain’t nothing. Estimates on the R&D investment so far are >$20 Billion.
For real reviews and lots of “in the goggles” demos, go check out Casey Neistat for the mainstream YouTuber version, or Marques Brownlee, who is the best tech vlogger on the internet. There's very little any of those folks have said that I disagree with. There are lots of mostly very silly videos of influencers trying to “live” with it on, but that’s a little like trying to “live” by looking through your iPhone camera all the time: possible, I suppose, but irrelevant.
In Short: It’s a Gen1 computing platform that will either work for you, or it won’t, with very little room in between. There’s nobody who *needs* one unless they’re a developer, anymore than anyone with a Blackberry “needed” an iPhone 1.
But is absolutely not a toy or a gimmick. It’s Gen1 of a new concept, which I am going to go ahead and give to Apple here: Spatial Computing. (If you want to understand how we got to this from the soup of VR/XR/AR/MetaVerse/Cyberspace and all that, check Matt Ball’s essay.)
A Force For Good: Brilliant Assistive Tech
The Apple Vision Pro as shipped is already a legit work device to both opens up the world as a workspace, and I suspect opens up the Metaverse (which I at least use to mean “all of interactive digital spaces, tools and experiences available on the internet whether their VR or not” to a whole new population in a positive way.
An Incredibly Mobile Work Environment: AVP’s core innovation is the operating system, which relies primarily on voice commands and eye tracking. I have always typed faster than I can speak, however, as I start getting closer to 60 arthritis makes that less and less the case every day. The dictation on the AVP is nothing short of magical. I find Microsoft’s built in Speech-to-Text unusable, Dragon too fiddly and cumbersome, and iPhone dictation to work about 50% of the time. By contrast, I’ve navigated the AVP and written thousands of words with it with very very few mistakes, and very very fast response.
I tend to do my best thinking and thus my best writing while walking. The AVP makes it easy to open a word doc and start writing, all while my hands are in the sink, or while I’m pacing the living room, or noodling on the guitar, using whatever combination of “Hey Siri” and eye-tracking feels natural — soapy hands can still make the magic gesture of pinching the air to signal a click. An added bonus I can put my working drafts and notes anywhere around me on any size window: I get less eyestrain reading a billboard size screen then a screen 20 inches away, so I tend to put my virtual docs on the walls, big. I actually think it gives me less eyestrain than the same amount of time staring and typing (and definitely hurts my hands less after).
But beyond just dictating, almost everything I do with computers (at least, in the Apple Ecosystem) is possible. Manipulating files, editing, selecting and copying text, making phone calls or writing emails, managing my calendar, listening to music, researching stuff, scrolling through content. I genuinely feel more productive having infinite screens of PDFs and websites open all around me as I’m pacing around the living room so that when I wanna go look something up, I can literally just walk over to it or say “hey Siri open Bloomberg.” And since authentication is retinal, once I have apps and such setup, it all just opens and logs in without delay.
Screen Extension: The AVP is amazing at what it does, but it’s not super powerful as a computational device — there are no native apps for Adobe Premiere or Ableton, for instance, and you’re not plugging it into a RAID array, but that’s obviated simply by looking at the screen of your Mac and sharing it’s screen, which then appears as big-as-you-want 4K monitor in the AVP. The first time I dragged Ableton and my sheet music over top of my keyboard, I was hooked.
With a Mac in the mix, pretty much anything you could ever need to do is at least doable inside the AVP, and in many cases, actually faster and better. The combination of an Vision Pro and a MacBook create not just a good work-travel experience, but effectively your entire work experience wherever you are.
The Worlds Best Assistive Device? Maybe?: The AVP is great for a pacer like me, but it’s also good for being utterly sedentary. As an experiment, I lay absolutely immobile in bed and using nothing but my voice, eyeballs and two fingers — not even moving my arms — and was able to do two hours of legitimate brain-think work. Reading things, opening, spreadsheets, editing some video, sending emails and making phone calls. Heck, I played a Magic the Gathering Draft when I was done with the work I wanted to do.
If for some reason I ever end up in an iron lung, I expect my wife to deliver this to my bedside.
Of the millions of things I know very little about, assistive tech is up there with “intuiting others emotional state” for me, however, I have to assume that for some people with mobility and dexterity issues, this seems like a literal life changing miracle.
Why It’s a Boon, Shorthand: The Apple Vision Pro — really, spatial computing — resets the baseline for where and how “knowledge work” gets done, potentially freeing even-more people from the constrains of an office, allowing better focus while in an office, and possibly opening up whole realms of work (and the broader Metaverse, VR or no) to new populations.
A Force for Moloch: Capitalist HellGoggles
Here’s the “success” scenario for Spatial Computing: a few years from now, AVP3 is lighter, cheaper, and variegated into “consumer” and “prosumer” models, and competitors have launched. A Spatial Computing device is now just another metaverse interaction device. So to “do something” you just grab some googles, a phone, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop. Most people won’t have all 5. Most knowledge workers will have a phone + at least two other devices. So who gets the goggles?
Labor Impacts: A Knowledge Work Hellscape:
One of the common troops of cyberpunk — the genre that presaged all this Metaverse stuff of people wearing goggles and waving their arms around — is the idea that the knowledge workers of the future are essentially computer jockeys who rely heavily on State of the Art hardware to be more efficient at their jobs than their competitors, while simultaneously living in a near-apocalyptic version of technocapitalism.
The iconic image of Wade Watts from Cline’s Ready Player One is of him standing in a derelict van, wearing mid-rate gear:
And a significant portion of Cyberpunk plots deal with quests to get corporate-grade hardware, while living in squalor. In other words: zoomers. My son moved to college in a compact car and took almost literally every object he owned but his bicycle and snowboard, but the important parts were his gaming PC, laptop and phone. He is a virtual boy and a virtual world, and based on my small sample size of actual zoomers I’ve met in person, he seems to be the norm. I suspect the average 20 year old is far, far more likely to own more dollar value in tech than in, say, sporting goods or automobiles or even clothes.
With AVP in the mix, it’s easy to imagine the 25-year-old coder/graphic designer/copy editor/button pusher/compliance person/account services rep of 2025 living in a 10 x 10 box with a recliner, souptubes and a shared bathroom.
After all why hire a bunch of programmers who have expensive houses, cars, and, you know, friends, in Silicon Valley? What if instead you could rack mount 100 “quality control technicians” - or whatever post-AI knowledge work becomes - in a warehouse in Hyderabad in some new version of a Japanese capsule hotel.
In fact, this kind of situation already exists in e-sports, and has a bit of a “exploitative dormitory” reputation. Resource efficient? Sure. But at the cost of collective sanity and soul.
And for a corporation, the ecosystem Apple has developed enables all sorts of panoptica. By design, the AVP as a single user device, hard locked to your retina scan. To heck with “Face-ID”. Once you’ve authenticated into your Company AVP, however, there’s the potential for this to be a privacy nightmare. Given that 96% of companies with remote workers already surveil them, it’s a dream come true for a company that wants to clock everyone in and out of bathroom visits. In order to function, the device tracks not just your “activity” online, but literally every single thing you look at inside the device and in the real world. Within 3 years, eye-and-action tracking will become de rigueur for the most invasive employers of rafts of untrusted remote cogworkers.
Cognitive impacts:
After spending a week with this thing, I think its changed my brain.
To use the AVP efficiently - that is, at a level where its as fast or faster than using a laptop - requires two major physical commitments:
I absolutely have to look *precisely* where I intend until you have done whatever thing I’m trying to do.
I need to have my thumb and forefinger within the 180 degree bubble of forward camera view.
Initially I made the mistake of trying to “click” something I wasn’t looking at, over and over again. Years of using a mouse has trained me that once I get the pointer over whatever, I can move my eyes — and my thinking — somewhere else while my finger clicks the mouse. After even just a few minutes of doing real work (not just exploring), it completely slowed down and monotracked both my eye movements and my thought processes.
If you spend an entire day, being extremely mindful of precisely what you are looking at you are in fact, engaging in a kind of mindfulness meditation. Specifically you’re doing something very similar to quite a few schools of meditation that rely on a visible object of meditation. The most famous of which is staring at a candle, so called Kasina meditation, something of which I’m quite fond of. (See sidebar article on meditation!)
After an hour or two with AVP, I experience somewhat similar kinds of cognitive shifts as I’ve noticed following visual meditation. The world seem sharper, I “feel” slower and more deliberate, things seem to have harder edges. Perceptual effects definitely linger. Time slows down a bit (meaning, my cognitive clock has sped up).
Yay! Dave Why Isn’t This In The “Force For Good” Part?! Maybe it should be! Perhaps the AVP will help folks like me focus better, manage social anxiety, and find some peace! I’m dying to see how some left-brain trapped technologists who’ve never tried anything “woo” before feel about it in a year, even if they never fire up an in-goggle mindfulness App. But also, I have come to believe, just from my own experience and relationships, that meditation and mindfulness are not panaceas, they are simply sharp knives in the drawer to refine the human experience, and like any tool, there are in fact some pitfalls (more on that in the sidebar). So it feels a bit like an experiment on a genuine attentional shift we’re about to run on 200,000 early adopters. Hope it goes well!
PsychoSocial Impacts: A Solipsism Engine:
Branding aside, this is a VR device with good enough passthrough to be used as an AR device. That passthrough is optional, and one of the only hardware buttons on the device is a wheel that “dials in” or “dials out” the real world, replacing it with a volcano or a field or black or whatever.
This is a core feature, and in practice, lets you create a bit of a “focus space” when you’d rather not deal with the world. I will absolutely be using this feature for working on airplanes or trains, weird glances from fellow passengers or no.
Of course, anyone using it in public is doing the equivalent of walking with their head in their phone, but worse. And I know the most important thing about the folks on the train who never look up from their phones:
They’re not real.
I just ignore them. They ignore me, because my head’s down in my phone too. But at least when we all pull into the station, most of us can be relied on to look up, put the phone in our pocket, and re-enter meatspace, even just for a moment.
No longer! The ability to pop in and out of the “real” — which it’s not, because it’s still just a screen — means the real world will always be less exciting. No matter what your doing in meatspace, you could always be doing ANYTHING in the Metaverse. And now I can walk off the train without even having to actually look at other humans through squishy meateyes.
I could of course try and still communicate with other humans from inside the goggles, and there is no more hilarious thing to do with the AVP than try and have a facetime call with someone.
I get what Apple is trying to do here. Their “persona” system drags the “animojis” nobody uses right into the uncanny valley, with all sorts of weird quirks and roaming manic eyeballs and such. Nobody is ever going to use this seriously for having meaningful social interactions. And it won’t ever not be funny and weird when someone with a “persona” shows up in a zoom call.
The puppeteering/visual hybrid system itself is in fact fantastic, it’s just that really good animated 3d avatars are very difficult to make non-creepy. Even movies get it more often wrong than right trying to simulate a real person. We’re probably about three months out from being able to hire a designer to give you a custom avatar that looks like the best version of yourself. And perhaps a month or so after that, we’ll have an AI based version which becomes eerily good. (Unless Apple keeps it locked down.)
I don’t really want to present an ersatz version of myself to the world, but I can absolutely see that some people will. With less laughable avatars — especially in a world where we might be expected to be under the goggles by our employer — I’m not even sure how we’ll tell who’s who anymore, much less surmise if someone bothered to put on pants.
And of course, everyone will know this, and everyone working in these environments will constantly be reminded in subtle ways:
They’re not real. Nothing is real.
And while I don’t suspect simply playing around in the AVP is going to send anyone to the library hunting for the solipsistic philosophical masterpieces of George Berkeley or the reality-denying nihilistic metaphysics of Jed McKenna, I don’t think “it doesn’t matter” anymore than I would say “social media didn’t matter” when it emerged as a new communication vector a decade or so ago.
Binary Reality Tunnels: Blue Glowy Eyes or Not
Last, one thing that’s bad, but also not civilization destroying, are the weird outward-facing eyeball screens.
The external facing eyes are just awful and creepy, but do have a legitimate purpose. Medical, industrial and training usage is actually a decent application well for VR and AR already, and the AVP shipped with apps designed for those kinds of uses already (manipulating 3d models, taking things apart, learning how to insert Stents, etc). In that kind of environment, its probably a good idea to know if the person wearing the rig is looking at me, or looking at the metaverse. That’s really all the creepy eyes do. Even in my own house, I won’t have anything but the quickest chat with my wife without taking it off.
Anyone wearing one of these in a communal environment is essentially doing the same thing as walking into meeting and staring at their phone the entire time. Wearing this in public is a statement. And right now, that statement is “what’s going on in my head right now is much much more important than what’s going on out in meatspace, and certainly more important than you.” That changes when the hardware gets truly just glasses-sized, but that’s at least 5 years off I imagine, and then it gets worse not knowing. Like when someone is on a call and you can’t see that their wearing earbuds, but for all of reality.
Molochian Hell Goggles? Miracle Productivity Machine?
(You’re supposed to be a Financial Futurist Dave …)“Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch!”
- Alan Ginsburg, HOWL
This is a device that one individual goes into and lives in a private world of their creation. That’s an incredible boon for some people, some of the time. Mostly, it’s terrifying. Wall-E was not supposed to be a documentary.
And yet the very nature of winner-take-all capitalism would suggest that the corporation that has us voluntarily consuming minimal resources for unit of output wins, and I actually think the combination of spatial computing and AI will be an inevitable phase in the longer-term democratic-capitalism reboot that AI and automation inevitably bring.
In other words, I think in 5 years, we look back and this is a legitimate “category” in the same way “tablets” are a legitimate category, where we say “of course they use tablets on the sidelines on the Superbowl” but also “no, I cannot edit your 4 camera video shoot on my iPad.”
Does that mean you should buy AAPL? Probably not. Apple's been in a slow growth mode for a while, with sales basically flattening out at the top line, so I don’t think their likely monopoly (for a few years) on spatial computing development means you should buy more AAPL than you probably (likely about 6-8% of your equity holdings, if you’re an average investor).
But it’s also clear this is a “big bet” moment for Apple. If they succeed in creating this new market then the reality is they have so much patent protection, ecosystem support, and early adopter goodwill, that it seems hard to bet against.
I generally don't buy single stocks, so I won't be loading up on AAPL, but I also wouldn't be using this as some sort of signal that they've lost their way. The AVP is just about the most classically Jobs/Ive/Apple thing they’ve done in the last decade. I have not yet, but might consider something like the 2026 calls, which are pricing only a bit more implied volatility in than the S&P 500:
(I’m just some idiot on the internet, don’t take my advice on anything, please, I’m not an advisor or a broker or any of that.)
The smarter strategy might be to pay really close attention to firms that lean in to Spatial Computing over the next year with real use corporate use cases. There will be small and large companies who take strong stands. There will be customers who find ways to actually extract even more productivity from their workers. There will be innovations, inventions, mis-steps and surprises, all of which present opportunities.
So keep paying attention when the hype fades. I don’t think this is going away.