Apple released the long-awaited Vision Pro headset this past week. Of course, with it being $3,500 USD and only available in the US, I made no plans to get one. But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t like one.
On the weekend, Ian asked me if I would get one (supposing they become available here at some point). I said “yes”, with the caveat that it probably wouldn’t be the first version or maybe even the second version. I’m the person who didn’t get an iPhone right away. I thought it was amazing and revolutionary from the start, but I got an iPod Touch first. And then I waited for the iPhone 4 before getting my first iPhone. There’s something to be said for not being on the bleeding edge and waiting for a product to mature (a bit) before jumping in.
But that having been said, I figure it’s a matter of time. I think that right now I could justify buying one. The whole ability to integrate with your Mac makes it easy to knock $2,000 off the price just by handwaving away the cost of a good, large external monitor. And that’s discounting all of the stuff that makes Vision Pro revolutionary.
I think one of the significant aspects of it is that it is a spatial OS in the way that classic MacOS was: icons represented things on a desktop and they stayed where you put them. VisionOS uses the same paradigm, extended to the space around you. You open something and put it somewhere, it stays there. Of course, the problem is that when the Vision Pro shuts off, all of that is lost. That’s the type of 1.0 stuff that will get sorted out, but the promise is there.
Looking forward to it.
