By John Moltz
June 9, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Polarizing lenses
The Apple Vision Pro is here! Well, not yet. And you can’t afford one. So is it really here? No. But the new Macs are! And soon the feature we’ve all been waiting for.
Don’t look forward in anger
Reactions to Vision Pro have really run the gamut. Some were “blown away” by it, declaring it an experience you’ll “find yourself craving”. For others it “deserves to be ridiculed”. (Turns out Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think much of it. Surprise.)
Zuckerberg aside, there seems no doubt that Vision Pro is incredibly well made and an amazing experience. It’s also really expensive and is making people as uncomfortable as a pair of well-starched underpants.
Many people thought Apple really missed a step in its demo, particularly the part where it showed a father recording a precious family moment while wearing Vision Pro… and then watching it later by himself. Presumably this was after his family has left him. Or have they? Can he even tell unless they get close enough to fade into his view?
“I love my family. I wonder where they are. I’ll go look after I watch a movie on Mt. Hood. You know, like you do.”
Apple rightly recognized that, to-date, XR headsets are isolating, both from your environment, which can be dangerous, and other people, which can be tragic. In attempting to provide a solution to that problem, the company appears to be saying “What if you could be both immersed and present at the same time?!” And after years of dealing with smartphones and their distractions, people seem to be reacting “GIRL, DON’T EVEN WITH THAT.”
Apple has time to sort out its product story. The Watch introduction also featured lavish explanations of features—sending a heartbeat or a touch—that most Watch owners now probably aren’t even aware are there. The first generation Vision Pro isn’t going to ship until next year and at $3,499 it’s not going to get wide adoption.
At least the company didn’t show people wearing them while walking down the street. You know it’s going to happen, but at least Apple’s not promoting it.
The correct intel on the new Macs
Kudos to Mark Gurman for correctly predicting Apple would announce two new Macs with M2 Max and Ultra chips in addition to the new 15-inch MacBook Air. Jason has declared the Mac the bigger winner of WWDC and it’s hard to argue with that. At least you can actually order these machines now.
We may now (finally) welcome the Mac Pro to the family of Apple-silicon-based Macs. Apple will surely sell dozens of them. They are certainly the most expandable Macs (a lot of) money can buy, but are they expandable in the kind of way that the people who typically buy Mac Pros really care about? After all that talk about users might be able to add GPUs, you can’t add GPUs.
Apple Bill Gates says “An Apple silicon GPU should be enough for anyone.” Apple mom says “We have GPUs at home.”
Given the continued existence of the Mac Studio, the new Mac Pro is fine, really. While there are certainly pro users who need and use these machines, their real effect may be more aspirational, existing more as a Platonic ideal of a Mac, an ultimate form that can be conceived but never attained.
Certainly not at those prices.
One more thing
So, we’ve talked about Vision Pro, we’ve talked about the new Macs… let’s get to the real meat of the keynote. Because according to Apple…
Are you sitting down?
…autocorrect is fixed in iOS 17.
Talk about burying the lede.
In its one big announcement that had anything to do with AI, Apple said that iOS 17 will use an on-device language model that learns how you type, instead of relying on how a weirdly statistically large sample of poor spellers and duck fanatics type.
Honestly, Apple could have just announced a fixed autocorrect and multiple timers on iOS and WWDC would have been declared a tour de force. Craig Federighi would have been carried off on the shoulders of the gathered developers and press, and a tub of Gatoraide would have been dumped on Tim Cook.
If that’s not how all WWDC keynotes end anyway. I don’t know, I’ve never been to one.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]