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By Jason Snell for Macworld
The Vision Pro shows that it’s time for Apple to get weird
No matter what you think of its future prospects, we can all agree that the Vision Pro is weird, right? One of the world’s most powerful companies has spent a decade preparing to ship a new product and platform that’s embodied in a $3500 VR headset that lets you use apps in 3-D space.
After a decade of steady and boring iteration, the Vision Pro is… not that. And I love it.
Apple is so disciplined and conservative with its product choices and has largely benefited from that tendency. Pretty much every hardware product Apple ships sells in such great numbers that it makes it awfully hard to experiment in public. (The Sony-made displays in the Vision Pro are available in such limited supply that Apple won’t even be able to sell a million of them in the first year, which is probably just as well since the product is very much a version 1.0.)
But while I admire the great care Apple takes before it brings a product to market, I do sometimes think that the company is missing out on some potentially great products because they’re not willing to get weird—and risk failure. Consider the original MacBook Air, which was deeply weird—but led to a second-generation model that became the template for Apple’s laptop design for the next decade!
The technology already exists today for Apple to create some wild stuff, the likes of which we’ve never seen from them. The Vision Pro has broken the seal. Let’s get weird, Apple.