Apple’s Vision Pro is a Time Machine, and Hollywood is the First Passenger
Unpacking what the Apple Vision Pro means for the future of entertainment
The Apple Vision Pro is a time machine. Not in the sense that it will deliver realistic recreations of past and future events in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), although, it will do that, too. In business terms, the Apple Vision Pro is a time machine in that its exorbitant price, limited supply, and unorthodox release method are all designed to buy Apple time. Time for what? Just a bit more time to continue to develop and perfect the Apple Vision Air (or Mini, or Light, or just Vision) and prepare consumers for the next phase of computer interfaces: mobile spatial computing.
Apple’s decision to release the Vision Pro is confusing to some because it moves the company into an AR/VR space that has so far failed to truly achieve mainstream consumer adoption. Furthermore, the Vision Pro diverges from the company’s usual Reality Distortion Field (RDF) strategy of reimagining existing products on the market and immediately enjoying fantastic margins on mass sales.
Even before margin-obsessed COO Tim Cook (who, oddly, has yet to wear the Vision Pro in public) took the helm at Apple in 2011, Steve Jobs’ visionary mobile product releases were dependent on great margins. Apple excelled at delivering something generally available from other companies in other forms, but with the unique Apple polish, feature set, and user-friendly ecosystem that made paying a premium seem worth it.
A $3,500 face computer is not a margin win for Apple, it’s an early-adopter luxury purchase. But, more importantly, the device is a developer beachhead into the world of immersive computing. It allows the company to begin to weave its story that will eventually justify the $1,200 Apple Vision smart glasses coming in 2026, or thereabouts.
A brief history of spatial computing
How do I know this? Well, in addition to many years of reporting on Apple, I’ve also spent over a decade using nearly every device that came before Vision Pro and, like Apple, I’ve closely studied the mistakes and experiments conducted by VR, AR, and “mixed reality” device makers throughout the years.
I’ve owned and spent years living with Microsoft's HoloLens 1, Magic Leap 1, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, Meta Quest 2 & 3, HTC Vive, North’s Focals (acquired by Google), Snap Spectacles 2 and 3, Google Daydream View, Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR. I’ve also spent a good deal of time using the HoloLens 2, Snap Spectacles 4 (AR version), Starbreeze StarVR, Meta Quest Pro, Valve Index, HP Reverb, Lenovo ThinkReality, PlayStation VR, Varjo VR-1, Lenovo Explorer, Samsung Odyssey, Vuzix Blade, and many others. Immersive computing has been a huge part of my life.
About five years ago, when all the Apple AR/VR rumors were pretty much confirmed, I predicted that the form factor would likely be a pair of smart glasses tethered to either a separate computing unit or perhaps even the iPhone. The most visible example of such a dynamic was the Magic Leap device, which had the user clip on an external computing device that fed data to a six-layer waveguide display.
Contrary to what Apple claims in its marketing materials, the Vision Pro is hardly “the world’s first spatial operating system,” as Microsoft’s HoloLens Windows Holographic OS and Magic Leap’s Lumin OS came first. More specifically, it was Magic Leap that led the charge in calling its product a spatial computing platform, not Apple.
In addition to the technical precedents that made a tethered smart glasses dynamic seem likely for Apple, back then I also noticed an emerging trend in China (Apple’s hardware manufacturing hub, and where most Apple leaks begin) toward startups that used a smart glasses device tethered to an Android smartphone. The results, particularly from the likes of China’s Rokid and Xreal (then called Nreal), indicated that lightweight smart glasses tethered to a smartphone would be the way forward. Years ago, when Xreal’s CEO Chi Xu walked me through a demo of the company’s device, I was convinced that a more polished version was probably on the way from Apple.
I’m still convinced that this is the dynamic that the cheaper, more mainstream-friendly version of Apple smart glasses will employ, and Vision Pro is the foundation designed to get developers and early adopters alike accustomed to spatial computing as a new platform.
We’ve been here before…
There is a dark side to this spatial computing story. Another well-funded company nearly died trying exactly what Apple is attempting to do with the Vision Pro. Before its shift to focusing primarily on enterprise spatial computing software, Magic Leap had aspirations of becoming the first major immersive entertainment platform focused on AR and mixed reality.
The company secured deals with Disney that delivered immersive experiences featuring Star Wars characters C-3PO, R2-D2, and Porgs from The Last Jedi, a Game of Thrones White Walker battle experience, an Angry Birds game, and a brilliant original game developed in collaboration with Weta Workshop called Dr. Grordbort's Invaders featuring the voices of Stephen Fry and Lucy Lawless.
Magic Leap also worked with partners to deliver original spatial computing apps for CNN, the NBA, the BBC, the Cheddar financial news, and Spotify (and now you know why Spotify skipped developing an original app for the Vision Pro…been there, done that). But even those major collaborations could not convince the public to spend $2,300 on a headset from a largely unknown company like Magic Leap.
Since the company had little public exposure beyond AT&T kiosk demo stations in the US, most of the public’s impressions of the device came from the tech news media. That became somewhat problematic. Early on, before the 2018 release of its device, Magic Leap cloaked itself in Apple-esque secrecy and hype, which, along with the company’s nearly $2 billion in funding at the time, set expectations extremely high.
Unfortunately, some of the early video examples didn’t quite mirror the hands-on demos that tech reporters finally managed to experience upon launch. Not only that, but few newsrooms were willing to shell out thousands of dollars to buy the unproven device to allow reporters to live with it and get a comprehensive sense of what it was capable of. As a result, Magic Leap was, in my opinion, somewhat unfairly characterized as a hype-driven platform that failed to deliver on its promises while presenting a $2,300 entertainment option that had little chance of competing with $400 PlayStation consoles or even the $500 Oculus Rift VR headset.
In 2022, with the Magic Leap 2, the company offered a device that could shift seamlessly between AR spatial computing and VR-style experiences. But by then the entertainment arm of the company had been cast off in favor of enterprise business development.
Magic Leap delivered an amazingly polished version of the Apple Vision Pro in 2018, with Apple-level partnerships and experiences, but offered neither the track record nor the embedded user base and ecosystem that would justify consumers taking such an expensive risk.
Apple’s biggest gamble ever
In 2024, some newer tech reviewers, as well as those experienced with AR/VR devices of the past, are asking some of the same questions that were pointed at Magic Leap: Who is the Apple Vision Pro for?
Believe it or not, these are the same questions that plagued the Apple Watch and iPad upon their initial release. Who needs these expensive curios when we already have all the mobile computing devices we need? Even the iPhone had its doubters in 2007, back when Japan’s flip phones, business Blackberrys, and T-Mobile Sidekicks ruled the day.
However, each of the aforementioned new products asked the user to only slightly shift their usage habits in ways that were at least somewhat familiar. Devices like the Magic Leap, and now the Apple Vision Pro, ask for something much more difficult—a complete rethink of what we knew before. Interestingly, early Vision Pro reviews are markedly less harsh than the reviews of the first Magic Leap. Whether that softer touch is political in the interest of not being denied a new iPhone to review in coming months, or driven by genuine tentative wonder as to what the device’s mainstream purpose might be, there is still a familiar whiff of Magic Leap skepticism around the pricey Apple Vision Pro.
Does anyone really need to spend $3,500 on what for now amounts to a more immersive home theater for TV and movie consumption? The answer, based on experience, is a resounding No. But passive TV and movie consumption are nevertheless fantastic placeholders to normalize an exotic new computing format, assuming you have the luxury of time that Apple has, and Magic Leap did not.
The Apple Vision Pro will debut with 150 immersive 3D movies as Hollywood studios hope to lock additional viewers into various streaming subscriptions.
Some of the major streaming providers already offering content for the Vision Pro include Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Peacock, TikTok, ESPN, NBA, MLB, the PGA Tour, Max, Discovery+, Paramount+, Pluto TV, Tubi, Fubo, and Crunchyroll. The chatter about YouTube (available via Safari on Vision Pro), Netflix, and Spotify not offering Vision Pro-specific apps is negligible at this point.
The Apple Vision Pro was never meant to go mainstream
The Apple Vision Pro is marketing and development for the future. In the meantime, if you want to experience much of what the Vision Pro has to offer (albeit with lower fidelity and not-so-seamless app integration), and you don’t have a spare $3,500 to spend, the $500 Meta Quest 3, which offers both AR and VR capabilities, is a good entry into the space. (The Meta Quest Pro is also available for $1,000 if you want to go premium, but I don’t recommend it.)
Sure, the Meta Quest 3 doesn’t have all the Apple magic you might be used to, but it’s a pretty good aperitif until Apple unveils the more affordable Apple Vision that’s tethered to your iPhone 18.
Of course, by then, Meta will likely have its Project Aria AR smart glasses ready for release in collaboration with Ray-Ban and powered by generative artificial intelligence. Meta’s job now is to make its current Ray-Ban AI-powered smart glasses as mainstream as possible—Instagram integration was long overdue—so that when AR smart glasses do go mainstream, Apple Vision will be just one among a robust array of relatively affordable wearable spatial computing devices. Meanwhile, Apple’s job will be to play catch-up in AI as it attempts to make Siri and its visionOS competitive with an AI space that is rapidly changing month-to-month.
The jokes about “the metaverse” were widespread in 2021 as some tried to dunk on Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his vision. But now that Apple is officially in the game, no one seems to be laughing anymore. Apple has been researching the viability of head-mounted computing devices for nearly 20 years, and now the public is about to find out if it was worth the wait.
Begun, the spatial computing wars have.