Perhaps it is this tacit recognition that makes the company’s pivot to inward-facing technology feel particularly cynical. These are features for staying safe and alive in a hostile world. In recent years, even the optimists in Cupertino have appeared to be grappling with this broader context, introducing Apple features such as crash detection, satellite emergency calling, extreme weather monitoring, and, recently, mental-health insights. In the case of the Vision Pro, we’re talking, in part, about a world of inescapable climate emergencies that, as we saw last week, large parts of the country are unprepared for. It is not a tool meant to help navigate the physical world: It is a way to tune it out.Įvaluating a new technology is difficult without also considering the world that it’s dropped into. It beckons its user to turn further inward. The Vision Pro’s proposition is different. Maps, Siri search, calendar apps, and other features support the idealized, highly productive “ Apple Man” as he lives efficiently and presently in his daily life. In sleek promotional videos, iPhones and Apple Watches aren’t just intermediary screens: They propel people through life and enrich it at every turn. Historically, the company has marketed its transformative products as tools that help users navigate the world. But it’s also a rather depressing turn away from Apple’s previous vision of its products. There’s a final-frontier vibe to it all-total sensory colonization. This is a decent strategy for a corporate juggernaut worth nearly $2.9 trillion.
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I see the Vision Pro as a play for the last available acreage of pixel real estate: Your peripheral vision.
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This full immersion has an obvious appeal, but it also represents “a total concession to the screens,” as New York’s John Herrman put it. She adjusts the Vision Pro: The chaos of the plane fades to the background as she becomes one with her premium content. There is a moment in Apple’s demo where we see an exhausted-looking woman on a crowded airplane. Still, I struggled to watch the world’s biggest technology company lay out its vision for the future of computing and not find it cynical, even a bit apocalyptic.Ī screenshot from Apple’s Vision Pro marketing video And it may be uncharitable to connect a marketing video to climate-disaster avoidance.
It’s easy to reflexively overanalyze the peculiar aesthetic of Apple’s presentation or the dystopia-adjacent features of the Vision Pro headset, which include an outward projection of your eyes so that people in your vicinity know when you’re gazing at them and not playing seven-dimensional Angry Birds. Last week was, in other words, an especially weird one to unveil a future in which people with enough disposable income can retreat from the physical world into the gated-face community of a 360-degree iPhone screen. Read: Your phone wasn’t built for the apocalypse An excellent device for an imperiled planet. My mind wandered back to the Vision Pro, an advanced marvel of immersive technology with the primary purpose of shielding our eyes. But about 18 hours later, I woke up to images of the East Coast with that familiar climate-apocalypse Instagram filter. I reminded myself to chill out, stop being such a doomer, and move on.
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The demo was clearly lit to evoke the intimacy and warmth of a late evening’s light as it slants into the double-paned bay windows of an idealized California bungalow-not the sepia-toned haze of a 400 air-quality index. I know this isn’t what the meticulous design geniuses at Apple were going for when they debuted the footage last Monday. It doesn’t just sting your eyes and scratch your throat: It forces you, during summer’s longest, most cherished days, to retreat indoors and away from the outside world. Weather patterns grind to a halt, and time seems to stand still in the acrid haze. I moved out West from New York six years ago: Since then, smoke seasons have exacted a physical and psychological toll. Despite the bells and whistles, I fixated on the glow emanating from the windows in Apple’s painstakingly constructed demo environments: I’ve come to recognize and resent it as the golden hour of a sky tinged by wildfire smoke.Īs millions more know after last week, it’s impossible to forget the feeling of being enveloped by low-hanging smog. The promotional clip features well-dressed men and women-mostly alone in their spartanly furnished homes-bathing their eyes in lush content from the $3,500 aluminum-alloy ski goggles. Perhaps my brain is poisoned from a decade-plus of staring at cascading social feeds of depressing news, but the first thing I noticed about Apple’s demo video for its upcoming Vision Pro headset was the haze-colored light.
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