I feel so lucky to have received a few early glimpses of the future in my life.

  • the Apple IIe - that appeared in the library of my elementary school, one of only a handful in the entire rural county
  • a pre-release NeXT cube - that was demoed to a small group of professors at a local college (I got my invite because I was dating the daughter of one of the professors)
  • an original Amazon Kindle tablet - that a coworker handed me with a smirk while passing in the hallway at work one day

I mention this because I found myself with some extra time to kill at the local mall and got a demo of the new Apple Vision Pro. I confidently place this experience in the very same category as all these other events. Even after a few weeks of reflection, I still consider the Vision Pro to be a watershed moment, an actual quantum leap beyond the desktop computing paradigm.

The Vision Pro utterly transcends what Engelbart and Xerox PARC birthed back in the 1970s and 80’s. While wearing them, virtual windows appear to effortlessly hang in the air all around you. Old two-dimensional “flat” photos and Safari browser pages were rendered at a high enough resolution that they seemed “real.” The fonts on these virtual pages are as smooth and easy to read as a sheet of laser printed paper. And all the windows stay perfectly frozen in place, wherever they are placed inside that virtual space. The verisimilitude of the experience is flawless.

Throughout the demo, I just kept repeating variations of how difficult it is to believe that:

  1. it exists outside the pages of a sci-fi novel
  2. it’s available for sale in retail stores

There were several remarkable, evocative moments:

  • Watching a 3D movie on a giant screen that appeared to float just above the surface of a mountain lake underneath a star-filled sky, noticing the reflections of the movie and sky in the ripples of the virtual waves
  • The exact moment the dinosaur breaks the fourth wall, stepping through the virtual window and interacting with you directly
  • A singer (Alicia Keys, it turns out) singing to you directly during a rehearsal in a studio space
  • the 3D video of a happy child blowing out the candles on their birthday cake and collapsing into giggles on a sofa

Apple is quite justified in asking where else might you find a comparable experience for the same (or lower) price point here.

It’s presently too expensive for most anyone other than early adopters and the technologists that are building new solutions on top of it, however.

And that means, after only a handful of months on the market, it still only fulfills a limited number of usecases. Sales appear to have cooled.

Jason Snell’s thoughts on calling it a “flop” at this point exactly mirror my own lived experience with technology.

It’s important to remember that this is the very first version. Every version after this will be lighter, faster, and generally more feature-rich.

Future versions of the Vision Pro will transform education, entertainment, video games, communication… quite a bit of what we think of as “computing” today will change.

Very, very promising.